I haven't been able to post for the last day or two due to some bizarre tech problem on my server that has now been fixed (theoretically).

Thanks!

This from the latest EFFector:
"If you know of any public school students, teachers, school
administrators, school board members, parents, or recent public school
alumni in the United States who are willing to speak about the impact
of Internet blocking on educational opportunities, the EFF would like
to make contact with them. Please have them contact: Will Doherty
wild@eff.org

PS: We are also seeking the donation of a high-powered statistics
package such as SPSS, MINITAB or SAS.

Hey guys, it's coming up on the big election in November, and one of the first ways we can all screw this up is by not being registered!

(I know there's been a lot of moving around lately for everyone, and it's easy to let the deadline slip past you in between unpacking boxes...)

Another important factor is that there's no way to register online! You'll have to find your respective Registration website for your state and fill out a form to request them to send you a form, so you can send that back in to register! (So we're talking a 2-3 week process potentially.)

In California, the deadline is October 21, 2002. I'm not sure if it's the same for all states, but I am sure that time is running out.

Thanks!

Calif. Legislature Widens Probe of Music Contracts

State Sen. Kevin Murray, one of the Democratic legislators spearheading the probe, said on Monday a new hearing set for Sept. 24 would examine a range of accounting practices that artists' lawyers and managers allege cheat their clients out of millions of dollars each year.

"Clearly we are just generally looking at whether artists are treated fairly," Murray said...

While Murray earlier this month withdrew a bill which would have addressed many of those complaints, he said the legislature would continue to gather information with an eye to passing a comprehensive package of "artists rights" bills early next year.

"There is clearly some momentum and we continue to move forward," Murray told Reuters. "People are now thinking about artists rights, and about making California an artist-friendly state. These are creative people, and we want them to live here."

To prepare for the next set of hearings, the state Senate Rules Committee will issue a number of subpoenas to follow up on charges that the world's five largest recording companies use complex accounting procedures to cheat artists out of money that is their due.

Here's the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=769&u=/nm/20020826/music_nm/leisure_artists_dc_4&printer=1

Calif. Legislature Widens Probe of Music Contracts
Mon Aug 26, 6:12 PM ET

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - California's legislature has deepened its probe into music industry contracts, looking into charges that recording companies defraud pop stars through accounting tricks such as special deals with mail-order record clubs and video channels.

State Sen. Kevin Murray, one of the Democratic legislators spearheading the probe, said on Monday a new hearing set for Sept. 24 would examine a range of accounting practices that artists' lawyers and managers allege cheat their clients out of millions of dollars each year.

"Clearly we are just generally looking at whether artists are treated fairly," Murray said.

California's legislature has already held one set of hearings into the recording industry's treatment of music artists following a high-profile lobbying effort by the Recording Artists Coalition (RAC), led by stars like Eagles frontman Don Henley, Sheryl Crow and the Dixie Chicks.

The artists have complained that they are bound to contracts for over seven years -- longer than talent in other entertainment industries -- and are subject to multimillion-dollar lawsuits by recording companies for failing to deliver albums and fulfill other obligations under contract conditions they say are impossible to meet.

While Murray earlier this month withdrew a bill which would have addressed many of those complaints, he said the legislature would continue to gather information with an eye to passing a comprehensive package of "artists rights" bills early next year.

"There is clearly some momentum and we continue to move forward," Murray told Reuters. "People are now thinking about artists rights, and about making California an artist-friendly state. These are creative people, and we want them to live here."

To prepare for the next set of hearings, the state Senate Rules Committee will issue a number of subpoenas to follow up on charges that the world's five largest recording companies use complex accounting procedures to cheat artists out of money that is their due.

Several of the specific allegations include charges that recording companies have rigged the music video business to enrich themselves without adequately compensating artists, and that music company deals with mail-order record clubs also shortchange artists by delivering far lower royalty levels than retail music outlets.

Artist representatives also charge that recording companies use accounting tricks to underpay royalties for music which is sold overseas -- a charge record companies have denied.

The Recording Industry Association of America ( news - web sites) (RIAA), which represents all the big labels, including Bertelsmann AG ( news - web sites)'s BMG, EMI Group Plc ( news - web sites), AOL Time Warner Inc. , Vivendi Universal and Sony Corp ( news - web sites)., declined comment Monday, saying it was not in a position to discuss business deals which may be negotiated by individual companies.

The industry trade group had earlier said it was willing to make concessions to resolve the artists' concerns, but that they were holding out for terms that could not be met.

Entertainment lawyer Don Engel, who has represented both artists and record labels, said he was hopeful that the legislative examination of recording industry contracts would result in a fairer deal for artists.

"I tell people that if you want to be in the business, you are going to sign with a company that is going to cheat you," Engel said.

HMV ventures into digital waters

The UK music retailer HMV is expected to confirm this week it has reached a deal with the digital music service On Demand Distribution (OD2) to offer almost 100,000 songs over the net...

Under the arrangement, fans will have access to the largest official catalogue of digital music ever made available in the UK.

Here is the text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2212764.stm

Sunday, 25 August, 2002, 07:16 GMT 08:16 UK
HMV ventures into digital waters

Thousands of tracks from Kylie Minogue to Coldplay are set to be made available to download over the internet.

The UK music retailer HMV is expected to confirm this week it has reached a deal with the digital music service On Demand Distribution (OD2) to offer almost 100,000 songs over the net.

From September, fans will be able to listen, download or burn a number of tracks for a monthly fee of £4.99.

"This is a very important deal for the industry as a whole as HMV is one of the largest High Street retailers of CDs and stocks quite a broad catalogue." said OD2 Chief Executive, Charles Grimsdale.

Musical choice

Under the arrangement, fans will have access to the largest official catalogue of digital music ever made available in the UK.

Among the material will be the entire Elvis Presley catalogue of 990 tracks, as well as songs by Craig David, Westlife and Dido.

The material will come from leading record labels such as EMI, Warner Music and BMG as well as independent labels like Telstar and V2.

The deal comes at a time when the music industry has been trying to stop the illegal sharing of songs over the net.

'Good value'

One of the ways it has fought back is by launching paid online subscription services, but so far these have been seen as unattractive alternatives to illegal file-sharing networks.

But OD2 is optimistic about the prospects for digital music services.

"It's still early days but the consumer feedback is good," said Charles Grimsdale.

"The cost per track is low, so if you want to listen to music on your computer, it is very good value."

OD2 was set up by Peter Gabriel in 1999 to sell digital music over the internet. Companies such as MSN.co.uk, Freeserve and Tiscali have already signed up to the service.

Brewster Khale of Wayback Machine and Internet Archive was quoted by the NY Times today when asked to comment on all of the "junk" he must be archiving along with all of the "worthwhile stuff."

See the article by John Schwartz:
From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter

Brewster Kahle, who has created a large Internet archive he calls the Wayback Machine, which contains several times the amount of information in the Library of Congress, said that the number of questionable sites is beside the point so long as search engines do their job.

"We don't worry about how many pages that I don't care about are in the Internet archive," he said. "What you do care about is, `Does it have the pages that I want?' "

He acknowledged, however, that "we haven't done a very good job of putting the good stuff up there" on the Internet to dilute the bad, and that as a result today's leaders "are shortchanging the next generation."

...To Mr. Kahle, the Internet's diversity, good and bad, means that people will find the information they want, as narrowly and as deeply as they care to explore it. While he, too, would like some method to control the spam that flows into his e-mailbox, he said he preferred a complex ecosystem to a monoculture as bland and regular as a suburban lawn.

"I grew up where almost everybody could sing all three verses of the `Gilligan's Island' theme song," he said. "I don't want my children to grow up like that."

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/26/technology/26CYBE.html

From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Life is good at the bottom of the cyberspace pit. When the Arizona attorney general's office recently shut down a Scottsdale company, CP Direct, it offered a glimpse into the spoils of the Internet's dark side. The company sold pills via the Web that promised to increase penis length, bust size and body height.
Advertisement

Enough people had spent $60 an order — mostly for the "Longitude" treatments, with ingredients that included pumpkin seed, sarsaparilla and "oyster meat" — that the state was able to seize more than $30 million in luxury real estate and a herd of Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls Royces and a Lamborghini.

The dot-com bust has left the economy littered with the husks of companies that said they would transform the way that people work, live and play. But aside from such notably profitable Internet winners as eBay and edging-into-profitability giants like Amazon, it is not easy to find many pure Internet companies that make healthy profits without appealing to baser interests or using questionable business practices. Even huge companies like AOL Time Warner appear to be struggling to figure out — still — how to come up with online content and services that mainstream consumers will be willing to pay for.

Those who provide some of the sites that many people object to say they have nothing to hide. "Obviously, there's a want for this stuff, because there's billions of dollars spent on it every year," said David Marchlak, who has brought the world sites like Voyeur Dorm, a Web precursor to the "Big Brother" television show that watches a Florida house shared by a cast of young women. "We're not forcing it on anybody."

Yet these days, Internet users complain of a proliferation of Web sites that offer a peek up Anna Kournikova's skirt or that hawk pills to increase the size of their sex organs. The Internet was supposed to make people's brains bigger.

People now talk about wasting too much of their time sifting through e-mail invitations to view photographs of nymphets or unspeakable acts with farm animals, as well as requests to send money to people who say they are relatives of Jonas Savimbi of Angola or Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire so they can release their stolen African millions.

Cyberspace is "debasing itself in front of our eyes," said Bruce Sterling, a science fiction author. Mr. Sterling, who sees the Internet becoming a pit of spam and swindles, pornography, corporate advertising and government surveillance, warns, "We will lose the Internet if we don't save it."

Why is so much high technology so lowbrow, with abominably written prose, horrific images like the beheading of the journalist Daniel Pearl and the sweaty sensibility of a tromp through the febrile fantasies of adolescent boys and middle-aged men?

One answer is that the Internet businesses that thrive most readily are the kinds that do well in every medium — including those selling titillation and cheating their customers.

"Every industry has its charlatans, and e-commerce is getting its share," said Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. "I don't see evidence that it is more than you would expect, especially in a new industry."

Not everyone who hangs out a shingle in the grimy quarters of the online world becomes rich. Maria, a woman who runs adult Web sites and a telephone sex service, said that dreams of quick riches are quickly dashed, especially for those entrepreneurs who spend thousands of dollars for pornography-site-in-a-box kits that are sold online, which often include stockpiles of images that are already in wide circulation.

"I don't see people getting rich," said Maria, who spoke on the condition that her full name not be used. "I see people getting burned" by their own inexperience and crushed by so-called chargebacks — cancellations of credit card charges by consumers.

Louis Bajjali, who runs a number of pornography sites, said that those who succeed share some characteristics with their counterparts in mainstream business: They are on the scene early to establish brand recognition, work hard and stick with what they know.

"We're businessmen," he said. "It's actually a simple and clean job."

At least the online pornography purveyors deliver what they promise, however unseemly. CP Direct, the penis-pill merchants, sold snake oil to consumers by the thousands, the Arizona attorney general, Jeanne Napolitano, said in her announcement of the civil forfeiture action.

"The product was purchased by CP Direct for $2.45 a bottle, and sold for $59.95 — that's a nice markup, isn't it?" said Lawrence J. Warfield, a certified public accountant who was appointed by the state to administer the sale of assets and distribution of money to victims of the swindle.

John Hannah, a lawyer for Michael Consoli, one of the principal figures in the CP Direct case, noted that the state seizure was not a final disposition of the case. "I have every reason to believe that Mr. Consoli will deny that he did anything wrong and will ask for his property back," he said.

CP Direct is one of many companies that — at least, until law enforcement showed up — proved that the wages of sin can, in fact, be bountiful. Last November, the Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general settled charges against a New York company, the Crescent Publishing Group, after proving that Crescent and 64 affiliated companies billed thousands of consumers as much as $90 a month for access to pornography sites that gave the appearance of being free. In a settlement with the company, the government got $30 million for consumer refunds.

Pyramid schemes, too, flourish online: In August 2001, the Federal Trade Commission fined the creators of BigSmart.com $5 million in a settlement over the business practices of its online shopping mall. BigSmart's customers paid $110 for a home page with links to other merchants, and the only way to make money was to recruit newcomers to the scheme, the commission found.

The reasons that people engage in such activity are simple enough, said Eric Wagner, a lawyer in the division of marketing practices at the Federal Trade Commission. "Fraud is profitable," he said. "If it wasn't profitable, people wouldn't be doing it."

The relatively low cost of using the Internet for marketing makes it every bit as attractive to swindlers as it is to legitimate businesses.

The commission has declared war on spam and fraud, and has trained people from 1,700 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to detect and prosecute online fraud. The F.T.C. has collected 13 million spam messages in its efforts to study the problem, and has initiated dozens of "Netforce" sweeps to drive spammers out of business.

From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter

(Page 2 of 2)

To be sure, the better neighborhoods of the Net — where one can find learned discussion of Kierkegaard or analysis of Gram Parsons's influence on rock music — are flourishing. But critics like Mr. Sterling argue that those leafy digital neighborhoods are increasingly surrounded by wildly expanding zones of slums, bad taste and risk.

He thinks "civil society" has broken down online, and that "it's not just a digital problem, it's the digital reflection of a global problem."
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Criticism of the Internet has its antecedents in the fears of every new technology that has come along, said Paul Saffo, an analyst at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. Some of the earliest printing presses were put to use publishing pulp and trash, and even early printed playing cards had salacious images. "A collective appetite for sleaze," he said, "seems to be a real constant."

Despite that, or perhaps because of it, reports of the death spiral for the online medium are premature, said Gary Chapman, director of the 21st Century Project, a nonprofit research and education program on science and technology policy at the University of Texas.

"I am astonished practically every day by something new on the Internet," he said. The medium has grown so extensively that "at this point, it's almost impossible to characterize what the Internet is like."

Spam, for example, "is an annoyance and something that is a regrettable display of the human tendency to go for the lowest common denominator," he said. "But it can't possibly be viewed as representative of the entire Internet."

Brewster Kahle, who has created a large Internet archive he calls the Wayback Machine, which contains several times the amount of information in the Library of Congress, said that the number of questionable sites is beside the point so long as search engines do their job.

"We don't worry about how many pages that I don't care about are in the Internet archive," he said. "What you do care about is, `Does it have the pages that I want?' "

He acknowledged, however, that "we haven't done a very good job of putting the good stuff up there" on the Internet to dilute the bad, and that as a result today's leaders "are shortchanging the next generation."

Other initiatives to dilute the bad by raising the concentration of the good have also begun. Project Gutenberg, an arduous effort conducted largely by volunteers, has put more than 400 books online. The Million Books Project at Carnegie Mellon University is trying to create an online home in every field for major works that are no longer protected by copyright.

And the Digital Promise Project, begun by a former Federal Communications Commission chairman, Newton N. Minow (who famously called 1961-era television a "vast wasteland") and Lawrence Grossman, the former chairman of NBC and PBS, aims to improve education and the Internet by earmarking some $18 billion raised in federal auctions of rights to use portions of the broadcast spectrum.

"There's so much good stuff that is trapped in libraries that should be digitized and made available," Mr. Minow said. "It's just yearning to get free."

To Mr. Kahle, the Internet's diversity, good and bad, means that people will find the information they want, as narrowly and as deeply as they care to explore it. While he, too, would like some method to control the spam that flows into his e-mailbox, he said he preferred a complex ecosystem to a monoculture as bland and regular as a suburban lawn.

"I grew up where almost everybody could sing all three verses of the `Gilligan's Island' theme song," he said. "I don't want my children to grow up like that."

I love my boys, and this whole situation makes me just sick. Right now, there's no way for them to win. Newton says they didn't offer him enough money, and then says he would have never given them permission in the first place -- money or no.

This isn't encouraging for artists that try to take the time to track other artists down to ask their permission -- what if they say no?

It also sucks to find out your song is on a famous album -- and nobody told you or bothered to try to track you down (since Newton is a professor at a major university, I doubt it would have been that hard to find him).

It seems like we need compulsory licensing for samples, so people don't need permission, but can still get paid fairly.

At the same time, this ruling suggests that Newton didn't need to be notified or paid for the use of his work -- surely that's not a precedent worth supporting!

The Flute Case That Fell Apart
-- Ruling on Sampling Has Composers Rattled
by Teresa Wiltz for the Washington

Composers are nervously keeping an eye on the case,
wondering what kind of precedent it will set if Manella's
ruling is upheld...Licensing a sample is a two-part
process: Permission is needed from both the record
label and the composer. The Beastie Boys licensed
the sample from Newton's record label, Munich-based
ECM, but neither the company nor the group got
permission from Newton. Manella's ruling in effect
said that since the sample was a recording and not
a composition, his permission wasn't needed.

"The ruling in this case will have a chilling effect
on musically creative artists," says Richard Kessler,
executive director of the American Music Center,
a New York-based arts service organization with
more than 3,000 composers in its membership.
Kessler said his organization is considering
joining an amicus brief with other musical
organizations for the appeal.

As Kessler sees it, "the idea that the judge
would take a look at these six notes and
determine that they are not original and
didn't warrant protection, it's something
musical artists, composers will and should fear."

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47321-2002Aug21.html

The Flute Case That Fell Apart
Ruling on Sampling Has Composers Rattled

By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 22, 2002; Page C01

This is how jazz flutist James Newton found out -- eight years after the
fact -- that he was on a popular rap recording: A student strolled into his
class and said hey, prof, I didn't know you performed with the Beastie Boys.

Newton wasn't happy. A six-second snippet of his song "Choir" was a featured
attraction in the 1992 Beastie Boys hit "Pass the Mic." He says that he's
never received any compensation for the band's use of the recording and that
the Beastie Boys never bothered to ask his permission.

Finding out that the song had made it onto a "Beavis & Butt-head" cartoon
only fueled his ire. Newton, a professor at California State University, Los
Angeles, says that if he'd been asked, he never would have granted his
permission. So in 2000 he sued the Beastie Boys, charging the group with
copyright infringement. And, to his surprise and rage in June, he learned
he'd lost the case.

In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Nora M. Manella said that Newton's
sequence was basically a "recording," for which Newton and his publisher had
already been compensated, as opposed to a "composition," and that it was
"unoriginal as a matter of law." (She also denied a motion filed by the
Beastie Boys seeking reimbursement from Newton for almost $500,000 in legal
fees.) Newton is appealing the decision, and has taken to the Internet in
search of support.

The case in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California
pits Newton, a critically acclaimed avant-garde jazz flutist and former
Guggenheim fellow, against the Beastie Boys, a rap group known for both its
innovation in sampling (the use of snippets of other artists' recordings)
and for its progressive politics.

Composers are nervously keeping an eye on the case, wondering what kind of
precedent it will set if Manella's ruling is upheld.

At issue are complicated questions of copyright law, and whether Newton's
permission was needed for the "Choir" sample. Licensing a sample is a
two-part process: Permission is needed from both the record label and the
composer. The Beastie Boys licensed the sample from Newton's record label,
Munich-based ECM, but neither the company nor the group got permission from
Newton. Manella's ruling in effect said that since the sample was a
recording and not a composition, his permission wasn't needed.

"The ruling in this case will have a chilling effect on musically creative
artists," says Richard Kessler, executive director of the American Music
Center, a New York-based arts service organization with more than 3,000
composers in its membership. Kessler said his organization is considering
joining an amicus brief with other musical organizations for the appeal.

As Kessler sees it, "the idea that the judge would take a look at these six
notes and determine that they are not original and didn't warrant
protection, it's something musical artists, composers will and should fear."

Says Billy Taylor, jazz pianist, composer and Kennedy Center fixture: "If I
create something, whether I create it in my head or on some electronic
machine, it's just as finite as if I write it on a sheet of paper. It
doesn't matter if it's not written down if it's something he created,
whether he whistled it or hummed it."

The sequence in question is a six-second sample of "Choir," a 1982 recording
during which Newton simultaneously sings notes while playing the flute using
an overblowing technique, creating a "multiphonic" composition. The segment,
which was inspired by Newton's Southern Baptist roots, opens "Pass the Mic,"
and then loops repeatedly throughout the piece. The Beastie Boys album
"Check Your Head," released in 1992, went multi-platinum. The Beastie Boys
continue to perform the song in concert, and it appears on a DVD released in
2000.

The Beastie Boys' attorney, Adam Streisand, did not return a phone call
requesting comment. In a prepared statement, Mike D of the Beastie Boys
said: "We have dealt with this entire matter legally and fairly from day
one. It's clear by the judge's rulings that she agreed as well. It's
unfortunate that Mr. Newton wouldn't reason with us earlier and that it had
to come to this."

Newton said that the Beastie Boys offered to compensate him for the use of
his material but that the figure was "insulting." Neither he nor his
attorney, Alan Korn, would comment on the amount of the offer. A
spokesperson for ECM said that the label tried to contact Newton, but the
flutist had moved and the company did not have a current telephone number.
The label mailed him a check, for a modest amount, the standard fee for
licensing agreements, but it was returned for lack of a forwarding address.

This isn't the first time the Beastie Boys were sued for copyright
infringement related to sampling, nor is it the first time that a rapper has
been sued for sampling. In a 1991 landmark ruling, Biz Markie lost a court
case for sampling Gilbert O'Sullivan's 1977 hit "Alone Again (Naturally)" in
his song "Alone Again." His record "I Need A Haircut" on which the single
appeared, was subsequently pulled from the shelves.

"For my music to be dispelled by the court in this fashion was a very
difficult pill for me to swallow," Newton said.

"It sounds racist to me," Taylor said. "Pure English. Here's a [judge] who's
saying if it's not written in the old European form that I may have heard
about from someone who studied Mozart," it's not a legitimate composition.

U.S. Opens Criminal AOL Probe
-- Justice Dept. to Focus On Unusual Accounting
by Alec Klein and Dan Eggen.

Also of interest is the cooperation of the SEC and the Justice Department on these investigations.

The two federal agencies have worked concurrently in the past, in part because their investigatory powers are different. The SEC brings civil cases only, a process that can be quicker in bringing enforcement actions and punishments than a criminal case. The Justice Department can bring both civil and criminal cases, but the department's ability to prosecute criminally -- and use grand-jury subpoenas to compel testimony -- augments what the SEC does, lawyers say. The Justice Department also has access to vast investigative resources, including those of the FBI. The SEC also has subpoena power, but it requires the specific authorization of its commissioners.

Here is the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28756-2002Jul31

The U.S. Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into the
accounting practices of AOL Time Warner Inc., focusing on the business deals
of its Dulles-based online division, officials familiar with the matter said.

The investigation coincides with a civil probe of the world's largest media
company by the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed last week by the
company's chief executive, Richard D. Parsons.

The Bush administration, seeking to restore investor confidence after a
string of business scandals, recently formed a corporate fraud task force to
pursue criminal and civil cases against several high-profile companies and
their executives.

"In the current environment, when anyone raises a question about accounting,
it's not surprising that the relevant government agencies will want to look
into the facts," AOL Time Warner said yesterday in a prepared statement. "As
we said last week, we are cooperating 100 percent with the SEC, and we will
cooperate with the Department of Justice as well."

New York-based AOL Time Warner said its accounting conforms to generally
accepted accounting principles, which it confirmed with its outside auditor,
Ernst & Young LLP.

The company declined to comment beyond its written statement. The Justice
Department and SEC also declined comment.

It was not known which AOL executives might be subjects of the Justice
Department's investigation. Prosecutors have "not ruled out anybody,"
including top AOL executives, a source said.

Sources familiar with the investigation said the Justice Department is
focusing on transactions cited in a recent Washington Post report that
examined how America Online recorded revenue through a series of
unconventional transactions from 2000 to 2002.

The Justice Department investigation was first reported by USA Today.

The U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria
is handling the case, the sources said. The main Justice Department office in
Washington also is involved, and people in its New York division may assist
in gathering evidence, the sources said.

The U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York issued a
subpoena to AOL initially but withdrew it when the case was transferred to
Virginia, where AOL is based, sources said. There is no current subpoena of
AOL.

U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty in Virginia did not return calls.

Paul T. Cappuccio, AOL Time Warner's general counsel, is spearheading AOL's
legal response to the Justice Department and SEC, sources said. Myer Berlow,
a former AOL advertising executive who now is a company consultant, has
retained counsel in connection with SEC investigations of companies that did
business with AOL, sources said. So has David M. Colburn, executive vice
president and president of business affairs and development for AOL Time
Warner's subscription services and advertising and commerce businesses, the
sources said. The company declined to make Berlow or Colburn available for
comment.

The deals examined by The Post included a transaction in which AOL inherited
an arbitration award from a British entertainment company and settled the
case by accepting an advertising deal instead.

In another deal, AOL served as an advertising agent for eBay Inc., the giant
online auctioneer. AOL sold ads for eBay, but AOL booked the revenue from the
sale of eBay's ad space as AOL's own revenue. AOL has said it accounted for
these transactions properly.

Sources said the Justice Department has notified AOL of its investigation and
requested documents, but it has not yet interviewed company officials. The
SEC also has requested information from AOL, including some the company
provided in response to questions related to articles published by The Post,
the sources said.

The two federal agencies have worked concurrently in the past, in part
because their investigatory powers are different. The SEC brings civil cases
only, a process that can be quicker in bringing enforcement actions and
punishments than a criminal case. The Justice Department can bring both civil
and criminal cases, but the department's ability to prosecute criminally --
and use grand-jury subpoenas to compel testimony -- augments what the SEC
does, lawyers say.

