Legal Issues

Slashdot pointed the way to The Comments on the DMCA.
I spotted comments from Seth Finkelstein, The American Library Association, and many others.

Ender noticed Racing Against Time, by Lawrence Lessig, over at CIOInsight.

Lessig says the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act harms Internet growth, makes it harder for content to be deployed on the Internet; and increases the cost of innovation.
He's not just a talking head in this case, he argused this before the Supreme Court in October. He takes a look at E-Book Regulation, and Copyright Law in this one.

"The purpose of copyright law is to create incentives that "promote...Progress." But extensions of copyright for works that already exist do not promote progress. Only 2 percent of the work copyrighted during the first 20 years affected by the Sonny Bono Act have any continuing commercial life. That 2 percent is benefited by the extension, while the rest of the creative work still under copyright is thrown into a black hole of legal regulation. These extensions only harm the creative process, especially when technology makes it possible for so many more to become creators."

Cnet Is Reporting ElcomSoft was found not guilty of criminal copyright charges for producing a program that can crack antipiracy protections on electronic books.
Not much analysis here, but they say the judge told jurors that in order to find the company guilty, they must agree that company representatives knew their actions were illegal and intended to violate the law. Merely offering a product that could violate copyrights was not enough to warrant a conviction, the jury instructions said.

GrepLaw has a Story that takes a look at the delicate balance between users and authors. They look for the spot where the author has good incentives to innovate, but where society at large is not too restricted due to the author's previous innovations.

They look at The future of intellectual property, Experimental copyright in action, Freedom of speech challenged, and more.

Jen Young pointed us to The Chronicle of Higher Education where they discuss Edward W. Felten, a distinguished Princeton University computer scientist.

He runs Fritz\'s Hit List, an irreverent inventory of devices that would be affected by a bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Ernest F. (Fritz) Hollings, a South Carolina Democrat. The bill, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, would require manufacturers to add copy-control systems to computer hardware and software.

The Scary Stories keep coming on Total Information Awareness, the Pentagon's recently created Information Awareness Office headed by John Poindexter, the former national security adviser convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-Contra scheme. Maybe I souldn't worry so much, after all, he said "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy."

"When a government accumulates detailed information on its citizenry, ultimately that power is going to be abused," said Charlotte Twight, an economics professor at Boise State University in Idaho who researches privacy issues. "We weren't supposed to have this all-powerful central government."

News.com has This Story on a lecture organized by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution., Posner criticized a 1998 law extending the duration of U.S. copyrights. He also attacked the Patent and Trademark Office for granting \"very questionable\" business method patents. They say Posner\'s critique is significant because up to now much of the attack on the steady expansion of intellectual-property rights has come from the left, and the Seventh Circuit judge is a darling of the conservative movement. Posner, a prolific author, is most famous for applying economic analysis to the law.

\"These rights keep expanding without any solid information about why they\'re socially beneficial,\" Posner said. \"At the same time that regulations are diminishing, intellectual-property rights are blossoming--(two) opposite trends bucking each other.\"

Someone writes \"Read the NYTimes opinion article by William Safire, He states that \"And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.\"


More on the Total Information Awareness (TIA) System can be found at darpa.mil
\"

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony.

Let your voice be heard. The Copyright Office is Taking Comments On The DMCA. You can read the law as a PDF Here.

They are requesting written comments from all interested parties, including representatives of copyright owners, educational institutions, libraries and archives, scholars, researchers and members of the public, in order to elicit evidence on whether noninfringing uses of certain classes of works are, or are likely to be, adversely affected by this prohibition on the circumvention of measures that control access to copyrighted works.

From the New York Times (registration required):

Slightly more than 70 years ago, Archer M. Huntington may have made a dreadful mistake . . .

The decision Mr. Huntington made, around 1930, was to have the Bronx library founded by his stepfather take in an extensive collection of books and manuscripts amassed by George Gustav Heye, the founder of the Museum of the American Indian. Mr. Heye\'s collection of rare materials about Indians had piled up in the basement of the museum at 155th and Broadway, and Mr. Huntington was one of the museum\'s major benefactors.

Whether Mr. Huntington\'s decision truly turned out to be an awful mistake depends on your point of view. But nobody can deny that in recent years it has led to a series of legal disputes of Dickensian proportions, involving the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, the State attorney general and rafts of private lawyers.

target=\"new\">Complete article.

