Legal Issues

The Washington Monthly's Brandon Koerner investigates:

It's a political tale as old as Capitol Hill: A lumbering industry selects a certain corporate-friendly party to be its Beltway patsy. In exchange for the requisite campaign donations and other perks, members of said party use their clout to push through the industry's legislative agenda--an agenda that would rip off consumers and harm the overall economy but enrich the corporate string-pullers immensely. Pundits and public-interest types grumble over the bald-faced cronyism, but as long as the money keeps flowing, the beneficiaries don't seem to care a whit.

Sounds like the buddy-buddy relationship between Republicans and the energy industry, right? The characters cited in the above scenario, however, are the Democrats and Hollywood, one of Washington's coziest couples.

Complete story, with thanks to FOS News.

SomeOne writes "The Supreme Court posted its latest hearing list yesterday, which states that Solicitor General Theodore Olson and Jenner and Block's Paul Smith will argue CIPA next week:

Wednesday,March 5,2003

No.02 –361.United States,et al.v.American Library
Association,Inc.,et al.
Appeal from the U.S.D.C.for the Eastern District of
Pennsylvania.

For appellants:Theodore B.Olson,Solicitor General,
Department of Justice,Washington,D.C.
For appellees:Paul M.Smith,Washington,D.C.
(1 hour for argument.) "

WorldNetDaily has This Article on The Court of Queen's Bench in Saskatchewan ruling by the province's human rights tribunal that fined a man for submitting a newspaper ad that included citations of four Bible verses that address homosexuality.

Justice J. Barclay wrote in his opinion that the human-rights panel "was correct in concluding that the advertisement can objectively be seen as exposing homosexuals to hatred or ridicule."

David Goldman writes "The New Hampshire Supreme Court has held that information brokers and private investigators can be liable for the harms caused by selling personal information. In the case, a young woman was murdered by a stalker who obtained her personal information from information brokers and private investigators..."

Here's The Story "

Slashdot pointed the way to This Chronicle of Higher Education Article on fair use in a world of trusted systems like Microsoft\'s Palladium.

Palladium involves new hardware and a new version Windows that could stifle the free flow of information that has come to characterize the Internet, and could give Microsoft too much control over colleges\' own computerized information. This would give MSFT and others unprecedented control over the data on the computer, and of course, mean big expenditures on new computers and software.

Publishers could dictate that colleges/libraries had to use Palladium or else be denied access to the material. Publishers could then easily use Palladium to bar some uses of digital materials to which scholars argue that they are entitled under fair use and current laws.

With Palladium, owners of content would gain at the expense of consumers of content, including professors and students, says Eben Moglen, a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University. In fact, if Palladium were to become a widely accepted way of protecting copyrighted material, Mr. Moglen says, it would create \"a closed system, in which each piece of knowledge in the world is identified with a particular owner, and that owner has a right to resist its copying, modification, and redistribution.\"

To really understand why this is TERRIBLE be sure to check out Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

Genghis John and a few others have passed along This Infotoday story, by Melissa Barr on Westlaw and LexisNexis, who together control much of the print and electronic legal research materials used by courts and law firms in the U.S.

Although many courts now publish case law on the Internet for free, thousands of older cases are not available to those who cannot pay. She says the courts and the court\'s words belong to us. In more ways than one, the American people have already paid for the case law produced by our courts. Commercial vendors must not be allowed to highjack our law or dictate who may have access to it. By refusing to allow public libraries to purchase electronic subscriptions that can serve their patrons, Westlaw and LexisNexis are closing the door on information.
Slashdot Has It As Well

"Recently, the Supreme Court decided in Eldred v. Ashcroft that a copyright term of life plus 70 years is "limited" as the Constitution's Copyright Clause requires. As a result, the Court declined to strike down the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act."

"Once the Court found that Congress had not violated the Copyright Clause, it was left with no other way to rein in Congress's excesses in this area. Longstanding precedent counseled that the Court ought to defer to Congress on the policy aspects of copyright law. And, as I noted in an earlier column, Congress had at least one good reason to enact the current copyright term: It harmonizes United States law with that of the European Union."

"Yet there have been many such Congressional excesses in this arena - in the form of repeated extension of the copyright term at the behest of corporations who hold copyrights, and to the detriment of the public domain. Is there anything that can be done about them?" (from Findlaw)

Seth writes: "The Online Policy Group
(OPG) and software expert
Seth Finkelstein have

submitted a brief
to the U.S. Supreme Court
supporting
a lower court decision
that the

Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA)
places unconstitutional limitations on free
speech of library patrons by requiring the use of technology protection
measures in libraries receiving certain federal funding or discounts.