The Justice Department also has access to vast investigative resources,
including those of the FBI. The SEC also has subpoena power, but it requires
the specific authorization of its commissioners.

The Justice Department and SEC have cooperated on several inquiries recently.
The Justice Department is reviewing WorldCom Inc., and it has brought
criminal charges against former cable-television executives at Adelphia
Communications Corp., and the co-founder of biotech company ImClone Inc. The
SEC has filed civil cases against WorldCom and Adelphia.

The two agencies also cooperated in the investigation of Enron Corp.'s
collapse. The corporate-fraud task force recently created by the president
also is an illustration of interagency cooperation. It is headed by Deputy
Attorney General Larry D. Thompson, and SEC Chairman Harvey L. Pitt also can
be brought in to assist the task force. It is not clear what role if any the
task force might play in the AOL investigation.

The SEC staff complains that personnel shortages have hurt the agency's
ability to police securities markets.

Congress has authorized -- but not yet funded -- a $776 million SEC budget
for fiscal 2003, a 77 percent increase from the current year. Congress also
passed a supplemental budget that would give the SEC $30 million in emergency
funding immediately, including $5 million for technology and $25 million for
as many as 150 new hires.

"We are absolutely stretched, and I'm happy at the prospect of getting new
resources," said the SEC's chief of enforcement, Stephen M. Cutler.

In addition to the government investigations, AOL Time Warner must deal with
class-action lawsuits alleging that company executives misled investors about
America Online's financial condition.

The company's stock has been pummeled. AOL Time Warner stock fell 90 cents to
$11.50 in heavy trading on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday.

AOL Time Warner has moved to bolster investor confidence. Chief Operating
Officer Robert W. Pittman recently left and Colburn relinquished his
day-to-day responsibility for the online division's business affairs
division.

One of the leading candidates to take over the online unit is Jon Miller, a
former executive of USA Interactive, according to sources.

Meanwhile, AOL Time Warner overhauled its corporate structure, making the
online division part of a unit that also includes Time Inc., Time Warner
Cable and the AOL Time Warner Book Group.

The reorganization is a stunning turn of events for the Internet division,
which acquired Time Warner about a year and a half ago in what was then
considered a triumph of new media over old media.

Staff writer Kathleen Day and staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to
this report.

A friend of mine emailed me this today:

Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 1:58 PM
Subject: Another Bush Judicial Nominee Threatens Disability Rights

"Dennis Shedd's Record on Disability Issues" Judge Dennis Shedd, a Bush nominee to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, has a striking record of hostility toward civil rights during his years on the federal bench, including a consistent disregard for the rights of people with disabilities. He has ruled against disability rights plaintiffs in almost every instance, departing from settled law and adopting tortured interpretations of disability rights laws. His opinions routinely ignore evidence, stating in conclusory fashion that the plaintiff has failed to produce evidence to support her claims.

Here's the whole email:

> "Another Bush Judicial Nominee Threatens Disability Rights"
>
> Jennifer Mathis of the Bazelon
> Center shares the following summary about another Bush
> nomination to the federal court system:
>
> "Dennis Shedd's Record on Disability Issues"
>
> Judge Dennis Shedd, a Bush nominee to the Fourth Circuit
> Court of Appeals, has a striking record of hostility toward
> civil rights during his years on the federal bench,
> including a consistent disregard for the rights of people
> with disabilities. He has ruled against disability rights
> plaintiffs in almost every instance, departing from settled
> law and adopting tortured interpretations of disability
> rights laws. His opinions routinely ignore evidence,
> stating in conclusory fashion that the plaintiff has failed
> to produce evidence to support her claims. For example:
>
> Judge Shedd effectively read the right of employees to
> "reassignment" out of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
> Reassignment to a vacant position is a crucial protection
> for individuals with disabilities who can no longer perform
> their current jobs. Congress explicitly included
> reassignment as one type of accommodation required by the
> ADA. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
> and the courts have consistently interpreted the ADA to
> require an employer to reassign a person with a disability
> to a vacant position for which he is qualified, if such a
> position exists, when the person is no longer able to do
> his current job. Judge Shedd drastically limited the right
> to reassignment in a way that not only made no sense but
> was flatly contradicted by the EEOC, the agency on whose
> interpretations Judge Shedd purported to rely. Judge
> Shedd's decision stands out as both unique and bizarre.
>
> Judge Shedd ignored the plain meaning of the ADA when he
> approved a state health insurance pool's refusal of
> coverage for a man who was HIV positive. The pool was
> designed to provide insurance for individuals whose medical
> conditions disqualified them from private insurance. No
> other medical condition was excluded, and the state had
> done no actuarial analysis to justify the exclusion of
> individuals with HIV/AIDS. While many courts have held that
> the ADA does not prevent insurance plans from providing
> lesser benefits for treatment of particular types of
> disabilities, Shedd's ruling that the ADA permits the
> complete exclusion from any benefits based on a person's
> disability goes way beyond those decisions. The plaintiff
> who brought this case sought to have it decided on an
> expedited basis, but died eight months later, before any
> decision was rendered.
>
> Judge Shedd rejected a discrimination claim of a man who
> was fired because of his status as an alcoholic even though
> his alcoholism had no effect on his work performance and he
> was not intoxicated at work. The employer discovered that
> the man was drinking during a two-week period of leave
> approved by the employer, and fired him on that basis
> alone. The man was fired before he returned to work. A
> federal magistrate found no evidence that the man's
> alcoholism interfered with his ability to do his job and
> recommended that his claim be permitted to proceed.
> Nonetheless, Judge Shedd rejected the magistrate's
> recommendation and threw out the man's discrimination
> claim. He concluded, without citing any evidence, that the
> man's alcoholism rendered him unable to do his job, and
> therefore was not protected by the Rehabilitation Act.
>
> Judge Shedd exhibited troubling attitudes toward
> individuals with disabilities in his courtroom. In a 1995
> criminal trial, Shedd upheld the prosecutor's request to
> require the defendant's wife to hide that she was blind.
> The prosecutor was concerned that the wife's blindness
> would engender sympathy for the defendant. The prosecutor
> asked that the wife keep her cane out of sight. Shedd
> inquired of the defense attorney, "Does the cane have to be
> visible during the court trial?" The defense attorney
> replied that the woman depended on it. Shedd stated: "It
> is going to be down. I will stop the trial if she uses it
> for anything other than access in and out."
>
>
> What you can do: Contact your senator to voice your
> opposition to the nomination of Judge Shedd to the Fourth
> Circuit Court of Appeals. It is particularly important to
> contact Senator Leahy, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary
> Committee, and the other senators on the Committee. The
> Committee members are:
>
> Democrats:
> Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont, 202-224-4242
> Senator Joe Biden from Delaware, 202-224-5042
> Senator Richard Durbin from Illinois, 202-244-2152
> Senator John Edwards from North Carolina, 202-224-3154
> Senator Herbert Kohl from Wisconsin, 202-224-5653
> Senator Russ Feingold from Wisconsin, 202-224-5323
> Senator Dianne Feinstein from California, 202-224-3841
> Senator Charles Schumer from New York, 202-224-6542
> Senator Maria Cantwell from Washington, 202-224-3441
> Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts, 202-224-4543
>
> Republicans:
> Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah, 202-224-5251
> Senator Charles Grassley from Iowa, 202-224-3744
> Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania, 202-224-4254
> Senator Jon Kyl from Arizona, 202-224-4521
> Senator Mike DeWine from Ohio, 202-224-2315
> Senator Jeff Sessions from Alabama, 202-224-4124
> Senator Sam Brownback from Kansas, 202-224-6521
> Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, 202-224-2541
> Senator Strom Thurmond from South Carolina, 202-224-5972
>
> # # #
>
> =====================
>
> JUSTICE FOR ALL -- A Service of the
> American Association of People with Disabilities
> www.aapd-dc.org www.jfanow.org
>
> There's strength in numbers! Be a part of a national
> coalition of people with disabilities and join AAPD today.
> www.aapd-dc.org
>
>

Our first Creative Commons' interview is up on the website:

Rick Prelinger.
(Keeper of the Prelinger Archives, which have just been accepted into the Library of Congress.

Through our partnership with the Internet Archive, my images are just going out all over the world. They are achieving a level of spread and penetration I could never do on my own. And therefore, I think that giving things away ends up benefiting me. You know, these images don't get used up. They don't get yellow around the edges. They don't become less valuable from being shown and repeated. Ubiquity equals value. That's how I think you can make money by giving things away.

Here's the full text of the interview in case the link goes bad
(wow I really hope this particular link never goes bad):

http://www.creativecommons.org/features/rick

Rick Prelinger
Interview by: Lisa Rein
Photos by: Lisa Leigh

Dateline: 1980. New York-based typesetter Rick Prelinger was trying to "make it in the movies" and writing a reference book on two-way radio frequencies on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Two years later, he became the Research Director for "Heavy Petting," the Norman Lear-funded Atomic Café-like documentary about sexuality in the 20th Century. Armed with photocopies of old educational film reference books and Library of Congress copyright catalogs, he began a project of surveying, cataloging, archiving, and cross-referencing educational, industrial and advertising films produced in the United States between 1903 and the early 1980s.

Over the past twenty years, Rick has collected more than 48,000 complete films and roughly 30,000 cans of raw footage. The Internet Archive currently hosts 1,125 titles online, with plans to have 1,500 uploaded by the end of 2003.

The Library of Congress recently acquired the Prelinger Archives, which will be made publicly accessible after a 3- to 4-year processing period. In the meantime, the Internet Archive will be the primary way to access the films.

We caught up with Rick fresh back from New York City, where he had been cataloging and preparing to ship the actual film stock for delivery to the L.O.C. The process had left him covered in rust and dust from digging into the corners of his storage facility in search of any lost films that may have slipped through the cracks.

CC: Rick, what exactly is the Prelinger Archives?

RP: The Prelinger Archives is a large collection of what I call "ephemeral films." These are industrial, advertising, educational, amateur and government films -- films that were generally made not to show in movie theatres or on TV, but films that were made to teach, to educate, sometimes to miseducate, to train, to sell, pitch a product, or promote an idea. Films that embody the persuasions of the past. In addition to showing us the way things were, they also show how things were supposed to be. They are a wonderful set of visions of the way we were supposed to think, what we were supposed to buy. A vision of the sort of people we were supposed to become, and as such they record aspects of our history that are suppressed. They are not necessarily public aspects of our history.

CC: What do you mean "not necessarily public aspects of our history"?

RP: I'll give you an example. If we want to have a sense of what it was like to be a member of a family, a nuclear family in the American 50's or 60's, you really can't get that authentically from a TV sit com, or from a Hollywood movie, or from a news reel. But when you see these films, they are filled with footage of idealized families in action. We get a sense of how the family actually looked and behaved, what was the body language, what were the gender roles, how kids were supposed to behave differently than adults, and you also get a sense of that sort of all-encompassing ideology. So you could argue that all of these films, in a way, are sort of an ethnographic vision of a lost America.

CC: Do you feel that producing these films is a lost art?

RP: These kinds of films really aren't made today, but if you could imagine the World Wide Web -- where organizations and institutions, companies and individuals use the Web to build a site to make their voice heard --imagine that instead everybody was making movies…every company made movies to promote products and train its workers and reach the public. In the schools of the past, really from the turn of the century until recently, films were shown to teach everything. Whether it was "How To Brush Your Teeth," "How To Get Married," "Social Studies," "The Products of Guatemala"…this is the kind of material that I've collected for about twenty years.

CC: How long has the Prelinger Archives offered films on the Web?

RP: We first started putting movies up at the very, very beginning of 2001, and the site was kind of embryonic for a while. It's still a work in progress, but well over 1,250,000 movies have been downloaded -- some of those for people to just look at and enjoy from the privacy of their homes, their dorm rooms. Others have been made into other movies.

CC: The movies in the Prelinger Archives have been used to create a wide range of "derivative works." Could you give us some examples?

RP: In 2001, we had a contest on the theme of "The World At War"…the winners are actually on the Internet Archive Website. The film that took the first prize was "The ABC's of Happiness," where an animated character tells the audience that we really shouldn't worry about the past. We should be happy. We shouldn't look at disturbing images and let this knock us off of our complacent center -- and of course the images we're seeing in the background are all very disturbing. It's a very funny and a very sweet film, but with a real punch to it. An artist in England whose name is Vicki Bennett -- who performs under the name of "People Like Us" is a musician whose work is made of sampling other kinds of works and knitting together a new whole which is kind of utopian and imaginative. She made a ten-minute movie called, "We, Out of the Life," which is about the history of electronic music and the (perhaps) obsolescence of human beings in the future, and it's all made with material from my collection that was downloaded through the Internet Archive. It's a funny and very complex little movie.

People are working with our footage to make shows for Tech TV. There's a series called "Big Thinkers" that makes very, very heavy use of our material. And you know, when you're making a movie about "Big Thinkers," you have people talking, and how do you add ametaphoric dimension to what people are saying? How do you visualize their ideas? One of the ways that the producers decided to do that was to download an incredible amount of footage from the site, build a little library, and use a lot of these archival images to contextualize what people were saying.

A woman in San Francisco named Heather Rogers just made a great little film on recycling that actually questions whether recycling is beneficial. We all think that recycling is a good thing…she's not sure that it is, and she uses a lot of old imagery from the Archives depicting consumption and waste to illustrate her point. It's a strong movie. So, there are artists. There are documentaries. There are people doing conventional commercial TV, and there are people doing work that doesn't look like anything that has ever been made before. But all of it relies heavily on having access to a pool of old imagery.

CC: Could you explain more of the details about how making your footage available "for free" through the Internet Archive has actually increased revenues for your stock footage business?

RP: I run a small stock footage company. It grosses every year in the low-to mid-six figures. My competitors are big companies who spend at least as much and maybe more money than I gross every year just on magazine advertising. Probably, they spend that much money just to build their Websites. I couldn't afford to do that. But if the footage that's in my collection is "out there," and [if] it works its way back into the culture by being ubiquitous, I gain. Because ubiquity of images makes them more valuable.

CC: How about an example of what you mean when you talk about how an image's being used over and over again makes it more ubiquitous and therefore more valuable?

RP: The example that I always like to point to goes back to when I used to work at HBO. (I worked in the entertainment industry for six years.) One day, I was sitting with a colleague of mine who was head of the Time-Life picture collection -- a wonderful, wonderful collection of images, many of which are the most emblematic images of the last 70 or 80 years. I asked [my colleague], "What's your highest revenue-producing image?" She said, "Why I'm surprised you asked, Rick. Of course, you know what it is: It's the image of everybody sitting in a movie theater with their 3-D glasses on." You know this famous image. It's kind of emblematic of the fifties. [Time-Life] makes a great deal of money selling that image...it's also pirated. It's been shot over and over again by people. People have set up people in theaters and then shot it on film, so they have a movie version of it. Repetition and ubiquity haven't lessened the value of that image: they've increased it.

Through our partnership with the Internet Archive, my images are just going out all over the world. They are achieving a level of spread and penetration I could never do on my own. And therefore, I think that giving things away ends up benefiting me. You know, these images don't get used up. They don't get yellow around the edges. They don't become less valuable from being shown and repeated. Ubiquity equals value. That's how I think you can make money by giving things away.

Wow this thing is as short as these things get!

Here's the Bill itself, for your perusal (and a quick read at only 5 center-margined double-spaced pages):
H.R. 5285: Internet Radio Fairness Act.

Study: Power Lines Probably Risky
by Paul Boutin for Wired News.

Here's the actual report, if you're interested:

An Evaluation of the Possible Risks From Electric and Magnetic Fields (EMFs) From Power Lines, Internal Wiring, Electrical Occupations and Appliances.

Or you could go right to the conclusions...

Digital copying rules may change
by Noel C. Paul for the Christian Science Monitor.

In a few years, Americans may not be able to copy a song off a CD, watch a recorded DVD at a friend's house, or store a copy of a television show for more than a day...

...Currently individuals can legally record TV shows, make digital audio files of CDs, and lend books to friends. Such activity is protected under a federal "fair use" statute, which takes into consideration most consumers' need for flexibility.

New regulations being discussed significantly erase fair-use rights in the name of piracy prevention. Ultimately, the entertainment industry hopes to charge consumers for what they now do free of charge.

"The only way they can charge you, they realized, is to first take away your legal right, and then sell that right back to you," says Joe Kraus, president of DigitalConsumer.org, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0819/p14s01-wmcn.html

from the August 19, 2002 edition

Digital copying rules may change
By Noel C. Paul
In a few years, Americans may not be able to copy a song off a CD, watch a recorded DVD at a friend's house, or store a copy of a television show for more than a day.

Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission approved regulations that would require television manufacturers to include anticopying technology in the next generation of televisions. The technology would identify programs that broadcasters do not want consumers to copy without first paying a fee.
E-mail this story

Write a letter to the Editor

Printer-friendly version

Permission to reprint/republish

And in Congress, lawmakers are considering a bill that would require all digital devices, and the software that runs them, to include a copyright protection system. The system would make it impossible for consumers to make unauthorized copies of music, movies, and television programs.

Such protections, proponents say, would give Hollywood an incentive to offer more entertainment in digital format, thereby spurring consumers' adoption of such technologies as high-definition TV and broadband services.

"The entertainment industry historically has been very, very slow to embrace technology because of concerns about piracy," says Mark Kersey, a broadband analyst with ARS, a market research firm in La Jolla, Calif.

Millions of consumers, for example, already watch pay-per-view movies and undoubtedly would pay for the ability to download digital movies onto their set-top boxes. But consumer advocates argue that the flood of digital entertainment for the home would come at a high cost, both in terms of money and consumer flexibility.

Currently individuals can legally record TV shows, make digital audio files of CDs, and lend books to friends. Such activity is protected under a federal "fair use" statute, which takes into consideration most consumers' need for flexibility.

New regulations being discussed significantly erase fair-use rights in the name of piracy prevention. Ultimately, the entertainment industry hopes to charge consumers for what they now do free of charge.

"The only way they can charge you, they realized, is to first take away your legal right, and then sell that right back to you," says Joe Kraus, president of DigitalConsumer.org, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

If certain antipiracy measures pass in Washington, Mr. Kraus says consumers may have to pay extra to play a CD in more than one player; be no longer able to transfer music from a CD to an MP3 player; and be unable to watch a program recorded onto a DVD on a separate machine.

Allowing consumers access to media, but restricting them from adapting it is similar to teaching people to read but not allowing them to write, says Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University. "To say we must make a device that does not do one of those functions is saying that the device is no longer a computer any more," says Mr. Shirky.

The entertainment industry's greatest concern is that the proliferation of digital technology and high-speed Internet access may let consumers download a movie, for example, and send it to thousands of users before it even exits the theaters.

According to Viant, a Boston-based market-research firm, 400,000 to 600,000 films are illegally downloaded from the Internet each day. "[These films] are innocents in a jungle, ready to be ambushed by anyone," says Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, a trade association in Washington.

Mr. Valenti believes consumers should still be able to record copies of films from television onto VHS and DVD formats. He is primarily concerned with consumers making additional copies of films, even if just for a neighbor.

"It is not legal to make a copy of a DVD now. Everything people are doing legally today, they'll be able to do legally tomorrow," says Valenti.

From the "anything for attention" department, Declan decides to take on reality by making the argument that the DMCA's Chilling Effect on scientific research doesn't really exist.

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, Ed Felten, a scientist who has been personally put on ice more than once clarifies the issue -- along with two other chilled out scientists: Edward D. Lazowska
(University of Washington; Co-chair, Computing Research Association
Government Affairs Committee) and Barbara Simons
(Co-chair, ACM US Public Policy Committee).

Boy that's a relief! And all this time I thought there was a problem with the DMCA! Thanks, Declan, for putting everything into perspective!

Here's the full text of Ed Felten's response in case the link goes bad (full text of declan's story follows below) :

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000020.html#000020

August 19, 2002
Response to Declan's DMCA Piece

Declan McCullagh misses the boat at least twice in his August 19th
column concerning the potential impact on computer science research of
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ["Debunking DMCA myths," c|net
News.Com, http://news.com.com/2010-12-950229.html].

First, the DMCA has two arms: one that prohibits devices that circumvent
copy protection, and one that prohibits acts of circumvention. The
research conducted by Professor Felten and his colleagues took place
prior to the time when the "acts of circumvention" provisions became
effective in October 2000. Thus, these provisions did not apply to that
research. However, there is little doubt in the legal community that
this research, and similar research, would be illegal under the "acts of
circumvention" provisions. Declan fails to recognize this arm of the
DMCA in his column.

Second, the chilling effect of the DMCA cannot be described by the
probability of conviction alone. One must also consider the magnitude
of the exposure if convicted. Because the "acts of circumvention"
provisions of the DMCA were not in effect at the time of the Felten
research, the probability of an adverse judgment was indeed small.
However, a group of highly respected legal consultants told Felten's
employer that the cost of an adverse judgment could be truly enormous.
The combination of these two factors had a very substantial chilling
effect. (It is also the case that two individuals were likely to lose
their jobs if the paper was published. This illustrates the human
dimension of the chilling effect.)

Other issues, on which we shall not elaborate, include the
anti-dissemination provisions of the DMCA, and the civil (in addition to
criminal) provisions.

It is disruptive to the progress of research when scientists must first
consult with attorneys to determine if previously legitimate research
might be in violation of the DMCA. We are happy to agree with Declan
that "The DMCA is ... an egregious law ... and should be unceremoniously
tossed out by the courts."

Edward W. Felten
Princeton University

Edward D. Lazowska
University of Washington; Co-chair, Computing Research Association
Government Affairs Committee

Barbara Simons
Co-chair, ACM US Public Policy Committee

Here's the text of Declan's original piece (that the above is a commentary on):

http://news.com.com/2010-12-950229.html

Debunking DMCA myths
By Declan McCullagh
August 19, 2002, 4:00 AM PT

WASHINGTON--Should researchers really be so worried about the much-reviled Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

If you believe the buzz, you'll conclude that programmers, academics and engineers should be scared witless about being sued under the DMCA. In effect for nearly two years, the law sets protections for the codes that are wrapped around certain copyrighted content such as DVDs and electronic books.

An attorney for the Computing Research Association, representing the computer science departments of some 200 universities, claims that "professors are afraid to study information systems or to publish their research." One researcher in the Netherlands announced that, because of the DMCA, he would not reveal his analysis of Intel's digital video system. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University, and his colleagues postponed a presentation of their co-authored paper for four months after receiving DMCA threats.

Because some of his co-authors' employers nixed the presentation, Felten's delay is understandable. However, the fears of legal action may not all be justified.

Don't get me wrong. The DMCA is both an egregious law and a brazen power grab by Hollywood, the music industry and software companies. It is probably unconstitutional. It creates unnecessary federal crimes, cedes too much authority to copyright holders, and should be unceremoniously tossed out by the courts. (As a bonus, perhaps we could horsewhip its many fans in Congress.)

If activists hope to assail a law like the DMCA, they'll be taken more seriously if they know what they're talking about.
Even so, not all execrable laws are equally loathsome. A careful look at the DMCA shows that, far from prohibiting all security research, the law does not regulate as many activities as people seem to believe. And if activists hope to assail a law like the DMCA, they'll be taken more seriously if they know what they're talking about.

"The risk that a researcher could go to jail for giving a speech at an academic conference is essentially zero," says Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University and a former prosecutor for the Justice Department. In fact, Kerr says, it makes sense to take opponents' claims about the scope of the copyright law with a grain of salt.

"Opponents of the DMCA want to dramatize its effects, so they want people to believe that the law is incredibly broad," Kerr says. "If the public believes that the DMCA is stopping Professor Felten and other researchers from conducting legitimate research, then that is a major victory for opponents of the law."

The fine print
Start with the text of the DMCA itself. It says, "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device (or) component" that is primarily designed to bypass copy-protection technology. Note it does not explicitly prohibit research or published work, and in fact the DMCA explicitly includes limited exemptions for encryption research and reverse-engineering.

Actual violations of the DMCA can be punished with a civil suit for damages or, if done for commercial gain, prosecuted as criminal acts. The Justice Department indicted Dmitry Sklyarov because his employer, ElcomSoft, sold an e-book decoder that he helped to create, triggering the DMCA's criminal penalties.

By contrast, in a legal opinion, the Justice Department stressed that the paper co-authored by Felten provided zero grounds for criminal prosecution. The government even lauded the work as "designed and published to further scientific research."

On the other hand, it's conceivable that the DMCA permits a civil suit against an academic report that includes source code or object code. A company seeking to sue a researcher could argue that the DMCA covers such an act, as eight movie studios did when successfully suing the magazine 2600 for distributing a DVD-descrambling utility.

But R. Polk Wagner, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks that a lawsuit sparked by a paper or presentation would be "a really long stretch."

"I don't think there was ever a realistic chance that Felten would have been liable, and I think all parties knew it from the beginning," Wagner says.

In a report accompanying the DMCA, Congress stressed that research could not be targeted: "The committee believes it is very important to emphasize that (this section) is aimed fundamentally at outlawing so-called 'black boxes' that are expressly intended to facilitate circumvention of technological protection measures for purposes of gaining access to a work."

Code-free zones
If published research does not include working code--which is a vital part of research--the odds of a successful lawsuit rapidly approach zero.

