Rule-making on allowable reasons for DMCA circumvention falls due again
Wired report.

“Starting Nov. 19, the United States Copyright Office will begin taking public comments on the section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, known as the DMCA, which prohibits people from breaking encryption technologies.

When the DMCA was enacted Oct. 28, 1998, a provision was built in that requires the registrar of copyrights and the assistant secretary for communications and information to revisit certain aspects of the law every three years.”

The rule making is supposed to determine what circumvention activities are legal. But the problem is that it will have little immediate impact on what people can do to circumvent digital copyright protection. The arbiters might find that certain users (e.g. librarians) might have legitimate reasons for circumventing the copy protection in, say, e-books. But the DMCA still makes illegal all tools for achieving that end. The only way out of this is to amend the DMCA.

The grim reaper strikes — twice. Keith Uncapher and Matthew Lyon both dead

Keith Uncapher was Paul Baran’s boss at RAND and founded the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, where Jon Postel worked and where the domain name system evolved under Uncapher’s general oversight. The “NYT” ran a nice obituary.

It was only when browsing the piece that I discovered that Matthew Lyon — who with his wife Katie Hafner wrote the first history of the ARPANET — died last February at the age of 45. Makes you think, doesn’t it.

Broadband users more likely to go in for file-sharing, says survey. Well, whaddya know?

According to this BBC report, 39% of broadband users swap music files, as compared with 18% of dial-up users. ” Perhaps even more worrying for the music industry is that 44% of net users admit that they do not want to pay for online music in future.

‘The digital music industry in Europe is in danger of being stillborn,’ said Jupiter Media analyst Mark Mulligan. ” Quite.

New York Times discovers Slashdot

There’s a slightly bemused, patronising tone to the piece, like something written by a maiden aunt who had discovered that her nephews were making hooch in the garden shed and selling it at a profit.

The Zoe explanation
Dave Winer writes…Probably because I’ve written about “personal information managers,” I’ve occasionally received e-mails about Zoe — an innovative e-mail indexer. But I could never make much headway from Zoe’s site toward figuring out exactly what it did. Now, thanks to this Jon Udell column from O’Reilly, I get it: Zoe Googles your e-mail stash, turning it into a permanently accessible, organized, useful, Web-formatted archive.

Linus on Microsoft

Well, er, sort of. This Register report of a BBC Interview with the great man suggests he doesn’t really care. “Will Linux ever topple Microsoft? Torvalds doesn’t think so. He notes that, despite the fact the world+dog moans about the shortfalls of Microsoft’s operating system, they will all install and use the systems. They don’t care about computing, which he says is the reason for this ignorance. Worse still, they don’t like change. And who can blame them, if they’re a large organisation, when converting to Linux could cost them millions. ”

The evolution of NFSNET

Very informative paper co-authored by Francois Bar.

Professor Lessig goes to Washington

Eldred v. Ashcroft was argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Nice profile of Lessig by Stephen Levy. By all accounts, it was a sobering hearing. Here’s a wonderful blog by a non-lawyer who sat in on the session. Business Week did a good piece on the significance of the Eldred case in September. There’s a good roundup of the case and its coverage here. The plaintiffs’ document centre is here. And here is Larry’s home page.

Later…

The Economist has a nice piece about him. “A Ralph Nader of the Internet, he fights against the mighty corporations that want to squeeze the vitality out of the web, trampling consumers in the name of Mammon. Were his target a cigarette company, say, Hollywood would already be making ‘Lessig, the movie’. Instead, it has branded him a cultural anarchist bent on justifying the rampant theft of others’ property in the name of ‘openness’ — ie, a direct threat to its bottom line. This week, Mr Lessig landed another blow, arguing his case before America’s Supreme Court.”

The article expects Lessig to lose but concludes: “Mr Lessig is surely correct that creativity in a media-obsessed culture relies on easy access to existing creative works. Disney itself, he points out, has thrived in large part by exploiting stories already in the public domain, such as ‘Snow White’ and ‘Cinderella’. On the other hand, America’s mighty entertainment industry faces a genuine dilemma: how to use the digital revolution to make loads of money when new technology can turn customers into its biggest enemy. Mr Lessig and his fans want to ensure that, far from embracing the revolution, Hollywood and its allies do not simply strangle it.”

And still more…

The “NYT” reported that “the statute’s challengers knew they had not scored a decisive victory. ‘My sense is that the case could be in trouble, ‘Charles Nesson, the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said afterward at a lunch reception. ‘They saw the problem, but they didn’t necessarily buy our solution.'”

John Sulston wins a Nobel Prize

What’s remarkable about him (apart from his obsessive thoroughness) is his wonderful commitment to the idea that scientific knowledge belongs in the public domain. Lovely profile by Andrew Brown — a model of well-informed, sympathetic journalism.

Newsweek: Glitterati vs. Geeks. Steven Levy. “Now Lessig has his chance to shift the momentum by overturning the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The most recent of 11 extensions of copyright terms, it stretches exclusive control of a work from 50 to 70 years after the creator’s death.” [Tomalak’s Realm]

Levy is usually pretty good — though not immune from puff pieces on Apple or acting as an apologist for venture capitalists (!) for Newsweek in the past. However that may be more Newsweek’s than Levy’s fault.

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