US Court begs to differ on location of Web-libel liability

Just as I expected. NEWS.COM story:

“Less than a week after Australia’s high court issued a ruling suggesting that online publishers are fair game for libel suits anywhere their content appears, a U.S. federal court has veered in the opposite direction.

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals said two Connecticut newspapers could not be sued for libel in a Virginia court on the basis of allegedly defamatory articles posted on their Web sites. ” The key question was whether the newspapers intended “to direct their Web site content, which included certain articles discussing conditions in a Virginia prison, to a Virginia audience,” and concluded the answer was definitely no. Instead of targeting Virginians, the court ruled, the papers’ Web sites were designed to be useful to residents of Connecticut, with information about weather and state politics, and local classified ads.

“The facts in this case establish that the newspapers’ Web sites, as well as the articles in question, were aimed at a Connecticut audience. The newspapers did not post materials on the Internet with the manifest intent of targeting Virginia readers,” the court said.

Creative Commons launch.

Creative Commons press release. “People want to bridge the public domain with the realm of private copyrights,” said Stanford Law Professor and Creative Commons Chairman Lawrence Lessig.

This morning Creative Commons opened up a formerly private part of their site containing enumerations of the different licenses they support. It’s very simple. A document, a weblog, a RSS file, a PDF or whatever, can specify which license applies. On the CC site, they tell you how to do it with RDF, but I’m interested in a solution that can be used in RSS 2.0 files, so we can in turn add a user interface to Rado and Manila (and others can do it for other authoring tools) that tie into the CC system. I totally support the idea of lawyers helping creative people instead of controlling us, but I can’t convert everything I do to RDF to show my support. Tonight is their launch. I’m going to it. If we can get a namespace defined and vetted today, I can announce our support tonight.So here’s the RFC. Have a read, and post comments on the discussion group or send via email. Thanks.

RFC: creativeCommons RSS Module. “A RSS module that adds an element at the or level that specifies which Creative Commons license applies.”

[Scripting News]

John Markoff writes about military efforts to restrict unlicensed wireless use: The US military operates radar in the 5 GHz range, the same used by 802.11a, that they’re leery of talking much about. The 5 GHz range was considered mostly open space, and colleagues at the 802.11 Planet conference pointed out to me on a few occasions that the middle part of 5 GHz, currently not available for 802.11a, is used for overseas radar by the US, not domestic.

[80211b News]

Creative Commons launches today!

Creative Commons machine-readable licenses will be available to the public free of charge from today. The release will take place at an early-evening reception in San Francisco which includes a chat and screening by DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid (NYC); a multimedia jam by People Like Us (London); and an address by Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons. Learn creative ways to distribute your works and find pointers to all sorts of licensed content you can use right away. It’s at the SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street. Wish I was there.

At last — some real insight into file-sharing

Tim O’Reilly has written a terrific essay on the reality of file-sharing. Among other things, it’s a reminder of the importance of not letting the opposition get control of language — e.g. the way the copyright thugs seek to brand everyone who downloads a music file as a ‘pirate’. Piracy is something quite different — the wholesale copying of copyrighted material and its onward sale for profit. Tim structures his essay in terms of a number of ‘lessons’:

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
Lesson 5: File sharing networks don’t threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
Lesson 6: “Free” is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
Lesson 7: There’s more than one way to do it.

Financial Times: A threat to innovation on the web. Lawrence Lessig. But increasingly, the providers of internet connectivity are pushing a different principle. US broadband companies are trying to ensure that they have the power to decide which applications and content can run. [Tomalak’s Realm]

More on the online shopping boom

According to this NYT report, the Internet will represent 30 percent of Lands’ End’s holiday sales, up from 25 percent last year.

My Observer profile of Google…

… is in today’s paper

DeCSS show trial opens in Oslo

Register story.

Online shopping takes off in the UK

According to this BBC Online story, UK online shoppers went on a record spree last month. The data comes from a survey by a market research firm which found that “sales broke through the £1bn mark last month, and have nearly doubled over the past year.

The growth in internet shopping is running about 15 times faster than that of general retail sales, the survey found.

IMRG also said that online shopping in the UK was growing three times faster than in the US.

“This high growth confirms that UK consumers at large are getting very confident with online purchasing,” said Jaap Favier, research director at Forrester Research, which carried out the survey.”