If published research does not include working code, the odds of a successful lawsuit rapidly approach zero.
Peter Jaszi, a law professor at American University, is an ardent DMCA foe who worked to defeat the bill when Congress was considering it. While there are no guarantees, Jaszi says, "it's a bigger reach to say that describing the process by which some kind of hack might be accomplished without providing any kind of code is covered."

So if English-language descriptions of security flaws are permissible, what explains the near-constant state of jitters among security researchers nowadays? (It can't just be Hewlett-Packard's quickly abandoned DMCA threats against security researchers.)

One explanation is an unreasonable fear of the law. Citing DMCA fears, TiVo asked people to stop posting information about how to copy video off the device onto another machine--even though its legal liability is nonexistent. Dug Song, a security expert at network-protection company Arbor Networks, even took his personal Web site offline. For a while, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers required authors writing for its science journals to certify that their papers were DMCA violation-free--until cooler minds prevailed and IEEE recanted.

Exaggerated threats
Another explanation is overly aggressive advocacy by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented Felten. "They succeeded in creating a kind of chilling effect in the scientific community because of the kind of fear-mongering they were engaged in," says Allan Adler, vice president at the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Adler says that because the AAP represents corporations and universities that publish books of computer code, the organization has every reason to worry about restrictions on distributing technical information. Among the AAP's members are MIT Press, Princeton University Press and Stanford University Press. McGraw-Hill, which publishes books such as "C: The Complete Reference," filled with programming examples, is another.

But, Adler says, the AAP isn't concerned about the DMCA. "Such a reading of the statute (to include restrictions on research) is a clear stretch given its constitutional implications and the absence of any supporting legislative history. Moreover, it is a stretch that would not have been lightly countenanced by ardent First Amendment advocates in the publishing industry."

The Register's Thomas Greene put it more bluntly. A recent DMCA alert, Greene said, was a "nonissue which EFF inflated into gargantuan proportions."

For its part, the EFF points to the potential chilling effect of even unfounded DMCA threats, saying that "nastygrams" can halt a lot of legal acts--and most people are not willing to risk being right at the cost of civil fines that swallow their kids' college funds.

"Not every grad student or even professor is going to have easy access to free counsel who can provide a counterweight to the university lawyers," says Lee Tien, an EFF staff attorney. "Even if the paper were published, was it somehow bowdlerized? This is corrosive to scientific discourse."

Any type of publishing carries risks, including possible suits for libel, copyright infringement or invasion of privacy. Security research is no different. Before self-censoring, a researcher should make a sober evaluation of which allegations are likely to stick and show courage by not bowing to spurious threats. Back in 1977, cryptographers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, and lawyers at MIT showed commendable mettle when standing up to threats from the National Security Agency related to their encryption research.

Luckily for them, the threat from the government soon faded. But because the DMCA has not yet been wielded in a court battle against a researcher, anxieties remain.

University of Pennsylvania professor Wagner says that's likely to remain the case for a while: "Copyright owners will kill two birds with one stone by expressing support for good-faith, serious research. It's good PR, and maintains the helpful--to them--vagueness of the current state of the law. I see an uneasy truce in our future."

If this isn't a sure sign of desperation, I don't know what is.
(Also, this year's rash of cyber-haiku is officially being taken a little too far, don't cha think?)

See the story by Michelle Delio for Wired News:
Haiku'da Been a Spam Filter.

Dave Winer has been negatively editorializing and negatively editorializing about Lawrence Lessig's final presentation at OSCON 2002 (which asks: What have you done?) and has continued to personally attack Larry to the point people began emailing Larry about it, asking for him to respond. So he did.

I think Cory Doctorow said it best when he said: "Larry's taken time off from working on one of the most important Supreme Court copyright challenges in the history of America to write this very cogent response..."

We now take you back to some of your regularly scheduled things that really matter in the world...

Here's a clip from Larry's response:

Hey, Dave, peace. Of course I don't mean that you've, literally, done nothing. Obviously and of course, you've done great things for the movement. Nor when I criticized the copyright system was I saying anything about you. (Obviously lots of people use copyright to spread knowledge, rather than hide it. Copyleft is still copyright. And I am, as my writing should make clear, pro-copyright.)

When I said at OSCON that "We've done nothing yet," what I meant (and I thought this was obvious) is that we've done nothing politically yet. We have yet to build a political movement to resist those who would use law to kill what you, and others, built when you, and others, built the net. That claim I still stand behind. There is no political movement that has punished, the way democracies punish, the likes of Berman, et al. And there's no political movement yet that adequately rewards the likes of Boucher, Cannon, and Hank Perritt.

Here's the complete text of the entry in case the link goes bad:

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2002_08.shtml#000384

In Reponse to Dave Winer

I've been hiding for the last few weeks trying to finish the reply brief in the Eldred case. (Check out the briefs on the other side. My favorite is the RIAA's, which begins "The RIAA and its members are dedicated defenders of the First Amendment and vigorously oppose government-sponsored censorship in all its forms." That's apparently the mini-me version of the RIAA. Also check out Bumperactive.com which is giving away free (as in beer) "Free the Mouse" bumperstickers. )

But today I started getting a bunch of frantic emails from people telling me that I needed to respond to Dave Winer. Dave's hopping mad. Apparently, when I asked in my OSCON talk, "What have you done?"and then said "We've done nothing," Dave thought I was literally saying he, Dave, has done nothing. He didn't take it well.

Hey, Dave, peace. Of course I don't mean that you've, literally, done nothing. Obviously and of course, you've done great things for the movement. Nor when I criticized the copyright system was I saying anything about you. (Obviously lots of people use copyright to spread knowledge, rather than hide it. Copyleft is still copyright. And I am, as my writing should make clear, pro-copyright.)

When I said at OSCON that "We've done nothing yet," what I meant (and I thought this was obvious) is that we've done nothing politically yet. We have yet to build a political movement to resist those who would use law to kill what you, and others, built when you, and others, built the net. That claim I still stand behind. There is no political movement that has punished, the way democracies punish, the likes of Berman, et al. And there's no political movement yet that adequately rewards the likes of Boucher, Cannon, and Hank Perritt.

You say there "will" be. Great. Here's hoping. But I was talking about what there is -- now, when the worst legislation we've seen so far is being bounced around DC like it's apple pie. Right now we have a culture where the most creative and important builders of freedom in the 21st century have zero political savvy and (so far) zero political effect. Part of the reason for this is good sense: obviously, your talents are for building the technical infrastructure for freedom that we call the Net. But part of the reason is the continuing reign of Declan-like banalities--about how you don't need to waste time getting democracies to protect freedom, that politics can be left to people in dc, that geeks should worry about west coast code not east coast code, etc. (My favorite line from the Declan missive was: "Would you rather see Ian Clarke start a certain-to-be-ignored postcard campaign instead of inventing such a beautifully disruptive technology as Freenet?" Gee, I guess not. And I guess on that reasoning, Ian should also stop going to movies, because if we've got to choose between the next great "beautifully disruptive technology" and movies, well...)

My point is that if this community does not begin to spend at least as much time as it spends watching Hollywood movies fighting Hollywood, or to spend at least as much money as it gives DSL providers on those who fight broad based control, then this extraordinary space that you, Dave, (and I trust you'll agree, some others as well) built will be taken away. Not by superior blogs, and not by witty /. postings. But in the old-fashioned way: through regulators who have been bent by the forces of those who can and do buy Washington.

You say I should stop complaining, and open up a blog. (Man. I knew you were still angry with me that I didn't take you up on your kind offer for free blog space at userland. I'm sorry, Dave.). I say that in addition to blogging, and coding and whatever, we've got to do something that matters to these people who think a blog is a typo. You, or we, or someone has got to get this community to deliver a different kind of message. One that east coast coders can read; one that says: we won't let the freedom we (actually, you, certainly not me) built be regulated away.

How? Here's the simplest thing we could do: identify 2 luddite members of Congress -- one Republican and one Democrat. Organize and defeat them in November. If Congress saw bad ideas cost seats, they'd begin to do something about their bad ideas.

It's one thing to sit at your screen and post rude-ities about how you'll throw them (and me) out (out of where, Dave? userland? Oh no!), and how the revolution will come, and so on. You're right: I'm not old enough to remember the "revolution" of the 60s; just old enough to remember that Nixon was president when the 60s ended. In any case, the revolution will be here only when it leaves your screen, and registers and votes. And about that, I still say "we've done nothing"-- still.

Back to the wisdom of the RIAA ...

Sorry to be away fro so long...meat space took over for a while there....but I'm baaack!

By Frank J. Murray for the Washington Times:
NASA plans to read terrorist's minds at airports.

NASA wants to use "noninvasive neuro-electric sensors," imbedded in gates, to collect tiny electric signals that all brains and hearts transmit. Computers would apply statistical algorithms to correlate physiologic patterns with computerized data on travel routines, criminal background and credit information from "hundreds to thousands of data sources," NASA documents say.

The notion has raised privacy concerns. Mihir Kshirsagar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says such technology would only add to airport-security chaos. "A lot of people's fear of flying would send those meters off the chart. Are they going to pull all those people aside?"

The organization obtained documents July 31, the product of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Transportation Security Administration, and offered the documents to this newspaper.

Here's the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020817-704732.htm

NASA plans to read terrorist's minds at airports
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Airport security screeners may soon try to read the minds of travelers to identify terrorists.

Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify.

Space technology would be adapted to receive and analyze brain-wave and heartbeat patterns, then feed that data into computerized programs "to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat," according to briefing documents obtained by The Washington Times.

NASA wants to use "noninvasive neuro-electric sensors," imbedded in gates, to collect tiny electric signals that all brains and hearts transmit. Computers would apply statistical algorithms to correlate physiologic patterns with computerized data on travel routines, criminal background and credit information from "hundreds to thousands of data sources," NASA documents say.

The notion has raised privacy concerns. Mihir Kshirsagar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says such technology would only add to airport-security chaos. "A lot of people's fear of flying would send those meters off the chart. Are they going to pull all those people aside?"

The organization obtained documents July 31, the product of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Transportation Security Administration, and offered the documents to this newspaper.

Mr. Kshirsagar's organization is concerned about enhancements already being added to the Computer-Aided Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS) system. Data from sensing machines are intended to be added to that mix.

NASA aerospace research manager Herb Schlickenmaier told The Times the test proposal to Northwest Airlines is one of four airline-security projects the agency is developing. It's too soon to know whether any of it is working, he says.

"There are baby steps for us to walk through before we can make any pronouncements," says Mr. Schlickenmaier, the Washington official overseeing scientists who briefed Northwest Airlines on the plan. He likened the proposal to a super lie detector that would also measure pulse rate, body temperature, eye-flicker rate and other biometric aspects sensed remotely.

Though adding mind reading to screening remains theoretical, Mr. Schlickenmaier says, he confirms that NASA has a goal of measuring brain waves and heartbeat rates of airline passengers as they pass screening machines.

This has raised concerns that using noninvasive procedures is merely a first step. Private researchers say reliable EEG brain waves are usually measurable only by machines whose sensors touch the head, sometimes in a "thinking cap" device. "To say I can take that cap off and put sensors in a doorjamb, and as the passenger starts walking through [to allow me to say] that they are a threat or not, is at this point a future application," Mr. Schlickenmaier said in an interview.

"Can I build a sensor that can move off of the head and still detect the EEG?" asks Mr. Schlickenmaier, who led NASA's development of airborne wind-shear detectors 20 years ago. "If I can do that, and I don't know that right now, can I package it and [then] say we can do this, or no we can't? We are going to look at this question. Can this be done? Is the physics possible?"

Two physics professors familiar with brain-wave research, but not associated with NASA, questioned how such testing could be feasible or reliable for mass screening. "What they're saying they would do has not been done, even wired in," says a national authority on neuro-electric sensing, who asked not to be identified. He called NASA's goal "pretty far out."

Both professors also raised privacy concerns.

"Screening systems must address privacy and 'Big Brother' issues to the extent possible," a NASA briefing paper, presented at a two-day meeting at Northwest Airlines headquarters in St. Paul, Minn., acknowledges. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional police efforts to use noninvasive "sense-enhancing technology" that is not in general public use in order to collect data otherwise unobtainable without a warrant. However, the high court consistently exempts airports and border posts from most Fourth Amendment restrictions on searches.

"We're getting closer to reading minds than you might suppose," says Robert Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland and spokesman for the American Physical Society. "It does make me uncomfortable. That's the limit of privacy invasion. You can't go further than that."

"We're close to the point where they can tell to an extent what you're thinking about by which part of the brain is activated, which is close to reading your mind. It would be terribly complicated to try to build a device that would read your mind as you walk by." The idea is plausible, he says, but frightening.

At the Northwest Airlines session conducted Dec. 10-11, nine scientists and managers from NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., proposed a "pilot test" of the Aviation Security Reporting System.

NASA also requested that the airline turn over all of its computerized passenger data for July, August and September 2001 to incorporate in NASA's "passenger-screening testbed" that uses "threat-assessment software" to analyze such data, biometric facial recognition and "neuro-electric sensing."

Northwest officials would not comment.

Published scientific reports show NASA researcher Alan Pope, at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., produced a system to alert pilots or astronauts who daydream or "zone out" for as few as five seconds.

The September 11 hijackers helped highlight one weakness of the CAPPS system. They did dry runs that show whether a specific terrorist is likely to be identified as a threat. Those pulled out for special checking could be replaced by others who do not raise suspicions. The September 11 hijackers cleared security under their own names, even though nine of them were pulled aside for extra attention.

Experts are still trying to find out the exact cause and origin (the best guess at this point is "caused from animals released into the wild after nutritional testing in Colorado in 1965"), but the final conclusion is the same: our nation's deer has been infected with Chronic Wasting Disease, a disease similar to Mad Cow -- both are variations of "Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy" -- weird diseases that aren't viral or bacterial yet can still fold protiens and cause ruptures in infected brain cells.

But all of that is just a really complicated way of saying: DON'T EAT ANY DEER MEAT FOR THE NEXT 5 OR 10 YEARS OR UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

Who is to Blame for Mad Deer?
by Brian McCombie for the Progressive.

Here's the text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.progressive.org/August%202002/mcco0802.html

August 2002

Who is to Blame for Mad Deer?

by Brian McCombie

E-Mail This Article

The helicopter rises up over the ridge line, the noise of the rotors scattering the targets below. But the snipers in the doorway already have their scoped, high-powered rifles locked in, and the bullets fly until the targets pitch forward, kicking and writhing in their death throes.

The latest battlefield description from Afghanistan? No. It's the next battlefield from the rolling, wooded hills near Madison, Wisconsin. The snipers are employees of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The targets? White-tailed deer, potential carriers of a deadly disease that may also infect people. It's called Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), and it's steadily spreading across North America.

"CWD clearly originated in northeastern Colorado and now has ended up spreading far and wide into many states and two Canadian provinces," writes John Stauber, a Madison, Wisconsin, activist and co-author of Mad Cow U.S.A. (Common Courage, 1997), which examines England's Mad Cow nightmare and whether it could happen here.

The disease, he claims, is traveling faster and more effectively than nature could ever accomplish. He suspects this is due to the interstate transportation of game farm animals. And he blames the expansion of the disease on the game farm industry and state agricultural agencies that act more as game farm patrons than as regulators.

The outbreak is causing near hysteria in rural Wisconsin. The state plans to kill as many as 50,000 deer in the south-central part of the state, and deer hunters everywhere are left to wonder whether their venison is safe to eat. Research and anecdotal evidence suggests it is not. And that's scary news for the fourteen million deer hunters around the country.

Both Mad Cow and Chronic Wasting Disease are kinds of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE). These diseases aren't viral or bacterial, yet somehow they transform or "fold" proteins in brain cells called prions. When enough infected prions deposit themselves in the brain, microscopic ruptures form in the brain cells. Prior to death, behavioral changes become apparent.

As the disease progresses, infected cattle become very agitated, kicking violently with no provocation. They also have trouble eating and swallowing, and usually lose weight. Similarly, deer with Chronic Wasting Disease stop eating. Their resulting emaciated state gives the disease its name. They also shy away from fellow animals, begin to slobber uncontrollably, and walk in circles.

As with all TSEs, Chronic Wasting Disease has no cure and is always fatal. The only way to test for it in elk and cattle is to kill them and examine brain samples under a microscope. A live test for deer was recently developed using a tonsil biopsy, but it's not yet clear how accurate this is.

The human version of TSE is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (pronounced Croytz-feld Yawkob). People with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease experience symptoms similar to Alzheimer's, including memory loss and depression, followed by rapidly progressive dementia and death usually within a year. While Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is rare (humans literally have a one-in-a-million chance of getting it), over the last few years three young deer hunters (from Utah, Oklahoma, and Maine) died of the illness.

Those deaths sparked an investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, largely because the three hunters were younger than thirty, which is extremely rare for Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (sixty-eight is the median age for deaths resulting from the illness). While it found no connection to Chronic Wasting Disease-infected venison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also had no way to test deer these hunters had already consumed. The agency did kill and test some deer where the victims of the disease had hunted. All the animals tested negative. There was evidence, though, that all the hunters were exposed to elk from Colorado or Wyoming, possibly from areas where Chronic Wasting Disease is prevalent. However, it was impossible for center investigators to know if those particular elk were infected.

Dr. Thomas Pringle thinks it's very likely that Chronic Wasting Disease can harm people. A molecular biologist who for five years covered TSE diseases for Sperling Biomedical Foundation in Oregon, Pringle notes that game agencies in Colorado and Wyoming have spent the last two decades assuring hunters there was no scientific proof that anyone had ever died from eating Chronic Wasting Disease-tainted venison. Yet, Pringle says, the research on Chronic Wasting Disease's potential human health risks is virtually nonexistent. He contends these agencies took their position to protect a multibillion dollar industry that revolves around deer and elk hunting.

The research that does exist isn't encouraging. In September 2000, the European Molecular Biology Organization published a study that found that deer prion materials infected with Chronic Wasting Disease converted human prion materials in test tubes at very low rates. "Chronic Wasting Disease and [Mad Cow conversions happened] at about the same rate, in this proxy test, for humans," Pringle observes, and says similar tests alerted British scientists that Mad Cow beef could potentially infect people. To date, more than 100 people have died from a Mad Cow-derived form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

In early April 2002, Byron Caughey, who directed the European Molecular Biology Organization research, told a Wisconsin newspaper that while the risk of people contracting infection from a Chronic Wasting Disease deer is probably low, "it's not a risk I'd want to take." The head of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Darrell Bazzell, publicly admitted his agency couldn't guarantee that meat from deer infected with Chronic Wasting Disease was 100 percent safe to eat, leading one Milwaukee food bank to stop accepting venison.

The epicenter of Chronic Wasting Disease is the Foothills Wildlife Research Facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, operated by the state's Department of Wildlife. In the mid-1960s, the Department of Wildlife ran a series of nutritional studies on wild deer and elk, releasing them when various projects were completed. Soon after the studies began, however, Foothills deer and elk began dying from a mysterious disease. It was not identified as Chronic Wasting Disease until 1980.

The Foothills facility also held a number of sheep with scrapie, the sheep form of TSE, which has existed in North America since 1947, and which Pringle thinks was transferred into the deer and elk from contact with the sheep. He believes Chronic Wasting Disease "must be an extremely virulent strain" to jump the species barrier.

"That's the theory," says Michael Miller, a veterinarian and Chronic Wasting Disease expert at the Foothills facility. Yet he also says it's possible the disease existed naturally in wild deer and elk, and infected animals were brought into Foothills for nutritional studies and began spreading the illness among the closely confined animals.

In 1981, the first wild animal (an elk) with Chronic Wasting Disease was found in Larimer County, Colorado, near the Foothills facility, and the disease moved out into northeastern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming. Today, the disease is found in more than 15,000 square miles of Colorado alone. However, testing by the Colorado Department of Wildlife in the 1980s found Chronic Wasting Disease at under 1 percent in elk and 2 percent or less for deer. But the rate of infection picked up speed in the mid-1990s. Pockets in Colorado today have deer at 7 to 8 percent infection rates, while 15 percent of the deer in Larimer County have tested positive for Chronic Wasting Disease.

In 1996, an elk at a Saskatchewan game farm was found to have the disease. By 2001, the province had twenty-nine game farms under quarantine, and eventually nearly 8,000 elk were slaughtered, with more than 100 testing positive for Chronic Wasting Disease.

"We traced back all the Chronic Wasting Disease exposures to a single elk from South Dakota," says Dr. George Luterbach, chief veterinarian for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. That elk arrived in the province in 1989 and died in 1990. Chronic Wasting Disease was eventually found on the South Dakota farm, and Luterbach thinks an animal from there infected the Saskatchewan game farm, which then bought and sold elk, seeding the disease into other operations. Citing Canada's privacy act, Luterbach won't release the name of the South Dakota farm.

The year 2000 also saw Saskatchewan record its first wild deer with Chronic Wasting Disease, followed the next year by two more. Darrel Rowledge, director of the Alliance for Public Wildlife, a conservation group based in Calgary, says, given that Chronic Wasting Disease is virtually indestructible (disinfectants and ultra-high temperatures don't prevent transmission) and always fatal, historical and scientific records should reveal its presence in North America before the 1960s. They don't, so Rowledge, like Stauber, blames game farms for transporting the disease. "Scientists knew that privatization, domestication, and commercialization of wildlife was going to cause horrendous disease problems," he says. But in many state legislatures and agricultural agencies, "There was this presumption that [game farmers] should be allowed to exist until it was proven that they were doing something wrong."

Chronic Wasting Disease was also discovered on game farms in Alberta, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and South Dakota from 1997 to 2001. By the time Wisconsin announced its problem, Nebraska and South Dakota had infected wild deer, too.

But Wisconsin is arguably in the most dire straits. Elk appear the least susceptible to Chronic Wasting Disease, with mule deer (a western cousin of white-tails) next in line. All the evidence suggests that white-tailed deer most easily contract and spread the illness. The exact route of infection between animals isn't known, but Miller says casual contact passes the disease. This could include deer feeding together, touching noses, or stepping in each others' feces and urine.

Most deer in Colorado and Wyoming are mule deer, very thinly dispersed (usually fewer than ten animals per square mile), and much less sociable than white-tails. But Wisconsin has an estimated 1.6 million white-tails, often at seventy or more per square mile, and in frequent contact. Pringle thinks Chronic Wasting Disease could rip through the deer population east of the Mississippi with virtually nothing to stop it.

In February, Wisconsin reported that three deer killed by hunters the previous fall had Chronic Wasting Disease, its first appearance east of the Mississippi River. After further testing found another fifteen deer with Chronic Wasting Disease approximately twenty miles west of Madison, the Department of Natural Resources announced it would try to eradicate all the deer (estimated at more than 25,000) in the 360-square-mile area, figuring fewer deer will slow the spread of the disease. The Department of Natural Resources began giving away free hunting permits this June, vowing a near-continuous hunt in the fall. The state legislature and the governor also gave the agency the legal right to shoot deer from roads and, if necessary, from helicopters.

The Resources Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives held Chronic Wasting Disease hearings in mid-May, and Wisconsin Governor Scott McCallum, who had asked the federal government for $18.5 million to fight the disease, testified that Chronic Wasting Disease could destroy Wisconsin's wildlife and hunting heritage. While Wisconsin Congressmen chimed in supportively, not everyone was a booster.

Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington, asked McCallum about a 1998 Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources memo on Chronic Wasting Disease-exposed elk coming onto Wisconsin game farms. Why hadn't Wisconsin taken more precautions to keep out the disease? he asked. McCallum insisted state agencies had taken the appropriate steps, but Inslee doesn't buy it.

"There were at least two specific instances where other states had informed Wisconsin that Chronic Wasting Disease-infected [or exposed] herds had sent elk to Wisconsin," Inslee says. "Even in light of this, Wisconsin didn't require mandatory testing and inspection of game farms."

"It's important to note that there's never been a case in Wisconsin of Chronic Wasting Disease in an elk ranch or game farm," says Henry Kriegel of a Montana public relations firm that represents a large game farm association. Wisconsin's discovery of Chronic Wasting Disease in wild deer, he argues, has "become an opportunity for those who oppose game farming to get media attention and create leverage for their position against game farming."

The first part of Kriegel's statement is true. Yet he doesn't reveal the whole picture.

For example, the voluntary monitoring plan had only forty of the state's 272 elk farmers signed up by the summer of 2000, and just eighty by May 2002. Wisconsin's 570 deer farmers ignored the voluntary program almost entirely.

Flaws with no mandatory testing were apparent in October 2001, after Colorado discovered a Chronic Wasting Disease outbreak on a number of game farms. At that point, 450 elk had been shipped to game farms in other states, including nineteen to Wisconsin. The Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection either quarantined or killed and tested these elk, except for two elk which the department wasn't able to locate. They had died before the investigation, and no one is sure where the carcasses are. A third carcass was recovered, but it was so decomposed that a brain sample couldn't be taken.

Game farm regulations concerning Chronic Wasting Disease vary by state, but in the past someone could import nearly any animal as long as it had a health certificate. That process could find detectable diseases like bovine tuberculosis, but did little for the nontestable Chronic Wasting Disease.

Once a state finds Chronic Wasting Disease, though, the whole game changes. South Dakota and Nebraska, for example, now require game farms to import animals only from operations certified as Chronic Wasting Disease-free for at least five years. Wisconsin put such a regulation into effect following its discovery of the outbreak.

