Wonderful story by Larry Lessig about the way the copyright thugs have reached deep into even elite universities. He wrote a scholarly paper. He launched a copy of Morpheus and put his paper in the shared folder. Went home for the weekend. On Monday he comes into the office and his computer is disconnected. Stanford security had paid him a visit. “That’s illegal,” they said. Note the irony. Larry is the author of the paper. He owns the copyright. All he sought to do was to use Morpheus to share it freely. But the RIAA and its legal lackeys are so obsessed with the idea that we are all thieves that they cannot contemplate the notion of anyone using file-sharing software for sharing ideas.  [Thanks to Dave Winer for this.]

A Dozen Things We Know About Blogs
Thoughtful web essay about the phenomenon.

Why openness is best — even in cryptography. (Especially in cryptography?)

“Cryptography is hard, and almost all cryptographic systems are insecure. It takes the cryptographic community, working over years, to properly vet a system. Almost all secure cryptographic systems were developed with public and published algorithms and protocols. I can’t think of a single cryptographic system developed in secret that, when eventually disclosed to the public, didn’t have flaws discovered by the cryptographic community. And this includes the Skipjack algorithm and the Clipper protocol, both NSA-developed.”

Excerpt from Brice Schneier’s latest Cryptogram newsletter.

More fallout from AOL Time Warner
“NYT” report on Gerald Levin’s departure.

“You just lost $54 billion,” an angry shareholder told the executives yesterday, referring to the noncash charge that AOL Time Warner took in the first quarter to account for the company’s plunge in value since the merger. “Where’d that come from?” the accuser continued. “Our pockets — the shareholders — not the options you got.”

Because Mr. Levin is expected to continue as an adviser to the company, analysts and company executives are wary of discussing his legacy on the record. But a recurrent criticism is that Mr. Levin gave away too much of the company when he agreed to merger terms in January 2000 that granted America Online 55 percent of Time Warner for AOL stock — just months before the bursting of the Internet bubble.

No one can predict the future of the stock market, of course. But industry executives also fault Mr. Levin for having overestimated the opportunities for complements between Time Warner’s conventional media holdings and AOL’s Internet business.

“When he sold to AOL, he sold for nothing,” one industry executive said. “It was pretty clear that the great synergies Jerry talked about were unrealistic.”

Will Bluetooth 1.1 do the business?
Useful — and fairly measured — “NYT” article.

” Almost alone among the cast of literary friends and enemies who populated his life, Orwell has managed to preserve and extend his relevance into a world that he would scarcely recognise.” D.J. Taylor on George Orwell’s enduring influence. Had he lived, GO would have been 99 next month.

Wonderful essay by John Gilmore on the technical absurdities ahead if the Hollings Bill ever became law.

John Gilmore is one of the Net’s Elders — and often credited with the adage that ‘the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’. He has written a scarifying piece tracing the logical implications of the Hollings Bill to force the computer industry to build copy-protection into all its products.

Free Spam filter
A reader sent me this link.

The Culture of Martyrdom: How suicide bombing became not just a means but an end
Interesting piece by David Brooks in The Atlantic on the origins and philosophy of suicide bombing.

The coming choice: do we want a vibrant computer industry, or a protected movie business?
Blunt Fortune story about Hollywood’s demand that technology march at its glacial pace.

“Hollywood has gone to Washington to stop the trading of pirated movies online. It has thrown its lobbying muscle behind a bill, introduced by South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings, that would order the Federal Communications Commission to find a way to halt this thievery if the entertainment and technology sectors can’t come up with their own solution. Disney CEO Michael Eisner, testifying in favor of the bill, took the opportunity to bash Silicon Valley on the Senate floor: “We’re dealing with an industry where an unspoken strategy is that the killer app is piracy.” […] The bill, however, is anathema to technology leaders like Intel Chairman Andy Grove and Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs. They fear the government could muck up the computer industry royally. Moreover, they question whether it’s their responsibility to rescue an industry that has historically been more concerned with cranking out Frankenstein sequels than embracing change. “Were the manufacturers of printing presses forced to protect the monks?” Grove asked in a recent op-ed piece. “Was the PC industry forced to protect the mainframe computer industry? Why is this case any different?” In an interview, Grove says, “We spent a decade talking convergence, and now that convergence is about to happen the content industry says, ‘Oh, not so soon’ and ‘Not this way and not that way.’ I think they are deadly afraid of [convergence], deadly afraid of what it is going to do to their business.” The message is clear: The studio owners are dinosaurs. If they can’t adapt to the brave new world that companies like Intel and Apple have ushered in, extinction is what they deserve.”