Steve Fesenmaier writes \"Last Friday Bill Moyers NOW Program investigated how easy it is for terrorists from around the world to still buy guns - military style guns - in the U.S. Most amazingly, Attorney General Ashcroft has prevented his agents from looking at lists of recent gun buyers, giving the NRA complete control of his office. Why investigate library records - and not gun records? THIS IS TOTALLY INSANE...


This was an amazing story - Bush has prevented his own people from looking at lists of gun owners even though his own people said it was perfectly legal....so why can he investigate what books you read?
\"

An Editorial from down in Florida says libraries are under pressure by the government, and by law, to be police adjuncts in the so-called war on terrorism.

"As librarians wait and see, they shouldn't wait alone. Volusia libraries had 239,000 card-holders at the beginning of the year. It is their libraries, their liberties, that are on the line. Using the libraries is itself an exercise of those liberties. But so is speaking out not just in defense of libraries, but in defense of the right to seek ideas, pursue knowledge or roam whatever pleasures of entertainment are out there without a government probe watching every move, or even a single move. "

luis acosta writes \"William Safire questions whether giving the
John Poindexter \"Total Information Awareness\"
is a good idea here.\"

Slashdot Has A Thread that points to CNET, and MSNBC as well.
Safire says:
\"Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as \"a virtual, centralized grand database.\"

Kurt Nimmo has written an Editorial that looks at the FBI and library snooping. He says no doubt the FBI has the capacity to bug the computers at libraries, buthe doesn\'t believe they seriously thinks they will apprehend terrorists at the library -- that is unless they consider average citizens who happen to read what the government may consider \"subversive\" literature as terrorists.
It\'s an interesting piece that pulls together some history as well.

Following up on This One, Karl Bridges wites, \"Regarding the earlier story about FBI snooping in CT libraries. The
columnist has now issued a retraction of the column. This is interesting.
I sent him an email earlier about what I saw were holes in the story and it
promptly disappeared.\"

The new story is Here and says Michael J. Wolf, the state\'s most senior FBI agent, disputed what he called the \"outrageously fallacious column.\"
He said in a statement that the FBI used a search warrant to seize evidence from a specific library computer that had been used to \"hack\" into a business computer system in California \"for criminal purposes.\"

He said in the statement that no software was installed on any computer in the library.

Gail Shackleton writes \"This story outlines the fury within the book arts community in Canada over mandatory book deposit in the National Library of Canada. What the story doesn\'t tell is that book artists have been quietly ignoring the law for years. The National Library even sends reps to book arts shows trying to track down those who aren\'t sending items in.\"

Jen Young passed along A Link To Chronicle of Higher Education where they say law professors and academic-library groups are asking a federal appeals court to modify a recent ruling to make it clear that established copyright provisions, like fair use, sometimes trump software-licensing agreements that would otherwise narrow consumers' rights.

The case in question, Bowers v. Baystate Technologies Inc., involves the shrink-wrap license on a piece of software
You can read the PDF Brief

"A scholar could lose his fair-use privilege to quote a novel ... A library could lose its ability under the first-sale doctrine to lend books."

A Great Site put together by someone over at The University of Pennsylvania that collects books that are by authors that have died more than 50 years ago, which places them in the public domain in many countries, particularly those outside the US and Europe. However, they remain copyrighted under United States law, where works copyrighted in 1923 or later can be protected for up to 95 years after publication.

O'Reillynet has a Good Story on the Internet Bookmobile and how it relates to Eldred v. Ashcroft.


They say the Bookmobile is a demo of a public domain application and it addresses the basic question: What good is the public domain.

"As we traveled the country and talked to people about the public domain, no one--not one single person--disagreed with this premise that more, not fewer, books should be in the public domain, and sooner rather than later."

Wired Is Reporting that a former Clinton administration official in charge of privacy issues warned Friday that the Bush administration risked setting the country back decades on privacy policy if it did not heed the lessons of the past.

\"Don\'t let the anti-terrorism measures of today turn into the anti-communist excesses of decades past,\" Swire said. \"We\'ve seen what abuses in the name of liberty look like -- lack of accountability and institutionalized lawlessness. We must assure that does not happen again.\"