Many states recently closed their borders to elk or deer from states with Chronic Wasting Disease. But, as with much of the regulatory framework surrounding game farms, this was done only after years of interstate trade in game farm animals.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in September 2001, declared a Chronic Wasting Disease emergency nationwide and announced its intention to wipe out the disease. With agriculture its regulatory focus, though, the department's efforts are concentrated on the game farm industry, not the spread of the disease in the wild. Among its initiatives is to provide indemnity monies (about $3,000 per elk) to game farms found with Chronic Wasting Disease where the standard management procedure is euphemistically called "depopulation." That is, slaughtering all the animals.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture took a more proactive approach this spring, actually buying up the stock of fifteen game farms in Colorado, even though no Chronic Wasting Disease was ever found in these facilities. The department then "depopulated" them to the tune of approximately 1,200 elk.

No word yet if game farms in other places with Chronic Wasting Disease, like Wisconsin, will now be bought up, too, or if the Department of Agriculture will also try to eradicate Chronic Wasting Disease in the wild--or if it can.

In most states, game farms are regulated by agriculture departments, though that wasn't always the case. In Wisconsin, for example, the Department of Natural Resources oversaw game farms until the mid-1990s, when the state legislature and then-Governor Tommy Thompson shifted responsibility to the Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection, a move the game farmers applauded.

Rowledge says these regulatory shifts across the United States weren't accidental. In the 1970s, more and more potential game farmers wanted to set up operations so they could sell elk velvet (the soft material that peels off newly formed antlers, which is marketed as a nutritional supplement and aphrodisiac), host "canned" hunts where animals are shot inside these farms, and market elk meat.

Despite tall fences, game farms have a well-documented history of captive and wild animals intermingling. For state wildlife biologists, the big concern was game farms bringing in diseases. "Whenever you move an animal," Rowledge says, "you're moving all the diseases and parasites the animal has in it and on it. You have no choice."

So state wildlife agencies generally opposed these farms. "When there was resistance," Rowledge says, "the game farmers sought to put themselves under the jurisdiction of bureaucracies that were friendly to their ideas."

Stauber thinks the federal government must step in with an eradication program or Chronic Wasting Disease will expand even further across the continent.

"If I'm right, we've got a hell of a crisis on our hands," he says. "My hope is that growing public outrage over Chronic Wasting may light a fire under the feds to address a problem they've ignored for a decade and a half."
Brian McCombie is a freelance writer based in Marshfield, Wisconsin. He specializes in wildlife and environmental issues.

Nat Hentoff explains it all for the Progressive:

The Terror of Pre-Crime

Keep in mind the massive, pervasive electronic surveillance--with minimal judicial supervision under the USA Patriot Act--of inferential "pre-crime" conversations and messages, both sent and received. Add to that the FBI's power, under the same law, to break into your home or office, with a warrant, while you're not there, and inset "The Magic Lantern" into your computer to record every one of your keystrokes, including those not sent. Then add the Patriot Act's allowing the FBI to command bookstores and libraries to reveal the books bought or read by potential domestic terrorists.

Here's the text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.progressive.org/sept02/hen0902.html

September 2002

Ashcroft Watch Nat Hentoff

The Terror of Pre-Crime

E-Mail This Article

Nat Hentoff photoJohn Ashcroft recently released his guidelines for investigating people he suspects as terrorists, and these guidelines exceed even J. Edgar Hoover's contempt for due process.

Activists particularly--and I expect the term applies to a good many readers of The Progressive--should know what may well be in store for them. On page three of "The Attorney General's Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Terrorism Enterprise Investigations," we are told: "A terrorism enterprise investigation may be initiated when facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that two or more persons are engaged in an enterprise for the purpose of . . . furthering political or social goals wholly or in part through activities that involve force or violence and a federal crime . . ."

Note the use of "reasonably" and "wholly or in part." These insidiously malleable guidelines for terrorism investigations could apply to political action (and the reaction) during demonstrations by environmentalists, anti-globalizationists, animal rights pickets, or union members on strike, as well as pro-lifers trying to talk, and only to talk, to women entering abortion clinics ("obstruction" at clinics can be a federal crime).

The guidelines go on to note that "the 'reasonable indication' standard for commencing a terrorism enterprise investigation is . . . substantially lower than probable cause." It is so low it could be part of the new Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, which envisions the nabbing of "pre-criminals." As The Washington Times puts it, such pre-criminals are convicted "before they ever act on, or, in some cases, are even aware of, their murderous designs."

On page four of the Ashcroft Guidelines: "The nature of the conduct engaged in by a [terrorist] enterprise will justify an inference that the standard [for opening a criminal intelligence investigation] is satisfied, even if there are no known statements by participants that advocate or indicate planning for violence or other prohibited acts." (Emphasis added.)

The Attorney General, furthermore, extends the dragnet to make individuals in a group under suspicion responsible for what other members say or write: "A group's activities and the statements of its members may properly be considered in conjunction with each other. A combination of statements and activities may justify a determination that the threshold standard for a terrorism investigation is satisfied, even if the statements alone or the activities alone would not warrant such a determination." (Emphasis added.)

Also indicating the "pre-crime" mindset of Attorney General Ashcroft is the following paragraph. "While no particular factor or combination of factors is required, considerations that will generally be relevant whether the threshold standard for a terrorism investigation is satisfied includes as noted, a group's statements, its activities, and the nature of potential federal law violations suggested by its statements or its activities." (Emphasis added.)

Keep in mind the massive, pervasive electronic surveillance--with minimal judicial supervision under the USA Patriot Act--of inferential "pre-crime" conversations and messages, both sent and received. Add to that the FBI's power, under the same law, to break into your home or office, with a warrant, while you're not there, and inset "The Magic Lantern" into your computer to record every one of your keystrokes, including those not sent. Then add the Patriot Act's allowing the FBI to command bookstores and libraries to reveal the books bought or read by potential domestic terrorists.

You may now appreciate the prophecy of Senator Frank Church--who was instrumental in exposing the constitutional crimes of J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro operation--when he said in 1975 that future government intelligence capabilities could "at any time be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left--such is the capacity to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter." And that was before the omnivorous, permeable Internet. The Web can be a spider web.

Senator Church, referring to "potential" enemies of the state, warned: "There would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know."

There is still time to fight back.
Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Village Voice, Legal Times, Editor&Publisher, and The Progressive.

Like this one:

is what the Internet is all about.

A friend of mine was recently hassled off of EBay for selling his Star Wars Holiday Special VCDs and video tapes. I think I'll buy a bunch for this year's no-brainer holiday gift. (You know -- those last-minute gifts that anyone will love for the people you always forget.)

The Luke Skywalker/Miss Piggy photo above is actually from a Star Wars Muppet Special that comes free with all PayPal orders for the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Fresh off the presses and ready for you to fax your reps in (let's say) 15 seconds.
(Maybe 30 seconds if you have to look up your zipcode.)

I think we can all agree that the future of Internet Webcasting is worth 30 seconds.

Thanks!

Contact your Representative and Senators to SAVE INTERNET RADIO!

MP3s not source of music industry woes, by Jack Kapika for The Globe and Mail.

Forrester's latest study, released Tuesday, says that consumers need a "Music Bill of Rights" to protect their right to get tunes over the Internet.

The five major international record companies, through their trade organization, called the Recording Industry Association of America, have been blaming a 15-per-cent drop in record sales over the past two years on Net-based file-swapping services, starting with Napster.

In reality, other factors led to the drop in revenue, Forrester said: the economic recession and competition from surging video-game and DVD sales.

"There is no denying that times are tough for the music business, but not because of downloading," Forrester's principal analyst, Josh Bernhoff, said. "Based on surveys of 1,000 on-line consumers, we see no evidence of decreased CD buying among frequent digital music consumers."

...The road ahead will be rough, the Forrester study cautioned. The record companies will spend the next two years struggling as they try to deliver digital music while testing out various technologies and legal moves to stop people from swapping the songs.

But by 2005, Forrester predicts that the five big labels will endorse a standard download contract that supports burning and a greater range of devices.

That will lead to soaring sales as finding content becomes effortless and impulse buying sets in. Labels will make content available on equal terms to all distributors, while on-line retailers become hubs for downloading.

By 2007, the new business model should generate 17 per cent of the sales in the music business, Forrester predicts.

Full text of article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/front/RTGAM/20020813/gtmusic

POSTED AT 6:24 PM EDT Tuesday, August 13
space
MP3s not source of music industry woes: Study
space


space Advertisement
space

By JACK KAPICA
Globe and Mail Update

The record industry has it wrong: Swapping music MP3s is not the cause of the industry's woes, but it may be the cure.

That conclusion comes from Forrester Research, an emerging-technology research firm, and flatly contradicts what the record executives are saying.

In fact, Forrester's latest study, released Tuesday, says that consumers need a "Music Bill of Rights" to protect their right to get tunes over the Internet.

The five major international record companies, through their trade organization, called the Recording Industry Association of America, have been blaming a 15-per-cent drop in record sales over the past two years on Net-based file-swapping services, starting with Napster.

In reality, other factors led to the drop in revenue, Forrester said: the economic recession and competition from surging video-game and DVD sales.

"There is no denying that times are tough for the music business, but not because of downloading," Forrester's principal analyst, Josh Bernhoff, said. "Based on surveys of 1,000 on-line consumers, we see no evidence of decreased CD buying among frequent digital music consumers."

Moreover, the Forrester paper predicts that music downloads will become big business, with sales reaching more than $2-billion (U.S.) by 2007. But it adds that the big surge in sales will happen only after 2005, when the record companies unite in their efforts to sell music together.

Under the analyst's proposed Music Bill of Rights, people will pay for the music they download, and will be happy to do so. It says that consumers must be able to find music from any label, not just two or three. They also want the right to control their music by burning it onto CDs or by copying it onto an MP3 player.

Finally, consumers will have the right to demand the ability to pay by the song or by the album, not just via the subscription services now offered by such experiments as Pressplay, MusicNet, FullAudio, and Emusic.

"We call this set of features — which any paid music service must meet to satisfy customers — the Music Bill Of Rights," Mr. Bernhoff said.

The road ahead will be rough, the Forrester study cautioned. The record companies will spend the next two years struggling as they try to deliver digital music while testing out various technologies and legal moves to stop people from swapping the songs.

But by 2005, Forrester predicts that the five big labels will endorse a standard download contract that supports burning and a greater range of devices.

That will lead to soaring sales as finding content becomes effortless and impulse buying sets in. Labels will make content available on equal terms to all distributors, while on-line retailers become hubs for downloading.

By 2007, the new business model should generate 17 per cent of the sales in the music business, Forrester predicts.

The company painted a picture in which big song hits will prompt people to download them directly to their cellphones, portable players or PCs. Artists will also embrace the Internet and sign downloading rights over to their labels, it said.

Ed Felten has started a new Freedom-to-Tinker Blog to raise awareness about the DMCA's negative impact on education and innovation.

In case you haven't heard, Creative Commons has released a metadata draft.

There's also a Mailing list if you're interested in following the discussion.

So far Ben Hammersley has implemented the schema in mod_cc, and Kevin Burton has implemented it in Mod_Reference and Mod_Subscription.

The list keeps growing and growing.

Let's think of a way that we can demonstrate the value of keeping these college stations open. Keep those URLs coming!

Latest additions:

Radio K - University of Minnesota, KUOM -- (http://radiok.org/)

Foothill College, KFJC-FM -- (http://www.kfjc.org)

Santa Monica College, Los Angeles, KCRW --(http://www.kcrw.org)

O'Reilly Network: Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002

Andromeda:

It looks like it wants to make the web a PHP-based MP3 player. Great idea!
(Thanks, Cory)

Lawrence Lessig on the future of patents (or lack thereof):

Who Should Own What?, by Todd Datz.

Also of particular interest is this mention of the MP3 patent, which media player developers will need to keep on radar.

That's the one that's most obvious and direct. Another threat is patents that we've been seeing recently, from the absurd British Telecom patent on hyperlinking to the way in which the MP3 patent is now being deployed against people who build players or record MP3s and to the way patents have been used in standards-making processes. You have these groups that get together to build a standard that other people can use and adopt. Secretly, one of the participants in the standards-making process early on files a patent for the basic idea. Nobody knows the patent has been filed because you don't have to reveal that information. Once the standard is out there and adopted, the company comes forward and says, "I have a patent on that standard and you've got to pay me to use it."

Here's the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.darwinmag.com/read/080102/lessig.html

LAWRENCE LESSIG knows how to stir things up. A professor at the Stanford Law School, he is also the founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. His latest book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, published in 2001, details Lessig's view that commercial forces are threatening to close off the once-free and open Internet by attempting to control the software code and content. Such ideas have stirred up animosity among patent lawyers.

Todd Datz of Darwinmag.com spoke with Lessig about patents and the Internet earlier this year.

DARWIN: If the purpose of patents is to spur innovation that would otherwise not occur, how well does the present system serve that goal?

Lawrence Lessig: My objection has been that we have launched into this fairly massive regulation of the innovation process without any [clear evidence] that it will do good. As I say in my book, where are the Republicans when you need them? Did anyone do any impact statements to show that this kind of regulation for a crucial part of our economy was needed or would actually be productive?

Companies are now patenting everything under the sun. In fact, companies that don't keep up with the competition are at a disadvantage.

It's impossible to imagine people sacrificing themselves in order to create a world without patents. It is a rational thing in this world to patent everything under the sun—especially because it's not just legitimate competitors in the innovative process who will come and threaten you down the road. It's also "patent thugs" who seek any way they can to hold up legitimate innovators through the use of these patent claims. Given their ability to get an injunction against the release of a product or muck up an IPO, that's quite a significant cost.

I think there's got be real legislative reform. I've argued that during this period we ought to permit people to patent what they want but forbid the offensive use of patents in the productive process. People can build up their claims of what property they've got.

A second kind of change would be just to lower the stakes by reducing the term of certain kinds of patents, such as software and business method patents, as Jeff Bezos [CEO of Amazon.com] has argued. I can't remember whether it's two or three years, but it's a radically shorter term, which I think would be fine. Another way to lower the stakes would be to remove the use of injunctions as a tool for enforcing the patent. If you've got a patent that covers some sort of technology, especially software, and you want to enforce that right, then you can seek damages for the violation of the patent, but not resort to this nuclear weapon of an injunction to stop the production process from going forward.

Do there need to be changes made in the patent office?

Though I'm a critic of the patent system, I'm not a critic of the patent office. I'm not saying I think they do a great job. I think, in fact, they do a bad job. But they do a bad job because they're wildly undersupported, underfunded. If we're going to manage this kind of Soviet system of picking and choosing which innovations are going to be allowed in this system, at least the Soviet system ought to have the resources to do it correctly. And patent examiners shouldn't be under extraordinary pressure to process these applications in an extremely quick way, which inevitably is going to lead to bad patents being issued.

Can you talk a little bit about software and business method patents and why you think they're out of control?

First, all of this patenting behavior took off after it was encouraged by the Federal Circuit court. At that time [1998], all the money in the world was in software and dotcoms. There was great incentive to find a tool to buy or bully your way into that market. That tool was the patent. All sorts of money was spent on patents in order to tell dotcom billionaires, "your business is toast unless you pay us money."

Second, whenever patents enter a new field (one that most people didn't think was open to patent behavior), there's obviously going to be a land grab. There's lots of stuff to claim, especially when that field is undergoing significant innovation. It's a great opportunity for taking ideas and beginning to express them in patents. Furthermore, the traditional inhibitor on the issuance of patents is the patent office's reliance on "prior art" [the history of innovation in a particular field]. Prior art for software and business method patents is almost nonexistent in the patent office. They didn't spend the last 30 years gathering the data they would need in order to establish something as prior art. They don't even know when something is not sufficiently novel to justify a patent.

This is another stupidity of the system: The legal system does not impose a strong enough requirement on inventors to come forward with prior art. Basically, the rule is you've got to reveal the prior art you know of. But that, of course, creates an incentive for the ostrich effect—put your head in the sand and not make yourself aware of the [prior art] other stuff. That puts all the burden on the patent office. It's a fairly simple legal change to say you've got to come forward with all the prior art that anybody familiar with this field would know of. If inventors had that obligation, and if patents were invalidated on the proof that they didn't come forward with prior art that should have been revealed, then that would ensure that the patent office knew how to do its job. Those are the primary reasons why the system should be afraid it's doing more harm than good.

What is the argument used by those companies that say strong intellectual property rights are necessary on the Internet?

The arguments I've heard are about the need to defend their significant investment for a long period of time before it gets taken by others. It's not an argument well-tuned in the context of the Internet. All of the creative work in the context of software and its implementation to the Internet is how the idea is implemented, not really the idea itself. However, given the way patents function now, they become the patents of ideas and that creates a huge ability to block subsequent deployment of competing systems.

The standard response of any capitalist is to say, "Give me a monopoly or else I won't be able to compete." A standard response of wise government would be to say, "We don't give capitalists monopolies unless they're absolutely necessary, so we'd rather have you compete like hell than give you the power to use the government to stop people from competing against you."

Do you think there will continue to be more disruptors like Napster that sprout up from the cracks, or has the fear of being brought immediately into court served to quash that kind of innovation?

It's clearly having an affect on innovation. Five years ago, when the law was still unsettled, venture capitalists were willing to gather lots of money to fund these innovations. They didn't expect that the first thing that would happen when a company opened its door was a lawsuit from a competitor—primarily from the copyright industry, which was trying to use its power over copyrights to kill you.

The reality now is that every new innovation has got to not only fund a development cycle and fund a marketing cycle, it's got to fund a legal cycle during which you go into court and demonstrate that your new technology should be allowed in the innovative system. In that context, there's an extraordinarily high burden on innovation because the legal system is extremely poor. It's costly and it's inefficient in that it doesn't often produce the right results. It imposes a huge risk on the development process, which translates into a much stifled level of investment by venture capitalists.

What are some of the most pressing threats to the Internet right now?

The stifling of broadband deployment is one extraordinarily important problem to solve. Unfortunately, in my view, it's not going to be solved, but, rather, is going to be exacerbated by the deregulation of the telecom infrastructure. The problem in getting broadband out there and accepted, in part, is caused by overly restrictive IP [intellectual property] laws. As even Michael Powell of the SEC has said, there are 10 million channels but still nothing on. That's because people aren't making content available. They're afraid of piracy, but also they're afraid of competition to their existing business models. Giving them this amount of power over IP contributes to the stifling of broadband deployment.

That's the one that's most obvious and direct. Another threat is patents that we've been seeing recently, from the absurd British Telecom patent on hyperlinking to the way in which the MP3 patent is now being deployed against people who build players or record MP3s and to the way patents have been used in standards-making processes. You have these groups that get together to build a standard that other people can use and adopt. Secretly, one of the participants in the standards-making process early on files a patent for the basic idea. Nobody knows the patent has been filed because you don't have to reveal that information. Once the standard is out there and adopted, the company comes forward and says, "I have a patent on that standard and you've got to pay me to use it."

Has that actually happened?

This is a particular complaint Vint Cerf was describing at a conference in Boulder, Colorado, about two weeks ago. He was describing how patents in the standards-making process are really inhibiting the opportunity to establish uniform and open standards. I see the beginning of discussion of this in "RDF," a standard to enable a description of data to be used for all sorts of Web services. The opportunity for people to begin to assert and threaten patents in this context will significantly chill innovation.

After reading your book, I'm scared to death of the consequences of companies controlling the Internet, as well as the general stifling effect of the surge in patenting on innovation; scared of this notion that "only property matters." Should I be? You even quote Marc Andreessen saying that the innovation age "is over."

I spoke to him late in the process of writing the book. I was both reassured and deeply depressed that essentially everything I was arguing in the book he summarized in a couple of sentences.

Look at the history of innovation in the context of the Internet. The World Wide Web was built not by AOL or Prodigy, but by a researcher in Switzerland. Hotmail was developed by an Indian immigrant. ICQ, which was the beginning of the really persistent instant messaging system, was developed by an Israeli—or rather stolen by an Israeli from his son—and deployed outside the United States and sold to AOL for $400 million.

All of these innovations were enabled by people outside the dominant, powerful industries at the time. They didn't need the permission of those industries to develop and deploy their innovations. That was what Andreessen was talking about. He said there was this window of time when you could become a desktop software maker because of the birth of the Internet. Before the Internet, everybody thought that the industry was dead because they thought software was in the control of Microsoft and other large companies. But the Internet radically transformed that. There was a period of time when an extraordinary explosion of innovation occurred. And once the explosion occurred and people came in to try and change the architecture of the environment, Andreessen says the opportunity for innovation disappeared.

You say that the rules governing the freedom to innovate are best characterized as a constitutional question. Explain what you mean.

The core argument of my book—an argument I've completely failed to get people to see—is that architecture is the politics of the Internet. The architecture of the Internet sets the values and possibilities for the Internet. In that sense, it functions like a constitution functions in a legal system. The Internet's architecture forms the background terms in which people experience opportunity on the Internet, and these are terms that are selected by designers of the network. So it functions like a constitution.

It's like a constitution in a second sense, too. Because the initial values it embraced are extraordinarily important and worth defending, then like a good constitution, they ought to be defended when they are threatened by changes in the environment that undermine its core. It's a metaphor to say it's like a constitution but it is the most significant constituting force in the context of the Internet.

In your opinion, what should be done to protect the freedom of the "Internet commons" from increasing control? What role might government play?

At the physical layer, the government has to take steps to induce much greater competition in the deployment of broadband. It can do that by opening up and ensuring a much broader opportunity for wireless technologies to deliver the last hop to the home. It could fund the deployment of basic infrastructure. If it's a national information superhighway, then we should spend money like we spend on regular highways and make sure it gets deployed in a neutral way. But most importantly, the government needs to architect the Internet's neutrality.

In the context of the content layer, the obvious thing to do is for the government to take steps to weaken the overly strong intellectual property rights. One way to do that is to change the term of IP, so instead of the term being essentially forever, the way it's become, it should be five-year renewable terms for copyrights to a maximum of 75 years, and people should be forced to register and renew their copyrights in order to get the benefit of the government monopoly.

This is a part that's bizarre to me. When I suggest this, copyright holders are outraged at the idea they should have to register and renew their copyrights in order to get the benefit of government protection. You can imagine a system where this registration and renewal only takes as long as it takes to buy a book on Amazon.com—practically nothing. The idea that you can't require people who are getting this very significant government benefit to take a little bit of effort to get that benefit seems crazy. Those steps ought to be taken so stuff doesn't become copyrighted forever in a way that's not even desired by the copyright owner.

There are other more affirmative things. We're building something called the Creative Commons, a kind of IP conservancy that will try to encourage people to donate IP into a conservancy for other people to draw from. Congress could take steps to encourage more of this. That would be a great encouragement to expanding the public domain.

Are there any groups working to lessen the length of copyrights on software? Is Congress aware of the difficult issues regarding this?

I'm not a politician, I just write books and try to make arguments of what I think is true. I just observe that in our system that doesn't seem to be enough. So I'm not really optimistic.

Okay my "to blog" pile is taking up two tables and starting to talk shit about me behind my back...so it's time to just start throwing stuff out there...

And yes I'm still writing my OSCON 2002 weblogs! Thanks for asking!

LinuxTV has the right idea:

Only the access to the source code of our future television sets will guarantee the independence of content and technology. This website is a platform for the development of open source software for digital television (DVB, DTV) receivers, Linux DVD players and tools to stream audio and video to the net.

Bush vetoed a Bill last week that would have given hundreds of millions of badly needed dollars to US Firefighters, and then expected them to be smiling when he showed up a week later to "honor" them in front of the cameras.

The International Association of Firefighters wants the Shrub to know that he can't have it both ways. Our nation's firefighters needed that money badly -- and how can Bush treat them like this, while smiling to their face? (After so many risked their lives and, according to the firefighters, died unnecessarily, as a direct result of outdated radio equipment (and other outdated equipment) that made it more difficult to get people out of the building quickly during 911.)

See the story by Helen Kennedy for the NY Daily News:

Firefighters blast Bush (May boycott 9/11 tribute after veto of funding bill).

The International Association of Firefighters caused a furor yesterday by voting unanimously to consider boycotting President Bush's October speech honoring the 343 FDNY personnel who died in New York.

The umbrella group for the nation's firefighter unions is furious that Bush cut $340 million in funding last week, some of which would have improved outdated radio equipment - a key reason so many firefighters didn't hear warnings to get out of the twin towers Sept. 11.

"President Bush, you are either with us or against us. You can't have it both ways," said the association's general president, Harold Schaitberger. "Don't lionize our fallen brothers in one breath and then stab us in the back."

Bush killed a $5.1 billion spending bill Tuesday that also contained money for veterans, AIDS prevention, domestic security, Israel and health testing for Ground Zero workers.

Virginia firefighter Michael Mohler, who made the boycott motion Wednesday night at the association's convention in Las Vegas, accused Bush of standing with firefighters only for the cameras.

here is the full text of the story in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/story/11353p-10746c.html

Firefighters blast Bush

May boycott 9/11 tribute after veto of funding bill

By HELEN KENNEDY
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON - The International Association of Firefighters caused a furor yesterday by voting unanimously to consider boycotting President Bush's October speech honoring the 343 FDNY personnel who died in New York.

The umbrella group for the nation's firefighter unions is furious that Bush cut $340 million in funding last week, some of which would have improved outdated radio equipment - a key reason so many firefighters didn't hear warnings to get out of the twin towers Sept. 11.

"President Bush, you are either with us or against us. You can't have it both ways," said the association's general president, Harold Schaitberger. "Don't lionize our fallen brothers in one breath and then stab us in the back."