OPG and Finkelstein's brief, prepared by attorneys Daniel H. Bromberg,
Charles Morse, and Josh Fairfield of the law firm Jones Day, argues
that CIPA's technology protection requirement forces libraries to use
commercial blocking software. Because blocking software censors speech
that receives full First Amendment protection and may discriminate
against certain viewpoints, OPG and Finkelstein argue that CIPA should
be subject to strict scrutiny.

As a follow up on This One, On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 9 P.M., on PBS , NOW with Bill Moyers took a look into the digital future of intellectual property and the debate that has pit private control against the public domain.

If you missed the show, like I did, you can now read all about it.

The Economist has This One that says of all the many difficult issues , the copyright battle is becoming one of the most urgent, and bitterly fought, because it could yet determine the future character of cyberspace itself.

They say a return to the original purpose of copyright (the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work) may be the best course of action.

\"Over the past 50 years, as a result of heavy lobbying by content industries, copyright has grown to such ludicrous proportions that it now often inhibits rather than promotes the circulation of ideas...\"

News.com Says a coalition of companies including Apple Computer, Microsoft, Dell Computer, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel said Thursday that they had joined together to oppose legislation backed by the movie studios that would allow the U.S. government to set antipiracy standards for PCs and consumer-electronics devices.

They call themselves the Alliance for Digital Progress, and they Have A Web Site.

Here\'s A Wired Story on the DMCA, just in case you needed another reason to hate this law.


They say just as naysayers predicted when it was enacted, the DMCA\'s anticompetitive impact is reverberating widely beyond the entertainment and software industries, with potentially devastating effects on consumers.

\"Society has a vested interest in assuring that laws designed to protect business interests aren\'t abused in ways that hurt us all. The DMCA is a perfect example. It needs immediate and serious revamping.\"

2 stories that seem like good news on the legal front for a change.


Senators vow to halt `data mining\' project says alarm about a Pentagon plan to find terrorists by trolling the electronic records of all Americans, several senators took steps Thursday to rein in the project and halt other ``data mining\'\' efforts until Congress can review the implications on civil liberties.

Fight for your right to copy music, movies urges readers to contact their members of Congress in support of Passage of the Boucher-Doolittle bill--officially called the Digital Media Consumers Rights Act (HR-107) and introduced by Reps. Rick Boucher, D-Va., and John Doolittle, R-Calif.--is vitally important to preserving what\'s known as \"fair use\" as part of U.S. copyright law.

The ARL has this nice History of Copyright in the United States.

They cover the 18th-19th Centuries, 20th-21st Centuries and have a nice Bibliography and Resources.

This timeline was written and compiled by Amy Masciola, Policy Analyst, Association of Research Libraries.

Terrible News, The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld lengthier copyrights protecting the profits of songs, books and cartoon characters - a huge victory for Disney and other companies.

The 7-2 ruling, while not unexpected, was a blow to Internet publishers and others who wanted to make old books available online and use the likenesses of a Mickey Mouse cartoon and other old creations without paying high royalties.

You can read the PDF Of The Ruling. The Majority opinion by Ginsburg

Dissent by Stevens,

and
Dissent by Breyer

Yesterday there was an interesting article in the Toronto Star summarizing issues of international technology law for 2003. Highlights include the Mickey Mouse Extention Act (otherwise know as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the U.S. and a possible tariff on blank CD-Rs in Canada.

Read the full article

Tne CNET Year In Review takes a look at copyright in the year 2002.

They focus mainly on the battles between Hollywood and the PC industry, Antipiracy, Kazaa, and such. They say Quarrels over digital copyrights shift from courts to Congress, and Hollywood becomes chief antagonist to advocates of the rights of digital consumers--the PC industry among them.

Jen Young points to This Chronicle of Higher Education story on The Association of American Universities [aau.edu], who wrote a letter on behalf of the American Council on Education and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges the Copyright Office that says a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, known as the "anti-circumvention provision," needs to be revised to permit "fair use" of copyrighted material for research and teaching.
.

An Interesting Editorial says we are going to have to be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water in our headlong rush to improve security against terrorism.

They also add One of the risks we face now is the uncertainty of terrorism. But we must be careful not to replace that with a greater evil, the certainty of tyranny.

James Nimmo pointed the way to This One that says it's not uncommon for FBI agents to ask companies to hand over customer and employee data without a warrant. And in cases related to national security investigations, the companies are often giving law enforcement what it wants, according to a poll of 797 chief security officers released last week.

"Agents in certain field offices are impatient and view you as unpatriotic (if you decline). I've had instances where agents have said, 'Give me your Social Security number and your address' to an in-house lawyer who wouldn't produce records without a subpoena."