Bush killed a $5.1 billion spending bill Tuesday that also contained money for veterans, AIDS prevention, domestic security, Israel and health testing for Ground Zero workers.

Virginia firefighter Michael Mohler, who made the boycott motion Wednesday night at the association's convention in Las Vegas, accused Bush of standing with firefighters only for the cameras.

"We will work actively to not grant him another photo op with us," he said.

The motion to consider boycotting appearances with Bush - including his Oct. 6 tribute in Washington to fallen New York firefighters - was unanimously adopted.

The firefighters also cheered a motion to return a videotaped speech Bush had sent the convention and then discussed an FDNY memorial slated for the New York-New York casino.

Tom Butler, spokesman for New York's Uniformed Firefighters Association, said news of the vote had not reached union members, many of whom were out rallying for raises yesterday.

Bush said he killed the spending bill because he opposed unrelated funding added by the Senate and said he would sign a stripped-down bill.

Among the included items he repeatedly ridiculed was $2 million to the Smithsonian Institution for a new building "to house worms and bugs."

But the Smithsonian says the specimen collection - currently preserved in 730,000 gallons of highly flammable alcohol blocks from the White House - must be moved. Members of both parties support the move, and Bush's own budget had requested it.

A week or two ago, the FBI got freaked out about wireless networks.

Their conclusions were confused, at best. Luckily Paul Holman, Theodore Pham,
Merin McDonell, and Skyler Fox had a nice mailing list thread to help put everything into perspective.

Thanks to Paul, Theodore, Merin, and Skyler for giving me permission to publish this email exchange in-tact.

(Theodore Pham) Say I forget my wallet containing my credit cards in a restaurant. Wardriving/warchalking is essentially posting a sign saying my wallet is sitting their out in the open and it contains credit cards. That signage in and of itself is NOT THEFT. But the moment someone uses my credit cards without my specific permission IS THEFT. My credit cards should NOT be
considered a public resource just because I FORGOT to put my wallet back in
my pocket out of public access.

(Merin McDonell) I think your wallet analogy is wrong. I think an apple tree is better. You have a nice big apple tree in your back yard and the apples fall in your neighbors yard and in the alley. Is it a crime if people eat the apples that
are on the ground and off your property? If you DON'T want anyone to eat any
of the apples that grew on your tree, if for some reason you need all 347
apples, you could trim your tree so that all the branches end right on your
property line and all of the apples would fall in your yard. Done.

Original letter sent out by FBI

From: Bill Shore [mailto:billshore@fbi.gov]
Sent: Monday, July 08, 2002 9:56 AM
To: billshore@fbi.gov
Subject: Wireless networks - Warchalking/Wardriving

It has recently been brought to my attention that
individuals/groups have been actively working in the Pittsburgh area as
well as other areas of the United States including Philadelphia, and
Boston, and the rest of the world for that matter, to identify locations
where wireless networks are implemented. This is done by a technique
identified as "Wardriving." Wardriving is accomplished by driving around
in a vehicle using a laptop computer equipped with appropriate hardware
and software http://www.netstumbler.com/ to identify wireless networks
used in commercial and/or residential areas. Upon identifying a wireless
network, the access point can be marked with a coded symbol, or
"warchalked." This symbol will alert others of the presence of a
wireless
network. The network can then be accessed with the proper equipment
and
utilized by the individual(s) to access the Internet, download email, and
potentially compromise your systems. In Pittsburgh, the individuals are
essentially attempting to map the entire city to identify the wireless
access points, see here,

http://mapserver.zhrodague.net/cgi-
bin/mapserv?mode=browse&layer=all&layer=q
uadsheets&layer=borough&layer=roads&layer=ap&zoomdir=1&zoomsize=2&imgxy=458+
165&imgext=-80.175489+40.268422+-79.733217+40.621536&map=%2Fmnt%2Fhog%2Fwebs
ites%2Fmapserver%2Fpublic_html%2Fpa%2Fpgh.map&savequery=true&program=%2Fcgi-
bin%2Fmapserv&map_web_imagepath=%2Fmnt%2Fhog%2Fwebsites%2Fmapserver%2Fpublic
_html%2Ftmp%2F&map_web_imageurl=%2Ftmp%2F&img.x=250&img.y=197.

Also, check this article from pghwireless.com,
http://www.pghwireless.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=19

Identifying the presence of a wireless network may not be a
criminal violation, however, there may be criminal violations if the
network is actually accessed including theft of services, interception of
communications, misuse of computing resources, up to and including
violations of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Statute, Theft of
Trade
Secrets, and other federal violations. At this point, I am not aware of
any malicious activity that has been reported to the FBI here in
Pittsburgh, however, you are cautioned regarding this activity if you
have
implemented a wireless network in your business. You are also highly
encouraged to implement appropriate wireless security practices to
protect
your information assets,
http://www.cert.org/research/isw/isw2001/papers/Kabara-31-08.pdf

There are several articles available with additional details
including http://www.warchalking.org as well as
http://www.pghwireless.com. A copy of the coding symbols is
attached in .pdf format. If you notice these symbols at your place of
business, it is likely your network has been identified publicly.

If you believe you may have been compromised or if you have any
questions regarding this activity, you are encouraged to contact the
appropriate law enforcement agency. The FBI office in Pittsburgh and
High
Tech Crimes Task Force can be contacted at 412-432-4000.

Bill Shore
Special Agent
FBI-Pittsburgh
3311 East Carson Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15203
412-432-4395
billshore@fbi.gov

Letter from Paul Holman to Bill Shore

To: billshore@fbi.gov
From: Paul Holman <pablos@shmoo.com>
Subject: [XGEEKS] Wireless networks - Warchalking/Wardriving

Bill,

Blocking public access to a wireless access point is a simple matter
of configuration. While this measure will not provide a great deal
of security, it is enough to stop casual surveillance and abuse of
resources.

As both an active member of community wireless networking
initiatives, and an expert on internet security, I would encourage
the FBI, and all other entities to consider open access points as a
shared resource available to all. Anyone not wishing to share their
resources can easily prevent it using the various controls built into
all wireless access points.

Drawing the line here is both practical and rational. It requires no
further legislation, no technical development, and affords the
greatest flexibility for innovation and exploration of how we can all
benefit from wireless networking technology.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions about this
approach. If you're interested, I'm happy to expand on any aspect of
wireless network security.

Thanks,

pablos.
--
Paul Holman
The Shmoo Group
pablos@shmoo.com
415.420.3806

From: "Theodore Pham" <telamon@roguesolutions.com>
To: <dev@seattlewireless.net>, <billshore@fbi.gov>
Cc: <xgeeks@lists.soma.net>, <tsg@shmoo.com>, <dev@seattlewireless.net>
Subject: [XGEEKS] Re: Wireless networks - Warchalking/Wardriving

With all due respect Paul, I think you are missing the point.

NOT everyone who owns and operates a wireless network has the technical
savvy to understand the implications of the way they configure their
wireless equipment. The rapid growth and popularity of wireless networks
has been a direct result of the dropping prices of equipment and the ease
with which this equipment can be installed.

Being a wireless networking consultant in the Pittsburgh area, and having
experimented with Netstumbler to map out channel usage (for the purposes of
evaluating the feasibility of a shared, potentially commercial, wireless
network) I find that the majority of networks are setup with NO type of
public access blocking AND with the DEFAULT out of the box parameters. As a
reseller of wireless networking equipment, I find most of my customers have
LITTLE TO NO idea that by just plugging one of these boxes into their DSL or
cable line they are making their networks open to the world. They choose
wireless networking for the simplicity and asthetic values.

The fact of the matter is that wireless equipment is connected to some type
of internet connection and that connection is paid for by the owner of the
wireless equipment. I have always been of the opinion that the use of any
resource I have NOT paid for or been given SPECIFIC PERMISSION to use is
THEFT.

Say I forget my wallet containing my credit cards in a restaurant.
Wardriving/warchalking is essentially posting a sign saying my wallet is
sitting their out in the open and it contains credit cards. That signage in
and of itself is NOT THEFT. But the moment someone uses my credit cards
without my specific permission IS THEFT. My credit cards should NOT be
considered a public resource just because I FORGOT to put my wallet back in
my pocket out of public access.

If you want to allow public access to your wireless network, then that is
your choice and I encourage you to post some signage indicating that fact.
And for your sake I would also post some terms of service for those who
would seek to use your wireless network for malicious purposes.

Sincerely,
Theodore Pham
Rogue Solutions

Subject: Re: [XGEEKS] Re: Wireless networks - Warchalking/Wardriving
From: "Merin McDonell" <merin@merin.net>
To: Theodore Pham <telamon@roguesolutions.com>
CC: xgeeks@soma.net

I'm not at all savvy about this kind of technical stuff, so in this case I
feel especially qualified to reply. I'm just a dumb user, however every
program I use has to be configured and you can choose whether or not you
have a password to access it. So...if I were to venture to set up a wireless
network, which I can't believe is so easy to install, I'd be sure to look at
the directions since it is, uh, wireless, and I get the concept that it
doesn't stop at the walls of my house.

I think your wallet analogy is wrong. I think an apple tree is better. You
have a nice big apple tree in your back yard and the apples fall in your
neighbors yard and in the alley. Is it a crime if people eat the apples that
are on the ground and off your property? If you DON'T want anyone to eat any
of the apples that grew on your tree, if for some reason you need all 347
apples, you could trim your tree so that all the branches end right on your
property line and all of the apples would fall in your yard. Done.
______________________________________________________________________
* Merin McDonell * Graphic Designer * 415-826-3500 * mm@merin.net*

From: "skyler fox" <skyler_fox@hotmail.com>
To: <billshore@fbi.gov>
Cc: <xgeeks@lists.soma.net>, <tsg@shmoo.com>
Subject: Re: [XGEEKS] Re: Wireless networks - Warchalking/Wardriving

I find the argument that digital access, and the access to your wallet are
similar, quite confusing. In one case we are talking about a resource that
exists in time(access to the network) and in the other, access to a limited
an irreplaceable resource (your cash). Only in the most remote circumstances
will someone surfing the net on your wireless network translate into any
loss that you would be cognizant of. I understand that people pay money to
have DSL access in their home, I pay the current exorbitant rate myself. But
it would take a herd of hackers to impact the usage I put on the line. In
fact most times during the day, the system is idle. You could make the
argument, which the Telco industry would hate, that communal use of a single
DSL line makes more sense than over-amping a single house.

There is certainly no excuse for a corporate network to be exposed. Any
company that does not control it's network, and computers is guilty of
malfeasance. It would be on the order of not locking the door.

You are right that most people are ignorant of what is necessary to protect
their line, but as we have seen all through the computer revolution, there
is a price to be paid for the power the computer gives you.
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*****

Theodore,

I think you may have dropped this conversation already, but just in
case, I'll complete my discussion here. The crux of our disagreement is
where to draw the line on how you advertise/explain/discover/determine
policy. Based on the current state of the technology, and societal
issues in play, I'm suggesting that we draw the line where it is most
practical. If a wireless network is configured to allow association and
provide an internet connection, then it should be construed as something
intended to do that. You are actually advocating the same thing, but
with a "fail closed" social/legal policy rather than my "fail open"
approach. To make that happen, you want the burden to be on those
running free networks to advertise them as such. The current technology
doesn't cleanly support this, and I prefer the burden to be on those
running closed wireless networks to keep them that way. This is how it
works for web servers, and all the issues about what happens when things
go wrong are covered by legislation/policies/social norms that out of
band from this issue.

Thanks for the discussion, I had been meaning to bring this issue up.

pablos.

On Monday, August 5, 2002, at 09:58 PM, Theodore Pham wrote:
>
> Again, you are confusing access to a resource with LEGAL USE of a
> resource.
> Yes, most web servers are meant to be a public resource and yes some
> block
> access to only authorized individuals. But consider what happens if
> Microsoft tomorrow accidentally posts a portion of the Windows XP source
> code on their website? Are you allowed to use it? Are you allowed to
> incorporate it into your products because you just happen to have gotten
> access to the code? If you park your car on a public road and leave it
> unlocked accidentally, is it legal for me to jump in and drive away
> with it?
> If someone hacks into a online store and posts their credit card
> database on
> the front page of the store, am I allowed to use the credit card
> numbers?
> ACCESS DOES NOT ENTITLE AUTHORIZED USE.
>
> It costs me money to have a SDSL line run into my house. And that SDSL
> line
> and the associated wireless network are a resource I OWN. If I wish to
> leave the whole dang network open for my ease of use, does the network
> still
> belong to me? YES. Does that give you the right to use my property
> without
> first asking me? NO. I might say yes, I'll kindly let you use this.
> Or
> no, I don't want you using my network. But in the end that is my
> decision
> and I don't waive that right just because I choose or forget to put a
> lock
> on it.
>
>> On wireless security:
>>
>> A typical wired network is wildly insecure, adding a wireless access
>> point with all the security features enabled (WEP, MAC auth, etc.)
>> would
>> reduce security. So most APs are put outside a firewall. In this
>> case,
>> association with the AP would provide internet access and nothing more.
>> Surveillance of the network does not require association. In a typical
>> home or office network that has no firewall, adding a wireless AP for
>> convenience without thinking of security will be a liability. I
>> contend
>> that the security implications are not affected by whether users
>> associate and use the network connection. If the AP is unsecured, your
>> network is insecure, and no law can save you.
>
> Yes, not securing your network is a liability to the owner of the
> network.
> I'm not arguing that it isn't.
> I'm not arguing with you over security at all. But your statement is
> that
> ANY resource which IS NOT SPECIFICALLY restricted should become a public
> resource. This is where I think you miss the point. I believe the
> statement should be ANY resource SPECIFICALLY ADVERTISED as public
> should be
> considered a public resource. I don't think my attaching a wireless AP
> to
> my network and choosing NOT to secure or FORGETTING to secure it should
> be
> taken to mean I'm SPECIFICALLY ADVERTISING it as public.
>
>> On fixing security:
>>
>> Wireless networking equipment vendors should be lobbied to fix WEP,
>> implement captive portal (NoCatAuth) functionality, and enable these
>> features by default. Almost all of them have horrible management
>> tools,
>> these should be drastically improved for usability. Organizations
>> concerned about security should learn that the issues on wireless
>> networks are the same as for wired networks, just magnified. The same
>> approach needs to be taken in order to make significant security gains.
>> Use strong authentication and encrypted protocols. WEP doesn't count.
>> VPNs, SSH & SSL do. Anything less will only serve to give users a
>> false sense of security.
>
> I agree. Any organization worried about it's information should take
> the
> precautions to preserve and secure it comensurate with the value of the
> information. But again, I'm not arguing with you over how secure or
> insecure wireless is.
>
>> On free access:
>>
>> When you are walking or driving around, how often do you see a license
>> agreement posted to indicate where you can go? Probably never. You go
>> wherever you want because there are roads and paths that just happen to
>> be accessible. You don't know what is public and what is private land,
>> you just make reasonable guesses. If somebody doesn't want you on
>> their
>> roads, or their property, then they post signs telling you not to go
>> there. Or gates and fences, or walls, maybe even towers with machine
>> guns. It turns out you can drive coast to coast, on almost any
>> continent, without reading a single license agreement that tells you
>> where you can go. You just avoid the ones that tell you where you
>> can't
>> go. I'm fine with that. I'd like to have my internet access work the
>> same way.
>
> How often do you drive through someone's backyard on your way to work?
> Just
> because there isn't a fence there and just because your car is capable
> of
> driving over their lawn, do you? I don't see a sign that says DON'T
> DRIVE
> THROUGH MY LAWN posted, but I don't take that to mean that I can. In
> fact,
> I don't recall every driving on a private road where I haven't done so
> INTENTIONALLY without permission of the owner or without paying a toll.
>
>> Lastly, it is important to understand that the current wireless
>> protocols have no mechanism for communicating their usage policy. The
>> way it works today, you wave your laptop around, connect to a network
>> and see if it works. Prior to that it is impossible to know if it is a
>> free network. Wardriving and Warchalking are legitimate ways to
>> find/test/use free wireless networks and we should keep it that way.
>
> I agree that wardriving and warchalking can be legitimately used to
> find/test/use wireless networks. But I think there must be some
> protocol
> established to contact the owner of the network in question and ask
> their
> permission BEFORE you go and ADVERTISE their network as freely
> accessible.
> I don't own your house, but just because I can see it and take photos
> of it,
> does that mean I can rent it out for a party or place it on the market
> for
> sale? Basically, if you want to use what possibly could be a public
> resource, EXPEND THE EXTRA EFFORT TO FIND OUT IF IT IS REALLY PUBLIC.
>
>> Thanks, pablos.
>>
>> Paul Holman deployed the first SeattleWireless Community Network link
>> <http://www.seattlewireless.net> and is a member of The Shmoo Group of
>> security, crypto & privacy professionals <http://www.shmoo.com>. The
>> Shmoo Group builds AirSnort for demonstrating the limitations of WEP
>> security and created the Global Access Wireless Database (GAWD), the
>> first online database of open wireless access points.
>>
>> On Monday, August 5, 2002, at 06:09 PM, Theodore Pham wrote:
>>
>>> With all due respect Paul, I think you are missing the point.
>>>
>>> NOT everyone who owns and operates a wireless network has the
>>> technical
>>> savvy to understand the implications of the way they configure their
>>> wireless equipment. The rapid growth and popularity of wireless
>>> networks
>>> has been a direct result of the dropping prices of equipment and the
>>> ease
>>> with which this equipment can be installed.
>>>
>>> Being a wireless networking consultant in the Pittsburgh area, and
>>> having
>>> experimented with Netstumbler to map out channel usage (for the
>>> purposes of
>>> evaluating the feasibility of a shared, potentially commercial,
>>> wireless
>>> network) I find that the majority of networks are setup with NO type
>>> of
>>> public access blocking AND with the DEFAULT out of the box parameters.
>>> As a
>>> reseller of wireless networking equipment, I find most of my customers
>>> have
>>> LITTLE TO NO idea that by just plugging one of these boxes into their
>>> DSL or
>>> cable line they are making their networks open to the world. They
>>> choose
>>> wireless networking for the simplicity and asthetic values.
>>>
>>> The fact of the matter is that wireless equipment is connected to some
>>> type
>>> of internet connection and that connection is paid for by the owner of
>>> the
>>> wireless equipment. I have always been of the opinion that the use of
>>> any
>>> resource I have NOT paid for or been given SPECIFIC PERMISSION to use
>>> is
>>> THEFT.
>>>
>>> Say I forget my wallet containing my credit cards in a restaurant.
>>> Wardriving/warchalking is essentially posting a sign saying my wallet
>>> is
>>> sitting their out in the open and it contains credit cards. That
>>> signage in
>>> and of itself is NOT THEFT. But the moment someone uses my credit
>>> cards
>>> without my specific permission IS THEFT. My credit cards should NOT
>>> be
>>> considered a public resource just because I FORGOT to put my wallet
>>> back in
>>> my pocket out of public access.
>>>
>>> If you want to allow public access to your wireless network, then that
>>> is
>>> your choice and I encourage you to post some signage indicating that
>>> fact.
>>> And for your sake I would also post some terms of service for those
>>> who
>>> would seek to use your wireless network for malicious purposes.
>>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>> Theodore Pham
>>> Rogue Solutions
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Paul Holman" <pablos@shmoo.com>
>>> To: <billshore@fbi.gov>
>>> Cc: <xgeeks@lists.soma.net>; <tsg@shmoo.com>;
>>> <dev@seattlewireless.net>
>>> Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 8:19 PM
>>> Subject: Wireless networks - Warchalking/Wardriving
>>>
>>>
>>>> Bill,
>>>>
>>>> Blocking public access to a wireless access point is a simple matter
>>>> of
>>>> configuration. While this measure will not provide a great deal of
>>>> security, it is enough to stop casual surveillance and abuse of
>>>> resources.
>>>>
>>>> As both an active member of community wireless networking
>>>> initiatives,
>>>> and an expert on internet security, I would encourage the FBI, and
>>>> all
>>>> other entities to consider open access points as a shared resource
>>>> available to all. Anyone not wishing to share their resources can
>>>> easily prevent it using the various controls built into all wireless
>>>> access points.
>>>>
>>>> Drawing the line here is both practical and rational. It requires no
>>>> further legislation, no technical development, and affords the
>>>> greatest
>>>> flexibility for innovation and exploration of how we can all benefit
>>>> from wireless networking technology.
>>>>
>>>> Please feel free to contact me with any questions about this
>>>> approach.
>>>> If you're interested, I'm happy to expand on any aspect of wireless
>>>> network security.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> pablos.
--
Paul Holman
The Shmoo Group
pablos@shmoo.com
415.420.3806

So today I'm tranferring my email and hosting. That's why yesterday was such a quiet day. (That and finishing up a neat interview for the Creative Commons website...)

I'm back and quite enthused from last night's event.

If you've emailed me over the last few days, about anything, and I haven't emailed you back, please resend. Thanks!

Lawrence Lessig will be speaking (along with the FSF's Bradley M. Kuhn) at Affero's FSF Benefit Party (Full Tilt for Software Freedom) going on TONIGHT at 525 Howard Street in San Francisco from 6pm to midnite.

Get there around 8pm if you want to see the speakers.

See you there!

So the whole time I've been on my little adventure, the EFF has had a wonderful Action Center where you can both email and fax your representatives (their service subscribes to an automatic congressional lookup service).

I'm still putting together my table of reps because I'm looking ahead to the November elections -- but I am very excited that at least one ease-of-use website for contacting our reps when issues emerge already exists.

Lawrence Lessig's keynote from OSCON 2002 is now available online (its an audio file over a powerpoint presentation in Flash format): http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/.

I just put up another tune I wrote with Ron Taylor that I recorded in Seattle with Evan Foster on guitar:

Spunky Funk.

Just Updated August 18th!

Show your support for these college stations sticking it out!

This list started with an excerpted from the Chronicle of Higher Education article below -- and then added to when people email me with new stations.

Let's keep this list growing people!

College radio stations that have continued Webcasting despite CARP's proposed fees and reporting requirements:

George Washington University -- WRGW-AM (http://www.gwradio.com)

Hobart and William Smith Colleges -- WEOS-FM (http://www.weos.org)

Middlebury College -- WRMC-FM (http://wrmc.middlebury.edu/wrmc)

Savannah College of Art and Design -- Scadradio (http://www.scadradio.org)

University of Louisiana at Monroe -- KXUL-FM (http://www.kxul.com)

University of Texas at Austin -- KVRX-FM (http://www.kvrx.org)

Radio K - University of Minnesota, KUOM -- (http://radiok.org/)

Foothill College, KFJC-FM -- (http://www.kfjc.org/)

Santa Monica College, Los Angeles, KCRW --(http://www.kcrw.org/)

This is all so sad and so unnecessary.

See the article in the Chronicle of Higher Eduacation:
Radio Silence: Fees Force College Stations to Stop Webcasting.

The fees are the result of a provision in the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 that states that
the recording industry and artists should be
compensated for music played over the Internet.
After months of tense negotiations and arbitration
run by the U.S. Copyright Office, Mr. Billington
decided in June what fees Webcasters will pay to
the record industry. The average college station
offering Webcasts -- a licensed noncommercial
college station that simultaneously plays its
over-the-air broadcasts online -- would pay
two-hundredths of a cent per listener per song
for every song it plays.

text of entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i49/49a03301.htm

From the issue dated August 16, 2002

Radio Silence
Fees force college stations to stop Webcasting

By DAN CARNEVALE

Almost all American college radio stations have listeners who call in to make
ALSO SEE:

Paying for Webcasts

Who's Out and Who's In

Colloquy Live: Join a live, online discussion with Will Robedee, vice chairman of Collegiate Broadcasters Inc. and general manager of KTRU-FM, Rice University's radio station, about new fees for Webcasting by college radio stations, on Thursday, August 15, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

song requests. But few have people calling in from Israel.

At the University of Akron, however, WZIP-FM reached a worldwide audience by transmitting its music over the Internet at the same time it broadcast a traditional radio signal locally. At its peak, the station's Webcasts of hip-hop and dance music attracted up to 300 online listeners an hour in places as distant as the Middle East and Australia. Song requests from Jerusalem and Sydney were common.

But in March, WZIP ended its Webcasts. Station officials estimated that WZIP would have to pay more than $10,000 a year under a new royalty-fee plan that was then being considered by James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress. Mr. Billington oversees the U.S. Copyright Office.

"It absolutely broke our hearts to pull the plug," says Thomas G. Beck, general manager of the station.

In anticipation of the fees, which were finally announced earlier this summer, dozens of college radio stations stopped transmitting music over the Internet. They joined hundreds of commercial and noncommercial stations that shut down their Webcasts to avoid both racking up hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees and meeting expensive new record-keeping requirements.

The fees are the result of a provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 that states that the recording industry and artists should be compensated for music played over the Internet. After months of tense negotiations and arbitration run by the U.S. Copyright Office, Mr. Billington decided in June what fees Webcasters will pay to the record industry. The average college station offering Webcasts -- a licensed noncommercial college station that simultaneously plays its over-the-air broadcasts online -- would pay two-hundredths of a cent per listener per song for every song it plays.

The rates are scheduled to be renewed every two years. The next round of negotiations could begin as early as this fall.

'A Tremendous Amount'

Although the rates are discussed in hundredths of a penny, Mr. Beck says multiplying them by hundreds of thousands of songs played, and by hundreds of listeners, could mean thousands of dollars in fees for stations. "It looks like nothing, but it adds up to a tremendous amount," he says.

So far, few college radio stations have attracted hundreds of online listeners -- most Webcasts pull in an audience of a couple dozen at most. But officials at college stations say the new fees discourage success. If a Webcast becomes too popular, the station soon wouldn't be able to afford to stay in business.

Many radio stations, both Webcasting and traditional, argue that the fees are unreasonably high. They say a flat rate of about $200 per year would be fair for all parties.

Broadcasters say they are even more afraid of a proposal, made by an arbitration panel from the Copyright Office, to require Webcasters to track detailed information about every song they play.

Under that proposal, radio and online stations would have to report each song's title, the artist or group that performed it, the album title, the record label, the catalog number, the International Standard Recording Code (which identifies each track of a compact disk), and the date and time of transmission. For each song, the station also has to keep track of how many listeners were online at the time the song was playing.

Software to collect that sort of information isn't on the market, station officials say. Even if it were, they add, collecting the information would be prohibitively expensive.

Mr. Billington has yet to rule on the panel's record-keeping recommendation, and Copyright Office officials say it may be weeks before he does.

Some of the Webcasters that shut down, like one at the University of California at Los Angeles, were online only. Other stations have continued to play music online, gambling that the courts or Congress will intervene to make the fees and record-keeping rules more radio-friendly. But the recording industry has argued that the fees are already too low and that they don't adequately compensate the companies that produce the music people want to hear.

One group of college radio stations has filed a lawsuit in an appeals court, asserting that smaller stations were unable to participate in the negotiations that helped determine the fees.

And some members of Congress have introduced legislation that might help lower the rates that smaller stations would have to pay to play music online.

In the meantime, students and faculty advisers at college stations are pulling out their calculators to tally what it would cost to continue making Webcasts under the new fees and how much they owe for Webcasting over the past four years.

A Unique Requirement

The fees and proposed record-keeping requirements are unique to online transmissions. Radio stations don't pay fees to the record industry for traditional broadcasts -- the assumption is that the record companies benefit from publicity that leads listeners to buy CD's. But the stations do pay a flat rate, usually around $500 a year, to the songwriters through organizations that support composers, authors, and publishers.

Will Robedee, vice chairman of Collegiate Broadcasters Inc., a trade group for campus radio stations, says broadcasters shouldn't have to pay the record industry and the performers because the record labels depend on radio to drum up sales.

He says the fees for Webcasting are especially far out of line. "It's higher than the broadcast fees for a lower quality and a smaller audience," says Mr. Robedee, who is also general manager of Rice University's radio station, KTRU-FM. He is leading a lobbying effort to get Congress to change the fees and other requirements in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Another college radio station, San Jose State University's KSJS-FM, plays a mix of music that's not usually heard on commercial stations, including classic jazz, death metal, and techno. But KSJS shut down its Webcast of music in January to avoid having to pay fees and keep intricate records.

"As soon as I saw the suggested rates, I thought, 'I don't even want to play this game anymore,'" says Nick Martinez, general manager at the station. "It's not worth it."

The station's traditional broadcasts reach an audience of about 25,000 a week.

The Webcasts attracted only a handful of listeners. "It wasn't any more than 10 to 15 listeners an hour," Mr. Martinez says. "And 99 times out of 100, it was the parents of the DJ's wanting to listen to their son or daughter."

But Amanda Collins, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, says stations could one day make lots of money from playing music online. "Webcasting is in its earliest stage of development," she says. "The fact that they're using our members' works to create a business, that means our members should be compensated."

Ms. Collins says the recording industry is willing to continue negotiating with college stations to reach a conclusion that satisfies both sides. "We're hearing the concerns that the college radio stations are raising, and we're prepared to work with them," she says.

Keeping Track of Listeners

For stations with only a few online listeners, as well as for stations with larger numbers, the proposed record-keeping requirements are at least as daunting as the fees, says Mr. Beck, of the University of Ak-ron. First the station would have to create a database of all the required information about each piece of music. Then it would have to determine how many people are listening to the Webcasts as the songs are playing.

He says no software is available that can handle all of that, meaning his staff members would have to do the work. "That is damn near an impossibility," Mr. Beck says. "We're an all-volunteer staff."

Some stations decided early on to stay out of the Webcasting business, sensing that the copyright law's provisions foretold burdensome rules. A community radio station operated by the University of Virginia, WTJU-FM, considered transmitting its broadcasts online, but decided against it. "We never Webcast, but a lot of it had to do with the financial situation," says Chuck Taylor, general manager of the station. "As a small station, we really could not afford to take that risk."

The station is a member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which negotiated its own fee rate with the recording industry and which covers the Webcasting fees for its member stations. The rate is kept confidential.

But the record-keeping requirements would have been too expensive for the station. Like many radio stations, WTJU currently keeps records the old-fashioned way -- DJ's scribble the names of songs and artists into a logbook.

The books don't include even half the information that's proposed for the new record-keeping requirements, and all of that information would have to be converted to digital form. It would take a full-time employee to handle the work, Mr. Taylor says.

Besides the fees and the record-keeping, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act restricts the number of tracks from one CD or by one artist that can be broadcast online. Webcasters cannot play more than two songs consecutively from one CD, or more than three songs consecutively from a boxed set. Nor can they play more than three songs from one disk or more than four songs from a boxed set within a three-hour period.

That hurts many college radio stations, which often offer a different type of programming than commercial stations.

For example, a college station might broadcast a special on Miles Davis, but the program would be prohibited online if it involved playing too many songs from a single album.

"If you've listened to community or college radio, that's pretty much what we do," Mr. Taylor says. Now Webcasters' options are running out. The Intercollegiate Broadcasting System, a trade group representing about 800 college stations, and the Harvard Radio Broadcasting Company filed a lawsuit in July against the librarian of Congress in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The suit asks that Mr. Billington's decision on fees be thrown out.

Going to Court

The stations argue that the fees are especially detrimental to smaller stations. They also say that small stations were left out of the arbitration proceedings because the cost of participating was so high. Under U.S. Copyright Office rules, members of copyright-arbitration panels pick up the cost of the process -- which in this instance meant that each panel member paid about $300,000 to participate, an amount that the stations say skewed the panel's membership in favor of the record industry and large broadcasters.

Whether Congress will take any action remains to be seen. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Webcasting in May. A Senate staff member says the committee may meet again now that the fees have been decided.

Some college-station managers are looking for help from a bill introduced in the House of Representatives in July. The bill's sponsors are Rep. Jay Inslee, a Washington Democrat, Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and George R. Nethercutt Jr., a Washington Republican.

As written, the legislation would exempt small businesses from having to pay the royalty fees until the next round of negotiations with the Copyright Office. It would also exempt small businesses from having to pay arbitration costs for future proceedings with the office. Mr. Robedee, of the Collegiate Broadcasters Inc., says he'll ask the lawmakers to amend the bill to include colleges in the exemptions.

Joel Willer, general manager of KXUL-FM, the radio station at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, is working with Mr. Robedee to lobby Congress for changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Mr. Willer, whose station has continued its Webcasts (http://www.kxul.com), says is difficult to gauge whether members of Congress are merely sympathetic to their needs or if they will actually take action.

"They nod politely," he says. "But if they're really going to do something, it's difficult to get that sense."

Mr. Martinez, of the San Jose State radio station, says he is hopeful that the regulations will be changed so his station can resume Webcasting.

"It's college radio," Mr. Martinez says. "Have fun, play music, and leave it at that."

PAYING FOR WEBCASTS

The following are the Webcasting fees and related rules set by James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress:

* Noncommercial radio stations -- including college stations -- that have simultaneous Internet transmissions must pay two-hundredths of a cent per listener per song for every song they play. Commercial radio stations that offer simultaneous Internet transmission will pay seven-hundredths of a cent per song for each online listener.

* Noncommercial stations that broadcast exclusively online must pay seven-hundredths of a cent per song per listener. Noncommercial radio stations that play music online from an archived broadcast -- permitting listeners to hear music on demand instead of what's playing live -- must pay two-hundredths of a cent per listener per song.

* All radio stations that play music online will be required to pay a minimum fee of $500 per year. All of the fees, which begin on September 1, are retroactive to October 1998, when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act went into effect. The first payments are due October 20.

* To determine how much the retroactive fees will be, Webcasters will estimate the number of listeners they had during the past four years. To calculate the fees, the number of listeners is multiplied by 12 songs an hour for traditional radio stations, and by 15 songs an hour for Internet-only stations.

* The income from the fees will be split three ways: Half goes to the record label, 45 percent goes to the featured artist, and 5 percent goes to non-featured artists.

Here are some examples of how much college stations would have to pay under the regulations:

* A radio station that Webcasts 15 songs an hour, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day and attracts 200 online listeners an hour would pay the recording industry $5,256 per year.

* A radio station that Webcasts 15 songs an hour, nine months every year, 18 hours a day and attracts 10 online listeners an hour would rack up fees of $146, but the station would pay the minimum $500 per year.

* An online-only station that Webcasts 15 songs an hour, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day and attracts 100 online listeners an hour would pay the recording industry $9,198 per year.

SOURCE: U.S. Copyright Office
WHO'S OUT AND WHO'S IN

The following are some of the college-affiliated radio and online stations that have ceased Webcasting because of the fees and reporting requirements associated with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

Arkansas Tech University -- KXRJ-FM

Azusa Pacific University -- KAPU-FM

Bellevue Community College -- KBCS-FM

Cayuga County Community College -- WDWN-FM

Central Michigan University -- WMHW-FM

Clemson University -- WSBF-FM

Colby College -- WMHB-FM

Emerson College -- WERS-FM

Georgetown College (Ky.) -- WRVG-FM

Houston Community College-Southwest College -- http://swc2.hccs.cc.tx.us/iradio

New York University -- WNYU-FM

Oakland University (Mich.) -- WXOU-FM

Ohio Northern University -- WONB-FM

Oregon State University -- KBVR-FM

San Diego City College -- KSDS-FM

San Jose State University -- KSJS-FM

Swarthmore College -- WSRN-FM

Texas A&M University at Commerce -- KETR-FM

Texas A&M University at Kingsville -- KTAI-FM

University of Akron Main Campus -- WZIP-FM

University of California at Los Angeles -- http://uclaradio.com

University of Massachusetts at Amherst -- WMUA-FM

University of Pittsburgh Main Campus -- WPTS-FM

University of Richmond -- WDCE-FM

University of Southern Colorado -- KTSC-FM

University of Tennessee at Knoxville -- WUTK-FM

University of Wisconsin at Madison -- WSUM-FM

University of Wisconsin at Whitewater -- WSUW-FM

Virginia Tech -- WUVT-FM

William Jewell College -- KWJC-FM

Some college radio stations have continued Webcasting despite the fees and proposed reporting requirements:

George Washington University -- WRGW-AM (http://www.gwradio.com)

Hobart and William Smith Colleges -- WEOS-FM (http://www.weos.org)

Middlebury College -- WRMC-FM (http://wrmc.middlebury.edu/wrmc)

Savannah College of Art and Design -- http://www.scadradio.org

University of Louisiana at Monroe -- KXUL-FM (http://www.kxul.com)

University of Texas at Austin -- KVRX-FM (http://www.kvrx.org)

SOURCES: Save Our Streams; Chronicle reporting

http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Page: A33

Looks like you can't just uncheck the Windows Media Rights Management box after all (see the gif on my "more" page -- i'm still dinking around with images in Movable Type)

I just happened to have to reinstall Windows Media Player 7.1 over the weekend (due to my Real One player expiring on me for no apparent reason...More on that experience later in perhaps far too much detail...)

So I took a gander at the EULA while I was installing WMP 7.1 and took a screen grab of the window that wouldn't let me uncheck the Windows Media Rights Management box (and also states very clearly in writing that Rights Management is a requirement, not an option).

Also, this paragraph of the EULA seems pretty darned relevant. How the heck did "security" get grouped in with "digital rights management" and my having to agree to allow Microsoft to install DRM updates on my computer that might "disable my ability to...use other software on my computer"??:

* Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

Full text of Supplemental Eula:

SUPPLEMENTAL END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR MICROSOFT SOFTWARE ("Supplemental EULA")

IMPORTANT: READ CAREFULLY - These Microsoft Corporation ("Microsoft") operating system components, including any "online" or electronic documentation ("OS Components") are subject to the terms and conditions of the agreement under which you have licensed the applicable Microsoft operating system product described below (each an "End User License Agreement" or "EULA") and the terms and conditions of this Supplemental EULA. BY INSTALLING, COPYING OR OTHERWISE USING THE OS COMPONENTS, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE APPLICABLE OPERATING SYSTEM PRODUCT EULA AND THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, DO NOT INSTALL, COPY OR USE THE OS COMPONENTS.

NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALIDLY LICENSED COPY OF ANY VERSION OR EDITION OF MICROSOFT WINDOWS 98, MICROSOFT WINDOWS MILLENUM EDITION, MICROSOFT WINDOWS 2000 OPERATING SYSTEM OR ANY MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM THAT IS A SUCCESSOR TO ANY OF THOSE OPERATING SYSTEMS (EACH AN "OS PRODUCT"), YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY OR OTHERWISE USE THE OS COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA.

Capitalized terms used in this Supplemental EULA and not otherwise defined herein shall have the meanings assigned to them in the applicable OS Product EULA.

General. The OS Components are provided to you by Microsoft to update, supplement, or replace existing functionality of the applicable OS Product. Microsoft grants you a license to use the OS Components under the terms and conditions of the EULA for the applicable OS Product (which are hereby incorporated by reference, except as set forth below) and the terms and conditions set forth in this Supplemental EULA, provided that you comply with all such terms and conditions. To the extent that any terms in this Supplemental EULA conflict with terms in the applicable OS Product EULA, the terms of this Supplemental EULA control solely with respect to the OS Components.

Additional Rights and Limitations.

* Reproduction. If you have multiple validly licensed copies of the applicable OS Product, you may reproduce, install and use one copy of the OS Components as part of such OS Product on all of your computers running validly licensed copies of the applicable OS Product provided that you use such additional copies of the OS Components in accordance with the terms and conditions above. For each validly licensed copy of the applicable OS Product, you also may reproduce one additional copy of the OS Components solely for archival purposes or reinstallation of the OS Components on the same computer as the OS Components were previously installed. Microsoft retains all right, title and interest in and to the OS Components. All rights not expressly granted are reserved by Microsoft.

* Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

IF THE APPLICABLE OS PRODUCT WAS LICENSED TO YOU BY MICROSOFT OR ANY OF ITS WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARIES, THE LIMITED WARRANTY (IF ANY) INCLUDED IN THE OS PRODUCT EULA APPLIES TO THE OS COMPONENTS PROVIDED THE OS COMPONENTS HAVE BEEN LICENSED BY YOU WITHIN THE TERM OF THE LIMITED WARRANTY IN THE OS PRODUCT EULA. HOWEVER, THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA DOES NOT EXTEND THE TIME PERIOD FOR WHICH THE LIMITED WARRANTY IS PROVIDED.

IF THE APPLICABLE OS PRODUCT WAS LICENSED TO YOU BY AN ENTITY OTHER THAN MICROSOFT OR ANY OF ITS WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARIES, MICROSOFT DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE OS COMPONENTS AS FOLLOWS:

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, MICROSOFT AND ITS SUPPLIERS PROVIDE TO YOU THE OS COMPONENTS, AND ANY (IF ANY) SUPPORT SERVICES RELATED TO THE OS COMPONENTS ("SUPPORT SERVICES") AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS; AND MICROSOFT AND ITS SUPPLIERS HEREBY DISCLAIM WITH RESPECT TO THE OS COMPONENTS AND SUPPORT SERVICES ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ANY (IF ANY) WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF OR RELATED TO: MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, LACK OF VIRUSES, ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF RESPONSES, RESULTS, WORKMANLIKE EFFORT AND LACK OF NEGLIGENCE. ALSO THERE IS NO WARRANTY, DUTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NONINFRINGEMENT. THE ENTIRE RISK ARISING OUT OF USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THE OS COMPONENTS AND ANY SUPPORT SERVICES REMAINS WITH YOU.

EXCLUSION OF INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL AND CERTAIN OTHER DAMAGES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DAMAGES FOR: LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF CONFIDENTIAL OR OTHER INFORMATION, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, PERSONAL INJURY, LOSS OF PRIVACY, FAILURE TO MEET ANY DUTY (INCLUDING OF GOOD FAITH OR OF REASONABLE CARE), NEGLIGENCE, AND ANY OTHER PECUNIARY OR OTHER LOSS WHATSOEVER) ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY RELATED TO THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE OS COMPONENTS OR THE SUPPORT SERVICES, OR THE PROVISION OF OR FAILURE TO PROVIDE SUPPORT SERVICES, OR OTHERWISE UNDER OR IN CONNECTION WITH ANY PROVISION OF THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA, EVEN IF MICROSOFT OR ANY SUPPLIER HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

LIMITATION OF LIABILITY AND REMEDIES. NOTWITHSTANDING ANY DAMAGES THAT YOU MIGHT INCUR FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ALL DAMAGES REFERENCED ABOVE AND ALL DIRECT OR GENERAL DAMAGES), THE ENTIRE LIABILITY OF MICROSOFT AND ANY OF ITS SUPPLIERS UNDER ANY PROVISION OF THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA AND YOUR EXCLUSIVE REMEDY FOR ALL OF THE FOREGOING SHALL BE LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF THE AMOUNT ACTUALLY PAID BY YOU FOR THE OS COMPONENTS OR U.S.$5.00. THE FOREGOING LIMITATIONS, EXCLUSIONS AND DISCLAIMERS SHALL APPLY TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, EVEN IF ANY REMEDY FAILS ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE.

Si vous avez acquis votre produit Microsoft au CANADA, le texte suivant vous concerne :

SI LE PRODUIT OS APPLICABLE VOUS A ÉTÉ CONCÉDÉ SOUS LICENCE PAR MICROSOFT OU PAR L'UNE QUELCONQUE DE SES FILIALES À 100%, LA GARANTIE LIMITÉE (SI ELLE EXISTE) APPLICABLE EN VERTU DU CONTRAT DE LICENCE UTILISATEUR FINAL (" CLUF ") RELATIF À CE PRODUIT OS S'APPLIQUE AUX COMPOSANTS SYSTÈME D'EXPLOITATION DE MICROSOFT Y COMPRIS TOUTE DOCUMENTATION " EN LIGNE " OU SOUS FORME ÉLECTRONIQUE (LES " COMPOSANTS OS "), À CONDITION QUE CEUX-CI VOUS AIENT ÉTÉ CONCÉDÉS SOUS LICENCE PENDANT LA DURÉE DE LA GARANTIE LIMITÉE DU CLUF RELATIF AU PRODUIT OS APPLICABLE. LE PRÉSENT CLUF SUPPLÉMENTAIRE N'A PAS POUR EFFET DE PROROGER LA DURÉE DE CETTE GARANTIE LIMITÉE.

SI LE PRODUIT OS VOUS A ÉTÉ CONCÉDÉ SOUS LICENCE PAR UNE ENTITÉ AUTRE QUE MICROSOFT OU QUE L'UNE QUELCONQUE DE SES FILIALES À 100%, MICROSOFT EXCLUT TOUTE GARANTIE RELATIVE AUX COMPOSANTS OS COMME CELA EST STIPULÉ CI-APRÈS :

EXCLUSION DE GARANTIE. DANS TOUTE LA MESURE PERMISE PAR LE DROIT APPLICABLE, MICROSOFT ET SES FOURNISSEURS VOUS FOURNISSENT LES COMPOSANTS OS, AINSI QUE, LE CAS ÉCHÉANT, TOUT SERVICE D'ASSISTANCE RELATIF À CES COMPOSANTS OS (LES "SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE"), " COMME TELS ET AVEC TOUS LEURS DEFAUTS ". EN OUTRE, MICROSOFT ET SES FOURNISSEURS EXCLUENT PAR LES PRÉSENTES TOUTE AUTRE GARANTIE LÉGALE, EXPRESSE OU IMPLICITE, RELATIVE AUX COMPOSANTS OS ET AUX SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE, NOTAMMENT (LE CAS ÉCHÉANT), TOUTE GARANTIE: DE QUALITÉ, D'ADAPTATION À UN USAGE PARTICULIER, D'ABSENCE DE VIRUS, DE PRÉCISION, D'EXHAUSTIVITÉ DES RÉPONSES, DES RÉSULTATS OBTENUS, DE FABRICATION Y D'ABSENCE DE NÉGLIGENCE. EN OUTRE, IL N'Y A PAS DE GARANTIE DE PROPRIÉTÉ, DE JOUISSANCE PAISIBLE, D'ABSENCE DE TROUBLE DE POSSESSION, DE CONFORMITÉ À LA DESCRIPTION OU D'ABSENCE DE CONTREFAÇON. VOUS ASSUMEZ L'ENSEMBLE DES RISQUES DÉCOULANT DE L'UTILISATION OU DU FONCTIONNEMENT DES COMPOSANTS OS ET DES SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE.

EXCLUSION DE RESPONSABILITÉ POUR LES DOMMAGES ACCESSOIRES, INDIRECTS ET CERTAINS AUTRES TYPES DE DOMMAGES. DANS TOUTE LA MESURE PERMISE PAR LE DROIT APPLICABLE, MICROSOFT OU SES FOURNISSEURS NE POURRONT EN AUCUN CAS ÊTRE TENUS RESPONSABLES DE TOUT DOMMAGE SPÉCIAL, ACCESSOIRE, INCIDENT OU INDIRECT DE QUELQUE NATURE QUE CE SOIT (Y COMPRIS, MAIS NON DE FACON LIMITATIVE, LES PERTES DE BÉNÉFICES, PERTES D'INFORMATIONS CONFIDENTIELLES OU AUTRES INFORMATIONS, INTERRUPTIONS D'ACTIVITÉ, PRÉJUDICES CORPORELS, ATTEINTES À LA VIE PRIVÉE, MANQUEMENT À TOUTE OBLIGATION (NOTAMMENT L'OBLIGATION DE BONNE FOI ET DE DILIGENCE), NÉGLIGENCE, ET POUR TOUTE PERTE PÉCUNIAIRE OU AUTRE DE QUELQUE NATURE QUE CE SOIT), RÉSULTANT DE, OU RELATIFS A, L'UTILISATION OU L'IMPOSSIBILITÉ D'UTILISER LES COMPOSANTS OS OU LES SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE, OU LA FOURNITURE OU LE DÉFAUT DE FOURNITURE DES SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE, OU AUTREMENT EN VERTU DE, OU RELATIVEMENT A, TOUTE DISPOSITION DE CE CLUF SUPPLÉMENTAIRE, MÊME SI LA SOCIÉTÉ MICROSOFT OU UN QUELCONQUE FOURNISSEUR A ÉTÉ PRÉVENU DE L'ÉVENTUALITÉ DE TELS DOMMAGES.

LIMITATION DE RESPONSABILITÉ ET RECOURS. NONOBSTANT TOUT DOMMAGE QUE VOUS POURRIEZ SUBIR POUR QUELQUE MOTIF QUE CE SOIT (NOTAMMENT TOUS LES DOMMAGES ÉNUMÉRÉS CI-DESSUS ET TOUS LES DOMMAGES DIRECTS OU GÉNÉRAUX), L'ENTIÈRE RESPONSABILITÉ DE MICROSOFT ET DE L'UN QUELCONQUE DE SES FOURNISSEURS AU TITRE DE TOUTE STIPULATION DE CE CLUF SUPPLÉMENTAIRE ET VOTRE SEUL RECOURS EN CE QUI CONCERNE TOUS LES DOMMAGES PRÉCITÉS NE SAURAIENT EXCÉDER LE MONTANT QUE VOUS AVEZ EFFECTIVEMENT PAYÉ POUR LES COMPOSANTS OS OU 5 DOLLARS US (US$ 5,00), SELON LE PLUS ÉLEVÉ DES DEUX MONTANTS. LES PRÉSENTES LIMITATIONS ET EXCLUSIONS DEMEURERONT APPLICABLES DANS TOUTE LA MESURE PERMISE PAR LE DROIT APPLICABLE QUAND BIEN MÊME UN QUELCONQUE REMÈDE À UN QUELCONQUE MANQUEMENT NE PRODUIRAIT PAS D'EFFET.

La présente Convention est régie par les lois de la province d'Ontario, Canada. Chacune des parties à la présente reconnaît irrévocablement la compétence des tribunaux de la province d'Ontario et consent à instituer tout litige qui pourrait découler de la présente auprès des tribunaux situés dans le district judiciaire de York, province d'Ontario.

Au cas où vous auriez des questions concernant cette licence ou que vous désiriez vous mettre en rapport avec Microsoft pour quelque raison que ce soit, veuillez contacter la succursale Microsoft desservant votre pays, ou écrire à : Microsoft Sales Information Center, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399.

A guy reformatted his hard drive and then found out none of his Windows Media files would work. Turns out that Windows Media Player turns the "copy protection" (copy prevention) on by default when it rips CDs, so when he reformatted his hard drive the player thought he was trying to play the copy protected files on a computer other than the one they had been licensed for.

Let me say this another way: when you rip CDs on a Windows machine using Windows Media Player, it makes a unique identifier for your computer (that has privacy implications, yes, but I'm trying to make another point here).

That unique identifier is associated with a license that is stored separately from the file itself that will only let those files be played back on the one single computer that matches the unique identifier. No other devices. Ever.

(Without a lot of hassle anyway -- Without having to backup and restore your licenses on the other computer -- or use Microsoft's Personal License Migration Service (PLMS) -- two processes that, to date, have performed less than dependably -- according to many a sad music collector....)

And it turns out there is a solution: turn it off! Change the settings on your player for now, and say "no" when it asks you about wanting copy protections (fair use copy preventions) in the future.

See the Guardian story by Jack Schofield:

When you first run Windows Media Player, it will ask if you want to keep copy protection on, and you can turn it off if you wish. If you missed that dialog box, it is still easy to turn off copy protection by going into the Tools|Options menu. Click on the Copy Music tab, and under Copy Settings, uncheck the 'Protect Content' box. In previous versions, this box was called the 'Enable Per sonal Rights Management' check box." Turning off copy protection would seem the best idea.

Text of article in case the URL goes bad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4477138,00.html

Ask Jack

Send your questions and comments to Jack.Schofield@guardian.co.uk
Published letters will be edited for brevity but please include full details with your original query

Jack Schofield
Guardian

Thursday August 8, 2002

Catch WMP
I have been collecting music using Windows Media Player to copy from CDs. When I needed to reformat my hard drive, I copied all my files to CD-R, re-installed my operating system and copied them back, only to find my music would not play.
Rowan Burgess

Jack Schofield replies: Microsoft's web site says: "By default, Windows Media Player [7.x] is configured to protect content that is copied from a CD to your computer from unauthorized use by using Personal Rights Management. When this feature is enabled, each track that is copied to your computer is a licensed file that cannot be played on any other computer unless you backup and restore your licenses on the other computer."

Reformatting the hard drive has made your PC, in effect, a different computer. Since you did not back up and restore your licenses, there is no obvious way to play the protected files. However, Michael Aldridge, lead product manager in the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft in Seattle, says: "There is still a way to get these licenses back and it is pretty easy using our Personal License Migration Service (PLMS), [which] was designed to address the exact situation you outline. The customer just has to be connected to the internet, then they can automatically restore their licenses just by playing the music files in question.

Windows Media Player will recognise that the music had a license and will go out on the web and update their music files with new licenses. All this service does is note these files once had a license and provides a new one. No internet connection is required for playback after that. "If the reader is connected to the internet and this is still not working, it is most likely because they created their music collection with an earlier version of Windows Media Player (7.0) and then upgraded on top of that collection. We did anticipate this scenario and developed a tool to help them update their licenses: the Personal License Update Utility. This must be run before they upgrade their system or transfer their music files to a new PC.

If they don't use this utility they will need to re-create (re-copy) their music CDs into their music library on their PC. Find out more information about this process at www.microsoft.com/ "You can also choose to turn off copy protection when you create your music collection, which can be done easily in any version of [WMP7.x or later].

When you first run Windows Media Player, it will ask if you want to keep copy protection on, and you can turn it off if you wish. If you missed that dialog box, it is still easy to turn off copy protection by going into the Tools|Options menu. Click on the Copy Music tab, and under Copy Settings, uncheck the 'Protect Content' box. In previous versions, this box was called the 'Enable Per sonal Rights Management' check box." Turning off copy protection would seem the best idea.

Here's one just for fun, except, as usual it's all real.

I can't wait till I get my video editing system set up so I can provide clips of this stuff online when I see them on TV. I saw this on the Daily Show a few nights back and couldn't believe my eyes.

With his golf club at the ready, and wagging his finger for emphasis, Dubya commented, "There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process that we have started. We must not let them."

The six-sentence statement complete, Dubya thanked reporters, then smirked and ordered: "Now watch my drive."

Don't forget to try out the Quote Navigator!

(Aw, come on. Is it really so important for one to unite one's tenses?)

It was a quick shift from angry statesman to Sunday golfer. Dubya rose before dawn for a round of golf with his father at the Cape Arundel Golf Club, but was "distressed" to learn of another suicide bombing in Israel. With his golf club at the ready, and wagging his finger for emphasis, Dubya commented, "There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process that we have started. We must not let them."

The six-sentence statement complete, Dubya thanked reporters, then smirked and ordered: "Now watch my drive."

On the same golf course a month ago, White House advisers pleaded with Dubya to "try not to look like you're on a golf course" when he made a brief statement on the assassination of an Afghan vice president. Apparently it's harder than his staff imagined to separate the sensibilities of a privileged rich kid from those commanded of the Commander-in-Chief.

Okay, maybe not the very first -- I'm sure that I've actually written letters to politicians before at some time or another (at least I'd like to think I have), but I didn't keep track of any of those letters and seem to have no specific recollections of them. So the experiences obviously didn't leave much of an impact on me (or them either, most likely :-)

Next step: to create a few customized versions of the Save Internet Radio Letter and make them available for people to print out and FAX easily.

These letters will be "customized" both in terms of who they are addressed to and what they contain (the save internet radio letter was admittedly a little out-of-date).

In particular, I'm thinking about adding support in the letter for the recently-introduced Internet Radio Fairness Act.)

I'll link to them from here for the California folks, for starters, and then maybe I'll try to do a state or two a day.

Feel free to jump in and help me put this table together guys! The idea is to have a "quick and easy fax table" for all fifty states with customized letters quickly available when something comes up and we need to let our Reps know about how we feel quickly...

text in case the link goes bad:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:H.R.5285:

GPO's PDF version of this bill References to this bill in the Congressional Record Link to the Bill Summary & Status file. Full Display - 5,566 bytes.[Help]
Internet Radio Fairness Act (Introduced in House)

HR 5285 IH

107th CONGRESS

2d Session

H. R. 5285

To amend title 17, United States Code, with respect to royalty fees for webcasting, and for other purposes.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

JULY 26, 2002

Mr. INSLEE (for himself, Mr. NETHERCUTT, Mr. BOUCHER, Mr. MANZULLO, Mr. MORAN of Virginia, Mrs. MINK of Hawaii, Mr. LARSEN of Washington, Mr. KUCINICH, Mr. KLECZKA, Mr. LEACH, Ms. LOFGREN, Ms. BROWN of Florida, Mr. DICKS, and Mr. SMITH of Washington) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

A BILL

To amend title 17, United States Code, with respect to royalty fees for webcasting, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the `Internet Radio Fairness Act'.

SEC. 2. APPLICABILITY OF ROYALTY RATES TO SMALL BUSINESS CONCERNS.

(a) INAPPLICABILITY OF DETERMINATION OF JULY 8, 2002- The determination by the Librarian of Congress of rates and terms for the digital performance of sound recordings and ephemeral recordings of July 8, 2002, pursuant to section 112(e) and section 114(f)(2)(B) of title 17, United States Code, shall not apply to transmissions and ephemeral recordings by small entities.

(b) FUTURE PROCEEDINGS- The first determination of terms and rates of royalty payments that is made pursuant to section 114(f)(2)(B) of title 17, United States Code, after the enactment of this Act shall apply to transmissions (to which such section applies) that are made by small business concerns during the period beginning on the date of the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and ending on the date provided for in that determination.

(c) VOLUNTARY NEGOTIATIONS- Nothing in this section shall affect the participation of small entities in voluntary negotiation proceedings under section 114(f)(2)(A) and (C)(i) of title 17, United States Code.

SEC. 3. STANDARD FOR DETERMINING RATES.

Section 114(f)(2)(B) of title 17, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by striking `Such rates and terms shall distinguish' and all that follows through `capital investment, cost, and risk.'; and

(2) by inserting after `as the parties may agree.' the following: `The copyright arbitration royalty panel shall establish rates and terms in accordance with the objectives set forth in section 801(b)(1).'.

SEC. 4. COSTS OF PROCEEDINGS; REGULATING FLEXIBILITY.

(a) COSTS OF PROCEEDINGS- Section 802(c) of title 17, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by inserting after `In ratemaking proceedings, the parties to the proceedings' the following: `, except for small entities that are parties to ratemaking proceedings under section 114(f)(2)(B),'; and

(2) by adding at the end the following: `In this subsection, the term `small entity' means a small business, small organization, or small governmental jurisdiction, as those terms are defined in section 601 of title 5.'.

(b) REGULATING FLEXIBILITY- Section 701(e) of title 17, United States Code, is amended by inserting before the period `and to the provisions of chapter 6 of title 5'.

SEC. 5. ELIMINATION OF CERTAIN STATUTORY LICENSES FOR EPHEMERAL RECORDINGS.

(a) ELIMINATION OF STATUTORY LICENSE- Section 112(a) of title 17, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

`(3) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106 and paragraph (1) of this subsection, and except in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, it is not an infringement of copyright for a transmitting organization entitled to transmit to the public a performance or display of a work, under a license, including a statutory license under section 114(f), or transfer of the copyright or for a transmitting organization that is a broadcast radio station licensed as such by the Federal Communications Commission and that makes a broadcast transmission of a sound recording in a digital format on a nonsubscription basis, to make one or more copies or phonorecords of that work, if--

`(A) each copy or phonorecord is retained and used solely by the transmitting organization that made it; and

`(B) each copy or phonorecord is used solely for the purpose of making the transmitting organization's own transmissions or for purposes of archival preservation or security.'.

(b) CONFORMING AMENDMENTS- Section 112(e) of title 17, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by striking in paragraph (1) `or under a statutory license in accordance with section 114(f)'; and

(2) by striking in paragraph (1)(B) `a statutory license in accordance with section 114(f) or'.

(c) EFFECTIVE DATE- The amendments made by subsection (a) take effect on January 1, 2003.

SEC. 6. DEFINITION.

In this Act, the term `small entity' means a small business, small organization, or small governmental jurisdiction, as those terms are defined in section 601 of title 5, United States Code.

Slashdot interviewed Ibiblio Director Paul Jones.

DRM is the general term for the groups of solutions to the need for creators to be compensated for their work while allowing their audience to easily access those works. Or at least that would be ideally what DRM should do.

When DRM goes wrong, it tramples on the rights of the citizens to have access to information that they have legally purchased, want to criticize, parody, legally reuse or share.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates barriers to innovation and creativity. It biases access and reproduction of information to only certain technologies.

When DRM goes wrong, it creates and perpetrates closed markets and monopolies.

When DRM goes wrong, everyone suffers. It takes us back to the Stationers Guild, a response to the printing press. "The Stationers Guild obtained monopoly rights in the printing and probably distribution of all books, a monopoly codified by the Tudors in a licensing system aimed at censoring religious dissent" which lasted until the early 1700s.

When DRM goes wrong, it is called Palladium.

The good news is that Palladium is vaporware - so far.

It actually sounds like they might not be offering much of anything, but it makes a great press release. (I mean article.)

Here's the Reuters/Variety story by Sue Zeidler:
Companies Offer Concessions in Artist Dispute.

Boy it sure would be cool if they could pull that "retroactive" thing off. I will be one surprised puppy if it happens though. Good luck guys!

here's the text in case the link goes bad in the future:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=768&e=1&cid=769&u=/nm/20020808/music_nm/music_artists_dc_1

Music Companies Offer Concessions in Artist Dispute
Thu Aug 8,12:49 AM ET

By Sue Zeidler

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The world's biggest music labels on Wednesday said they have offered major concessions to a group of angry pop stars to try to settle a high-profile dispute regarding recording industry contracts.

But a representatives for the artists, who have been lobbying for a change to California labor law, said that a settlement was still not in sight.

"I want the artist community to know that the record companies came to the table with substantial compromises and it's now in the artists' hands," said Hilary Rosen, president and chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America ( news - web sites) (RIAA).

Rosen said the RIAA, which represents all the big labels, including Bertelsmann AG ( news - web sites), EMI Group Plc ( news - web sites), AOL Time Warner Inc., Vivendi Universal and Sony Corp ( news - web sites)., has offered several key concessions during negotiating sessions in recent months.

But Jay Cooper, one of the entertainment attorneys involved in the negotiations on behalf of the artists, said the two sides were still apart on several major issues.

"I don't want to negotiate in the press," Cooper said. "It's too delicate. There are too many issues. Whether we'll settle or not, I have no idea."

The negotiations have come in part at the urging of the California lawmakers who are considering a repeal of a controversial amendment to the state labor code that allows recording to be tied to record contracts for more than seven years, longer than talent in industries like television and sports.

The bill proposing that change was the result of lobbying by the Recording Artists Coalition, led by stars like Don Henley, Sheryl Crow and the Dixie Chicks, who banded together against the labor code amendment.

The record label concessions offer significant restrictions on the amount of damages labels could seek from an artist who breaks his contract after seven years compared to current law.

Another concession would allow artists, in many cases, to satisfy significant obligations and avoid damages by delivering just one additional album, even if the contract requires more.

"This could be a historic agreement. It would dramatically reshape the artist-label relationship and instill critical certainty into the marketplace at a time when the entire industry needs it," Rosen said.

The biggest hurdle to reaching a deal was the issue of retroactivity, Rosen said. Artists' representatives want to make contract changes rendered by any deal retroactive, she said.

If applied retroactively, for example, an artist who signed a six-album deal and received handsome upfront advances could walk away after two albums, she said.

"The record company would be limited to damages on two albums instead of four, regardless of how much had already been invested. That's simply not fair and it's bad public policy," she said.

The dispute between the two sides has come amid a broader artist rights movement. In the past few months, Rev. Al Sharpton and attorney Johnnie Cochran launched a movement to reform record label business practices.

By Paul Davidson for USA Today:
FCC to review media ownership caps later

The FCC is also reviewing prohibitions on ownership of a newspaper and TV station in the same market and limits on local radio concentration. Analysts expect the rules to be relaxed. Consumer advocates say that would fuel more media consolidation, elbow out local broadcasters and reduce diversity.

Here's the whole article in case the link goes bad in the future:

http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20020618/4201004s.htm

FCC to review media ownership caps later

By Paul Davidson
USA TODAY

The Federal Communications Commission said Monday that it will review most of its media ownership limits in one sweeping proceeding, delaying an expected relaxation of the caps for nearly a year.

The move rankled some broadcasters anxious to snap up TV stations and newspapers to achieve efficiencies and better compete against cable.

''It certainly leaves a tremendous cloud over our ability to pursue certain types of transactions,'' says Mark Hyman, vice president of Sinclair Broadcasting.

But Legg Mason analyst Blair Levin said many media companies would forge ahead with deals, expecting the FCC to suspend limits until it eases them.

Analysts and FCC officials said the agency was largely taking a cue from recent court rulings that chided it for not grounding its ownership limits in a more solid, consistent analysis.

''You can't look at the rules in isolation,'' said Kenneth Ferree, chief of the FCC's media bureau.

Changing one rule before another also could ''free up one industry segment first,'' giving it ''an arbitrage advantage over other potential buyers in the market.''

The FCC delay appeared to be a reaction to political forces, says George Reed-Dellinger of Washington Analysis. Democratic lawmakers recently asked the FCC to move more slowly. And by deferring the agency's initiatives until after the November elections, FCC Chairman Michael Powell also may be banking on a shift to a Republican Senate that would be unlikely to nullify FCC's actions, Reed-Dellinger says.

An appeals court this year ordered the FCC to justify caps that prevent a broadcaster from owning TV stations that reach more than 35% of U.S. households and from owning two TV stations in smaller cities.

The FCC is also reviewing prohibitions on ownership of a newspaper and TV station in the same market and limits on local radio concentration. Analysts expect the rules to be relaxed. Consumer advocates say that would fuel more media consolidation, elbow out local broadcasters and reduce diversity.

A lovely discussion of Benjamin Franklin's Junto and the potential for creating a sort of super-junto online has blossomed on Metafilter.

The latest wave of spam bots have their own love-starved human
knowledge workers:

The bot who loved me.

here's the article in case the link goes bad:

page 1

The bot who loved me
Are those secret-admirer e-mails real -- or just the latest excrescence of an Internet marketing machine grown unfathomably sleazy?

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Katharine Mieszkowski

printe-mail

Aug. 7, 2002 | He has blond hair, blue eyes and a sarcastic sense of humor. He's an artist, writer or musician, between the ages of 28 and 32. His idea of fun on a first date is a walk in the park, but he hankers to go on an African safari.

And this man -- whoever he is -- likes me. The Internet told me so.

Just a few walks in the park from now, I could be on the savanna in Zaire with Mr. X, trading acerbic remarks about the redoubtable mating habits of wildebeests.

There's just one hitch: I'm not convinced that this secret admirer actually exists. He may just be the bot who loved me.

____

Sign O' the Times: Pop's last great double album in 'Masterpiece'

Start your Summer Fling @ Matchmaker

____

A flirty e-mail from matchmaker@someonelikesyou.com tipped me off to this mystery man's tender crush. "You have a secret admirer!" gushed the message. Like half a dozen similar Web sites -- eCrush, Crushlink and SecretAdmirer.com among them -- SomeoneLikesYou plays Internet go-between. The gimmick: An anonymous e-mail crush notification service can pave the way for romance without the risk of rejection.

But while most of these "crush" sites operate above-board, proudly listing the founders' names and e-mail addresses, the cupids behind SomeoneLikesYou and its corporate sister site, Crushlink, play hard to get. The sites conceal the identities not only of the source of your crush note, but also of the people who run the services. Even some of the publicly available domain-name registration information about the sites is fake.

This secrecy, along with the sheer volume of admiring messages spewing from crushmaster@crushlink.com and matchmaker@someonelikeyou.com, has raised speculation that there's less romance than savvy marketing going on here. Competitors accuse Crushlink and SomeoneLikesYou of spamming any old e-mail address they can scrape off the Net with love notes, building membership by preying on sad-sack lonely-hearts -- then peddling affiliate programs to those members to bring in some cash.

"My dog has gotten 'someone has a crush on you' e-mail messages -- she's a cute dog, but no one has a crush on her," says Karen Demars, co-founder of eCrush. "My belief is that they are sending 'someone has a crush on you' messages to people who have not been legitimately crushed."

One consumer advocacy group in California is even threatening a lawsuit against Crushlink for misleading consumers about their love lives. And vigilant webmasters and anti-spam crusaders, suspicious that the sites are simply cynical e-mail harvesters, charge "spam!"

Forget "Who's my crush?" The more interesting question is: who's the crushmaster?

Is Mr. Crush really Mr. Spammer in a cupid's costume, breeding false hopes among the lovelorn with fake messages about nascent crushes that don't really exist? Or could the crushmaster be a scorned lover turning his vindictive rage on the Net's lonely millions in a frenzy of mixed messages? Or, maybe, just maybe, there's actually this much latent love out there on the Web, just waiting for the right database to come along and play yenta.

All the accusations of nefarious behavior and the secrecy surrounding these sites has made unmasking the identities of the frenzied cupids behind them a true Internet whodunit. After all, for geeks, speculating about the identity of a mysterious webmaster is as captivating as thinking about who might have a crush on you.

By following the geeks' trail in the ether, I found out who the crushmaster is -- and just like Mr. Right, he's the kind of guy you'd least expect.

page 2

SomeoneLikesYou and Crushlink represent a more extreme version of what all crush sites do. They inspire you to reveal your own crushes' e-mail addresses by dangling the lure that they know who wants you.

To find out what guy would be such a fourth-grader as to reveal his interest in me in this cheesy way, I first registered at SomeoneLikesYou, giving away a bevy of valuable demographic facts about myself in the process, like my date of birth and my ZIP code. Then I filled out a profile from a fixed menu of canned choices, indicating my hair color, eye color and ideal first date.

Finally, I was invited to offer all my own crushes' e-mail addresses up for sacrifice.

If I guess who my secret admirer is and turn over his e-mail address to the site, our identities will be revealed to each other, and we could be pricing safaris before the week is out!

____

Sign O' the Times: Pop's last great double album in 'Masterpiece'

Start your Summer Fling @ Matchmaker

____

But if there's no love connection, every address I've given to the site will get a message announcing "You have a secret admirer!" and the whirlwind of anonymous, crazy-making romantic madness just spreads.

What makes SomeoneLikesYou and Crushlink different from the rest of the sites in the genre is this: they bait hopeful visitors to hand over as many e-mail addresses as possible by trading clues for e-mail addresses.

The more e-mails that you reveal to SomeoneLikesYou, the more hints you get about your admirer's identity, like his hair color and his approximate age. Five e-mail addresses generates one clue. I gave away more than two-dozen e-mail addresses before the system ran out of hints about my admirer. Not even the most love-sick puppy has that many real crushes.

So, what's stronger -- the hunger for any clue that might unmask your own admirer, or the desire to protect the in-boxes of your friends, loved ones and colleagues from random romance spam, which could potentially embarrass you in the process? "She has a crush on me! Yikes!" And is it really spam if friends or colleagues have sold out your address in their own search for romance?

I elected to take a middle road, which wouldn't embarrass me or abuse my friends' trust, but might turn up enough hints to reveal my crush. I gamed the system by entering random, made-up e-mail addresses, potentially muddling the in-boxes (and sanity) of total strangers in pursuit of my own love interest.

Crushes -- they make people do crazy things.

But the system anticipates this simple ploy. If a made-up e-mail address I turned over bounced, SomeoneLikesYou just demanded another one.

This clues system helps explain why the SomeoneLikesYou and Crushlink romance virus has spread so far. A single wistful crushee hankering to know who likes her can generate dozens of "crush" messages to people she doesn't even know, which will likely spur some percentage of those suckers to spread the love as well.

That's got the California Consumer Action Network, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, considering filing a lawsuit against these online cupids, according to the group's attorney, Joe Hughes. He charges that the site is violating the state's laws against unfair and deceptive advertising.

"We're concerned about the fact that it's a spam generator. They're implying to the user that they're going to find out if the e-mail address they enter is someone who has a crush on them, although it's probably more likely that someone is doing just what they're doing, which is guessing who had a crush on them." Could a class action lawsuit of lovelorn crushees hurt by messages about fake admirers be far behind?

The more I learned about the "someone" who likes me, the less real he seemed.

The e-mail that I got from this "secret admirer" came to an official corporate address that no friend would use. Besides, the "hints" I received about my admirer bore an uncanny resemblance to what I told the system about myself when I registered.

Maybe my account had just become a bit of currency to buy someone else a "hint." But the competitors to SomeoneLikesYou and Crushlink in the online crush space say that it's more than just this hints system that's generating all those befuddling crush messages.

Clark Benson, the co-founder of eCrush, says: "Crushlink must have bought tons of spam lists. The site went from nothing to a million visitors in no time. In about two weeks, everybody's accounts here were getting Crushlink e-mails." Among the addresses at eCrush that have gotten "crush" messages from Crushlink and SomeoneLikesYou: webmaster@ecrush.com, bizdev@ecrush.com, jobs@ecrush.com and Maggie@ecrush.com, a joke account for his co-founder's dog, which is published on the eCrush site.

Demars, the eCrush co-founder who owns Maggie, charges: "They're obtaining e-mail addresses in a way that is either technically generated or generated out of a hostage marketing situation (want a hint? Just give us five e-mail addresses!) that are just not truly the product of someone having a crush on you."

Miles Kronby, the founder of SecretAdmirer -- the grandfather of the concept, launched in 1997 -- won't name names, but says that he's watched the e-mail crush concept take a hurtful, debauched turn: "The problem is, some unscrupulous people running these things decided to abuse this system as a kind of spam generator," he sighs.

Perhaps the most extreme is the Crush007 site. (Note: Clicking on the link will open a lot of advertising windows.) Based in Malaysia, it sends a fake crush e-mail to an unsuspecting stooge. The site then goads the sucker to reveal all kinds of personal facts, including "how many times does she/he masturbate a week?" and "names of his/her biggest crush." The homepage makes no secret about its motives: "We have developed this website just to help you find out who your friend's crushes are, and also not to mention, their biggest, most well kept secrets." Fear for the dorkiest kid in the class, thrilled that someone actually has a crush on him, who is about to be the victim of an Internet humiliation machine.

But carping competitors aren't the only ones who think that all these anonymous romance e-mails have taken a sick and twisted turn. Several geeks, webmasters and spam fighters have put these love messages to the spam test and gone on a Web vigilante mission to find out who's behind them. If they couldn't find out who had crushes on them, at least they could figure out who was generating all those love notes!

. Next page | Unmasking the crushmaster

page 3

"Warning: crushlink is a spam scam," warns "Steve," a geek who refuses to reveal his real identity for fear of being sued, on a Web page set up to discuss his experience with the site. After he received a "crush" message, he became convinced that Crushlink was a system for harvesting e-mail addresses, so he registered for the site with an account at his own domain that he'd never used for anything else. Several months later, this account got a message from something called "Jennyslist."

Justin Beech, the webmaster behind Broadbandreports.com, went on his own sleuthing mission to unmask Mr. Crush after webmasters on his site groused that Crushlink and SomeoneLikesYou were fomenting spam, not romance. Although the WHOIS records for both sites are at least partially fake -- for instance, the phone number for Crushlink is listed as 800-000-0000 -- their Web server IP addresses don't lie. Beech linked both sites to Jumpstart Technologies LLC, a "direct-marketing" company. His research led him to finger Johann Schleier-Smith, a Harvard graduate and currently a physics grad student at Stanford, as Mr. Crush.

But it was Rob Whelan, a 40-year-old CIO for a retailing company in Tennessee, who finally turned up the guy who will admit to being the president and co-owner of Crushlink, Mr. Crush himself.

When Whelan got his "crush" message from Crushlink, he was immediately suspicious: "I'm not 12, so it seemed odd that I would get a message like this," he says. He contacted anti-spam organizations, the Federal Trade Commission and CyberAngels, a group that protects children online. After a few weeks of mucking around, threats to sue prompted a nervous phone call from one G reg Tseng, another Stanford physics grad student, who also went to Harvard as an undergrad.

____

'Some Like It Hot', Billy Wilder's manic, magical farce in 'Masterpiece' presented by Lexus

Start your Summer Fling @ Matchmaker

____

As a sophomore in college, Tseng started a dot-com called flyingchickens.com, which sought to take on Harvard's Coop by selling textbooks. (Johann Schleier-Smith, also then a student at Harvard. co-founded the site.) Flyingchickens soon merged with something called Limespot.com, a college-event listing site.

In short, these two embodied the late-'90s, dot-com poster-boy ideal -- techie, entrepreneurial undergrads so brimming with Big Ideas that they couldn't wait for graduation to start launching companies.

These weren't the stereotypical lowlife spammers that Whelan expected to find on the other end of his Crushmail. "Greg Tseng is a very bright young man, and unfortunately he's chosen this vocation for himself," sighs Whelan. "He does have a good entrepreneurial spirit, but I think that he's just misguided."

Whelan worries about the hurt feelings of kids who won't think twice about dumping their friends' e-mail addresses into a system that will send anonymous messages misleading them that romance is just at the other end of an "@" sign. "These guys think they're going to make a lot of money and not hurt anybody, but they're really just going to make a lot of money," says Whelan. "And they're not going to ever know or see or hear from the people who are hurt by this."

But worse than teenage false hopes, Whelan is concerned that parents have no way to opt their kids out. And he charges that the system lures kids to lie about their ages to Crushlink's and SomeoneLikesYou's marketing partners, who don't want 12-year-olds as customers. That's because one way to get "hints" to your admirer's identity on Crushlink is to register for an affiliated site's marketing program, like Netflix, which pays Crushlink a bounty for every person who signs up. SomeoneLikesYou takes this scheme even further. Even if you guess your crush correctly, you either have to sign up for an affiliate's program or pay $14.90 to find out who your admirer actually is.

After much stalking, both online and off, I finally tracked Tseng down. Although he demurely refused to speak to me on the phone or answer any specific questions about the charges leveled against his online love-note machines, he did send a few comments in one e-mail.

He maintained that the secrecy surrounding who's involved in the company is simply because they're in "stealth mode." But he outright denied spamming anyone with missives that might breed romantic delusions: "We do not sell or rent our user list to third parties (a.k.a. 'spam')," he wrote. "We do not purchase lists or harvest e-mail addresses. All of our outbound e-mails are either user-generated notices or communications with our registered users. We send precisely zero e-mail advertisements."

At least in one limited instance, this statement appears false. Remember Jennyslist, which messaged "Steve," after he registered for Crushlink with an address that he'd used for nothing else? A business acquaintance of Tseng's reveals that Jennyslist.com is a project of Jumpstart Technologies. Isn't this advertising? Tseng declined to comment.

Oh, maybe we're all just such doubting Thomases about the idea that anyone might actually like us that we can't face the possibility of new romance, even when it shows up right in our in boxes. Tseng seems to think so: "Some people may be confused about the origin of the 'Someone has a crush on you' notices but actually every single person that receives such a notice was listed as a crush by a registered user (and they should come to CrushLink to find out who!)."

Really? Then, prove to me that this person who claimed to admire me really exists, I demanded. But Tseng stayed mum. He had the perfect excuse, not that he bothered to offer it: Selling out the guy who likes me (if he exists) would violate the site's whole premise -- crush notification without the risk of rejection.

So maybe the evil genius of SomeoneLikesYou isn't that it's a love machine at all, but that it's an Internet Narcissus' pool. In this scenario, the love automaton feeds you hints about your "secret admirer," based on the profile you entered about yourself. You have so much in common!

More likely, the messages I got from SomeoneLikesYou came from someone who offered up my e-mail address when he or she tried to game the system to find out who likes them -- just as I did.

Or maybe there really is some blond-haired, blue-eyed, sarcastic guy biding his time surfing African safari Web sites, while he nurtures his fervent hope that the Internet will be our go-between.

Only the matchmaker knows for sure, and that pathological flirt's not telling.

I'll let this comic from Tom Tomorrow speak for itself.

No, wait. Just so we know this isn't just a comic strip, this is real life, here's a Reuters article.

Reuters story in case the link goes bad (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0727-02.htm):

Halliburton to Build New Cells at Guantanamo Base
by Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Halliburton Co. has been awarded a $9.7 million contract to build an additional 204-cell detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to hold additional suspected al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, the Pentagon said on Friday.

The move will expand the high-security prison on the base, where hundreds of such "detainees" from Afghanistan are already being held in 612 small cells.

The prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station has played a major part in the U.S. war on terrorism declared after September's attacks on America in which more than 3,000 people died. No prisoners have been charged, but some could eventually face military trials.

Brown and Root Services, an engineering division of Halliburton, will build the additional 6-by-8-foot cells on the windward side of the remote U.S. base at the southeastern tip of Cuba, the Pentagon said.

The work is expected to be completed by October. But the Pentagon suggested on Friday that the facility could grow even more and that the contract could eventually total as much as $300 million if additional options were exercised over the next four years.

Vice President Dick Cheney is the former chief executive officer of Halliburton, whose main business is providing oilfield services. The company has come under heavy pressure this year because of concerns about its liabilities and a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission into its accounting for cost overruns on construction projects.

ADDITIONAL CELLS SOUGHT BY RUMSFELD

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier this month asked Congress to approve expanding the prison facility, which currently has 612 cells, by 204 cells.

Army Lt. Col. Joe Hoey, a spokesman for the task force running the prisoner operation at the naval base in Cuba, said earlier that the United States was holding and interrogating 564 suspected Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners.

The prisoners were captured in the U.S.-led war against the al Qaeda group blamed for the September attacks and against the Taliban government that sheltered them in Afghanistan.

The captives were moved in April to Camp Delta, a permanent facility built to replace Camp X-Ray, a series of makeshift chain-link cells hastily erected when the U.S. military first brought prisoners from Afghanistan to Guantanamo in January.

The United States drew fire from human rights groups after photographs were distributed of the prisoners squatting in their cells in the blazing Cuban sun. Human rights activists have criticized that U.S. stance that the captives are not prisoners of war under the Geneva conventions.

The fate of the prisoners being held at Guantanamo is still uncertain. The United States government has set guidelines to try some of them before military tribunals but has not said when that might happen.

Camp Delta is made up of solid cells in rows that look like long mobile homes. Unlike Camp X-Ray, they have wash basins with running water and floor-style toilets that flush.

Like X-Ray, Camp Delta is surrounded by fences topped with razor wire and ringed by wooden guard towers manned by sharpshooters. But the new camp is enclosed inside a green mesh curtain, which prevents visitors from seeing in and keeps the prisoners from seeing the tightly guarded shoreline a few hundred yards away.

© Reuters 2002

Jon Johansen's trial has been rescheduled to December 9, 2002 so that a technically-savvy judge can be located for the trial (hey! there's an idea :-)

Read more about it (along with a note frooom Jon explaining that he didn't even write the particular piece of code in question on
Greplaw.

Here's the EFF's Jon Johansen Information Website for more information about the details of the case.

clip from referenced article:

Date Set For Jon Johansen DVD Trial
posted by mpawlo on Tuesday August 06, @08:39AM
from the your-code-is-mine dept.
The Norweigan "Byrett" (district court) will try the Jon Johansen DVD case on December 9, 2002. The trial was supposed to take place this summer, but the court decided to postpone the trial to find a technology savvy judge. The case will be tried by one judge and a panel of two lay assessors.

Jon Johansen is being prosecuted by the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit (OKOKRIM) under Norwegian Criminal Code 145(2). Johansen created DeCSS software that can enable DVD playback on Linux. It is argued that the DeCSS software is a piracy tool.

The ACLU website has useful information on my California State Senators:
Barbara Boxer and
Dianne Feinstein.

I found their contact info too -- now I have to find remember what letters I want to send them...

Here's the contact info for Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein:

Barbara Boxer
Web Site: boxer.senate.gov

Washington Office:
Phone: (202) 224-3553
Fax: (415) 956-6701
112 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-0505

Main District Office:
Phone: (415) 403-0100
Fax: (415) 956-6701
1700 Montgomery St., #240
San Francisco, CA 94111

****

Dianne Feinstein
Web Site: feinstein.senate.gov

Washington Office:
Phone: (202) 224-3841
Fax: (202) 228-3954
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-0504

Main District Office:
Phone: (415) 393-0707
Fax: (415) 989-3242
One Post St., #2450
San Francisco, CA 94104

Just enter your zip code: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/memberinfo.

There has got to be a table of these zipcode-legislator lookup forms on a state-by-state basis already existing on the Web. But, if not, let's create one.

Danny O'Brien was kind enough to send me this charming essay about Ben Franklin written by Mark Twain:
The Late Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel; and also to snub his stove, and his military inspirations, his unseemly endeavor to make himself conspicuous when he entered Philadelphia, and his flying his kite and fooling away his time in all sorts of such ways, when he ought have been foraging for soap-fat, or constructing candles... It is time these gentlemen were finding out that these execrable eccentricities of instinct and conduct are only the evidences of genius, not the creators of it.

Okay so I'm pretty well diverted from my original goal of contacting my representatives (which I will get back to, I promise) because I'm having too much fun with the voting statistics on Congress.org.

Capital Advantage's motto is "Congress at your fingertips." Let's see how long it takes to figure out what I need. That is, of course, if I can stop fooling around long enough to get back to the task at hand...

Cory mentioned something about Radio Paradise Open Sourcing their software, but I can't find any other specifics about it...

P.S. -- Donate $5 or $10 to Radioparadise.com -- You'll Feel Better.

(Thanks, Cam -- and feel free to speak the truth about the Shrub -- some of us will be glad you did.)

Adventures in Hacktivism -- Day 1:

1) I type "congress" into Google.

2) Click on the 3rd or 4th thing down (not google's fault - ambiguous query :-)
on something that says "Congress.org - Write to Congress, the President and State..."
-- cause that's what I wanna do - write to these guys...

3) I end up on Congress.org - which is not actually a government or non-profit operation, as I initially suspected when I entered the website. It is actually a demonstration website for a product of Capital Advantage, who provides the demo as a "public service".

That said (that it's an infotisement -- which is a "nice" way of saying "an advertisement that informs") I'd like to say that it's a darn useful advertisement, and I look forward to more functional advertisements just like it in the future!

I'll just be over here checking out voting records (by zipcode) for a while...

So I decided to find out who "my representatives" were so I could start writing/faxing to them and begin to research who they are their polical history etc. to see if I want to vote for them in the future (and things like that).

One of the subjects that kept coming up at the OSCON 2002 conference a few weeks ago was the feeling of helplessness among conference goers who wanted to get more involved, but didn't know exactly where to begin.

Alas, it's a process I myself have started on more than one occasion, and abandoned for one frustrating reason or another every time. It can be pretty complicated getting started.

Nevertheless, I've decided to get the show on the road, and practice what I preach basically, and figure out where my reps are and what the story is on them so that I can convey the information to a wider audience. It is my goal to set something up for California -- and then perhaps others might take on the task for their states -- and maybe we can get a little organization going and get something accomplished in this upcoming election.

So off I go on my little "Ms. Smith Virtually Goes To Washington." How hard can it be to put together some lists of reps and their fax numbers? We're a gonna find out...

I need to decide if I can get a good quality DV for around $1,500-$2,000 or if it's worth it to make the jump to a more expensive camera.

Please mail me at lisarein@finetuning.com if you have any specific advice. About digital video editing equipment software/systems too.

I'm about to re-enter video/filmmaking and I'm going to need all the help I can get catching up on the last few years of technological advances :-)

Thanks in advance!

I sure like the idea of thinking of Benjamin Franklin as a hacker. And a patriotic hacker at that! (Like most of us, I imagine.)

Franklin was a socially and politically effective hacker who created the leading edge of science, technology, and society. He was responsible for breakthroughs like lighting=electricity, and inventions like bifocals and the Franklin stove. His printing operation was the 18th century equivalent of the web (the number of newspapers in the colonies expanded from a couple of dozen to a few hundred during his life, and he funded the creation of several of them).

Digital Speech.org has created a boilerplate letter you can send to your representative.

I hope to get to this later this evening. I'll let you know how it goes...

Janis Ian has written a great followup to her Internet Debacle article.

Here's where to get the TurboNet card and some Newbie Hacking Instructions from TiVo sTeVe-o.

The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is presenting a showing of films from the Prelinger Archive.

Check out the line up for this week and next week too.

Survival of the Fittest

Though these films were meant to consider the moment, they are often concerned with issues that irascibly linger. Here contradictions between Man, nature, and social byproducts duke it out.

Ant City (Almanac Films, 1949). Recut from a captured German science film, Ant City abuts images of the social life of ants with surreally dissociated narration. The effort to describe ant life in anthropomorphic terms leaves us feeling that such attempts to "humanize" other species are bound to fail. (9:56 mins, B&W)

A Nation at Your Fingertips (Audio Productions for the Bell System, 1951). For many, freedom to communicate instantly over a wide area didn't begin with e-mail, but with the telephone. This film dramatizes the exciting impact direct long-distance dialing had on isolated families. (10:19 mins, B&W)

Freedom Highway (Jerry Fairbanks Productions for Greyhound Lines, 1956). A bus transports us on a mysterious journey through the landscape of American mythology, overlaid with roads, battles, and Manifest Destiny. Its passengers, who include Tommy Kirk, Angie Dickinson, and Tex Ritter, learn that the space we inhabit can't be separated from the events that occurred there. (34:45 mins, Color)

Perversion for Profit (Citizens for Decent Literature, Inc., 1964-65). Banker Charles Keating and several others founded CDL in the early 1960s, producing "film essays" as part of their effort to influence anti-pornography legislation. Perversion for Profit shows examples of everyday erotica, reaching new heights of prurience in its efforts to censor offending body parts. (29:23 mins, Color)

# (Total running time: 85 mins, All films U.S., 16mm, From the Prelinger Archives)

PFA FILMSERIES: Films that Haunt the Future: Ephemera from the Prelinger Archives

PFA PLAYDATE: Thursday August 8, 2002

******

Artful Adaptations

Ephemeral films document all aspects of human life, from birth unto death. What follows are four films about people at odds with their environments, and how they try to help themselves.

Safety: Harm Hides at Home (Rodger Landoue, 1977). As usual in safety films, the everyday world is a minefield of potential risks, menaces, and jeopardy, but "Guardiana, the Safety Woman" and her supernatural powers are here to protect children from harm. (16 mins, Color)

Age 13 (Arthur Swerdloff for Sid Davis Productions, 1955). Sid Davis's most compassionate film and certainly his most unusual, Age 13 enlists Buñuelian surrealism and a neorealist sensibility to follow the emergence of an "at-risk" young teen from immobilizing anger to self-expression. In its inability to come to terms with customary film language, this might well be called an outsider film. (26:40 mins, B&W)

Social Class in America (Knickerbocker Productions, 1957). This sociology film obeys the conventions of educational films, but packs quite a wallop. Following three boys who grow up in a small company town, it shows the limits that social class imposes on mobility. An unusually downbeat (and realistic) document of disappointment in the fifties. (14:49 mins, B&W)

Boredom at Work: The Search for Zest (University of Oklahoma, 1963). From a remarkable series on the emotions of everyday life, The Search for Zest shows the efforts of a bored, desexualized, and neurotic engineer to find happiness through therapy. Borrowing from film noir and late 1950s TV drama, it might be read as a case study of a rural man trapped by his discontent with urban life. (25 mins, B&W)

# (Total running time: 83 mins, All films U.S., 16mm, From the Prelinger Archives)

PFA FILMSERIES: Films that Haunt the Future: Ephemera from the Prelinger Archives

PFA PLAYDATE: Thursday August 15, 2002

Here's more about GeekPAC from Doc Searls:
Setting Fire to Hollywood's Plans for the Net: The GeekPAC Story.

Hollywood Vigilantes vs. Copyright Pirates

Also, in the spirit of fair use - a poorly formatted version of this article is available by clicking "more"...

JULY 31, 2002

PERSPECTIVE
By Heather Green

Hollywood Vigilantes vs. Copyright Pirates
The entertainment industry doesn't need a law letting it hack and disable file-sharers. Why is Congress even considering it?

It would be fun to look at the most recent Hollywood-backed copyright protection bill and simply call it what it is: downright silly. Unfortunately, the debate over what to do about copyright protection seem to be building to a head in Washington, with Hollywood's view -- that no holds should be barred -- holding sway.

That means, unfortunately, that heedless bills like this one, which was introduced on July 25 in the House of Representatives by Representative Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and Howard Coble (R-N.C.), actually have to be taken seriously. So, instead of ignoring it as the scrap of nonsense that it is, let's call this bill irresponsible.

What's all the fuss? Berman's bill gives copyright owners a legal right to hack into and disable peer-to-peer networks suspected of illegally trading copyrighted works. It's an aggressive new tactic in a battle that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America initially waged primarily against those behind the software and services that they allege are contributing to copyright infringement.

FREEDOM TO ATTACK. Critics of the new tactic are calling it vigilante justice, and it certainly looks a lot like that. Frankly, the provisions under which a copyright owner gets to hack someone else's computer are pretty loosey goosey.

All copyright holders need to do before launching an attack is alert the Justice Dept. about the kind of software they're using. They don't have to tell Justice how long they plan to conduct a hacking campaign or even which site it will target. They don't even need to inform the person whose computer they are hacking what is going on -- even after the fact.

Meantime, consumers who share a network with the person being attacked could end up having their service impaired. And a legitimate file-sharing service could come under attack without a chance to respond to a copyright holder's claims of infringement.

THE SYSTEM WORKS. Forget how nonsensical and rare it is to grant any industry this kind of power. There's actually a more compelling point: Plenty of laws are already on the books to protect copyright holders. Copyright infringement is a crime. Courts and law-enforcement agencies already exist whose sole goal is to prevent crime. Entertainment companies have the option of tracking what they think are unlawful activities and alerting law officials.

Under the four-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act, copyright holders can also issue subpoenas to Internet service providers (ISPs) to obtain contact information about a potential infringer. Then copyright holders can send a warning e-mail or instigate litigation.

The beauty of these scenarios is that they follow the basic guidelines of due process by protecting innocent people, getting the bad guys, and providing at least the modicum of a forum for someone accused of copyright infringement to protect themselves.

THREE-PRONGED APPROACH. Using the existing system can produce results. Just ask the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Established in 1988 by technology companies, the BSA uses existing laws to go after pirates. Software outfits so far have a lot more skin in the game than the entertainment industry. They lost about $11 billion in sales last year. The RIAA, meantime, can't quantify the dollar impact of online piracy beyond stating that millions of dollars are at stake.

The BSA uses a three-pronged approach: working with policymakers, running education campaigns, and collaborating with law enforcement. The group often conducts its own investigations, referring those cases to law officials. It sends notices to ISPs about potentially pirated material, including material on peer-to-peer networks. It works with governments and businesses in the U.S. and abroad to run education campaigns.

Yet, even as the software piracy rate has increased, the BSA hasn't called for new laws. Unlike some entertainment companies, the BSA isn't asking Congress to mandate the inclusion of technology in all software, PCs, and servers to protect copyrighted works.

NO "SILVER BULLET." That's because the BSA has a sense of what works and what doesn't. And vigilante use of technology -- or the call for mandated technology that could affect other consumers, innovation, or the market -- just doesn't make sense. "There isn't one technological silver bullet," says Bob Kruger, BSA's vice-president for enforcement. "You have to look at it as a multifaceted problem that takes a multifaceted solution. If you put all your eggs in one basket, you're not got to be able to make a big difference."

The RIAA argues that it needs special exemptions. The organization does work with law enforcement and ISPs, but it says too many separate computers and services are out there for it to rely on the existing legal structure. In its fight against piracy, it wants to explore all the options. "Traditional methods can't control mass, worldwide piracy. That's why the Berman bill offers a unique perspective," says Mitch Glazier, senior vice-president for government relations at the RIAA.

Copyright holders haven't proven that they deserve that kind of power. Legislators shouldn't be willing to consider something as outlandish as Berman's bill until entertainment companies have proven first that they have exhausted the other legal avenues already available. Instead, the entertainment industry and Congress should take a look at the BSA's most recent piracy report, which explains why the the BSA has been successful in the past, and why it now faces new problems.

THINK LONG AND HARD. The chief reason for the lowering of piracy rates over time is simple, according to the BSA report. "As PC technology and the demand for software spread from the U.S. to other countries during the 1990s, there was, at times, a lag between the demand for software and the effective distribution of legal software.... The software industry has worked hard to have a legitimate sales presence in every country, making legal software sales and support easier to obtain."

As to the reason for a recent uptick in piracy, instead of pointing the finger at the Internet, the BSA explains that the increase is due to the economic downturn, with people in harder-hit countries turning back to pirating software.

Congress should consider a lot of things before considering Berman's bill. Legislators also should look at how other industries handle piracy. Instead of swallowing the entertainment industry's line, Congress needs to do a little thinking on its own.

(Note: I almost categorized this one under "Celebrity Bitchfights.")

Here's the story on it by the BBC:
Boeing tries to defy gravity.

Doc Searls has written a brilliant piece on the last month or so of developments surrounding the complex CARP and "Crazy Tech Legislation" (like the Berman Bill) Battles on Capitol Hill.

This thing is so loaded with important content, I know I'll be going over it in more detail over the course of the day, but I didn't want to hold up pointing it out to you:
Hollywood Steps Up Its Assault on the Net While Webcasting Death March Claims KPIG.

Craig Newmark sent out an email Tuesday urging California-based citizens to acknowledge their support for a SB773 (a Bill that Craig has personally taken the time to investigate) by going to Californiaprivacy.org and sending a form-based letter. (It took me about 15 seconds to do this.)

Here's Craig's Letter.

Here's the whole letter:

Like Mr. Ed, I never speak, unless I have something to say ... and I
happen to know a few things about forthcoming financial privacy
legislation, so here goes.

Right now, banks share your financial information to provide you with
services, which is okay, but also sell your financial information for
marketing purposes.

Jackie Speier has proposed a bill (SB 773) to stop this, but it's stalled
in the state assembly.

Some large banks and insurers are already in support of SB 773 and at
least a couple of large financial institutions have told me that, with a
few technical changes, they could live with this. So, while a change to
some existing business practices, SB 773 shouldn't put them out of
business.

The lawmakers really need to hear from you:

-- visit California Privacy: http://www.californiaprivacy.org/
and send Governor Gray Davis an email.

-- feedback? here's a discussion board:

http://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=5785

(If the state bill doesn't pass, it's been proposed at the County level
for San Francisco and San Mateo... and Chris Larsen, CEO of E-LOAN, has
committed a million to get it passed as a voter referendum. Then, this
problem can be addressed in Washington.)

Here's more about these issues, from a down-to-earth perspective. I feel
that there's a lot of confusion around this bill, in part, because the
people how know this stuff have a hard time explaining it to civilians.

The following guidelines protect your privacy from advertisers who overdo
it, while allowing the banks to do the services you request. It also
allows the banks to do some marketing in a way that's more effective for
them, for advertisers. If it's clear that they're making money from
sending you ads, maybe they should offer you a cut of the resulting
dollars.

To make conversation easy, I'd say a "bank" is any financial institution
and the other institutions it controls or uses ("outsources") to render
you the services you've contracted. An insurance company is a "bank" for
purposes of discussion, and so is a retailer issuing credit cards or a
family of insurance companies doing business together. The bank should
assume liability for info security and reliability, including identity
theft.

"disclosure" is the clear and conspicuous disclosure to customers of bank
practices and policies in a specific matter.

1. A bank may share customer financial information with another company to
provide services that the customer has requested. This includes secondary
purposes like fraud detection. Such relationships must be disclosed
periodically.

The customer may opt-out from some or all such sharing arrangments,
subject to denial of the related services. (It is assumed that the
customer opted into this relationship in the account application, even if
it wasn't clear at the time.)

2. A bank may promote other services from other companies without sharing
any information about you. For example, it might include advertising
inserts from other companies.

3. A bank may share customer financial information with other companies
for any purpose with customer permission, that is, opt-in. This permission
will remain in effect, until such time as the customer opts out. Every
such case must be disclosed periodically.

Again, here are ways to take action or find out more:

-- visit California Privacy: http://www.californiaprivacy.org/ and send
Governor Gray Davis an email.

-- any feedback? please use our discussion board:

http://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=5785

Thanks!

Craig

I've decided that Richard Stallman is right about "Intellectual Property" being a poor choice of words for lumping together several very different subjects (Copyright, Patents and Trademarks).

With that in mind, I've renamed my Tales of Copyright Royalties and Copyright History categories appropriately.

I'll tell you one thing: it sure takes more effort to describe them correctly. I had to do a lot of reading and thinking and stuff when I used to just be able to say "IP".

What's worse than an automated DMCA cease and dissest letter spamming system with lousy heuristics and a big hollywood budget?

One currently in use by our own government and law enforcement agencies for gathering "Open Source Intelligence".

P.S.Ranger's own news page seems to be a good place for articles on them.