Another good piece on the copyright land grab.

The main message of Heather Green’s excellent Business Week piece is that Congress’ continual extension of the protection period — under publishers’ tenacious lobbying — has all but ended fair use.

“To create a safety valve so that copyright wouldn’t clash with the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and to recognize fair abridgments, a fair use doctrine was established, granting individuals certain rights over how they use copyrighted material. Now, though, that balance is being upset. The threat of the Net sent the publishing industry scrambling, and fair use and public domain are being crowded. That’s putting innovation at risk. The first side of the squeeze on innovation comes in extending the delay in allowing works to fall into the public domain. That’s what’s at issue in the case the Supreme Court will hear in October. Congress has extended copyright terms 11 times since 1962, compared to only twice from 1790 to 1962. A big contention of the current Supreme Court case is that lawmakers are simply turning limited copyright protection into endless protection by continually extending the terms. That trend negates the intention of the limited copyright. ”

When I wrote a column in the Observer about spam I had a huge postbag (well, inbox) in response — more than I ever remember about any other subject. It felt as though I had touched a raw nerve. But I also had messages from readers claiming that I was going overboard — that spam was a nuisance, certainly, but a tolerable one. In vain have I tried to explain that, if unchecked, spam will lead to a tragedy of the digital commons which we will all one day rue. So I was pleased to see that someone else takes it seriously. “On Feb. 18 and 19”, this Business Week piece begins, “e-mail delivery to thousands of AT&T WorldNet customers slowed to a trickle. Some messages took as many as 24 hours to arrive — an eternity in Internet time. The reason? Spam — those irritating, unwanted e-mail messages that clog your in-box hawking everything from hot sex and Viagra to interest-free loans. WorldNet, which processes 15 million to 20 million messages each day, was suddenly besieged by millions of junk e-mail pitches — just as one of its sophisticated anti-spam filters went on the blink. It was the first time that spam brought a large Internet service provider (ISP) to a virtual standstill. “

An intruder broke into the New York Times intranet recently. Not that it was difficult, it seems. He managed to gather all kinds of confidential information about Times op-ed contributors etc. but did no real damage — and alerted the newspaper to the vulnerability he’d been able to exploit. But what if he’d got to the website and subtly altered Times copy? This highlights the risk of what Bruce Schneier calls ‘semantic attacks’. It means that we may need to become more vigilant about what we read online.

More on copy-protected music CDs.

Useful round-up article in today’s New York Times. The story, however, underplayed the computer industry’s hostility to the demands of the copyright thugs. Basically, they are demanding that Congress legislates to ensure that every computing device sold conforms to their requirements — that, in effect, we should have to get a government licence to own a general purpose PC — just as you have to get a licence to own a gun in the UK. The Intel rep (the only tech spokesman available, it seems) pointed out mildly that this would, er, slow down innovation in the computing industry. What he ought to have pointed out to the somnolent legislators is that the computing and technology industries are orders of magnitude more important to the US economy than the recording industry. So legislators will have to decide where their priorities lie — crippling a huge strategic industry in order to feather-bed a smaller one.

Footnote: according to figures published by Salon, the computing industry dwarfs Hollywood in size — US domestic spending on technology goods and services totaled $600 billion in 2000, according to government figures, while Hollywood receipts equaled $35 billion.

Blogging Here to Stay, says Dan Gillmor.

In this piece , Dan Gillmor argues that Andrew Sullivan got it right — while castigating him for writing a piece without links to other people’s sites. (Dave Winer sees this as typical professional-journo behaviour.) But the best part of Dan’s essay is this:

“My guiding principles in journalism are the usual ones. I believe in getting it right, being fair, shining lights on things that are hidden when they affect the public good, etc. But I have developed another guiding principle in the way I do this craft.

My readers know more than I do. And if we can all take advantage of that, in the best sense of the expression, we will all be better informed.”

Peer-to-Peer Knowledge.

What an interesting idea. “Works just like Peer-to-Peer music services, but we don’t share music; we help people share knowledge, connect to each other and find things and information. P2PQ is a dynamic directory of live people, available to you from anywhere and any device. “

In technical terms, it’s a client server system for farming out questions to people via a modified instant messaging system, returning the aggregated answers to a single webpage or device. No Mac client available yet, though. :-(

Andrew Sullivan really gets it. This man understands the significance of the Blogging phenomenon. “Blogger even provides a handy, idiot-proof rubric for a simple site. And all this is provided for free. It was, I realized two years ago, the nascent Napster of the journalism industry. Just as Napster by-passed the record companies and brought music to people with barely any mediation, so Blogger by-passed established magazines, newspapers, editors and proprietors, and allowed direct peer-to-peer journalism to flourish.”

This is a VERY perceptive piece. At one point he says:
“Peer-to-peer journalism, I realized, had a huge advantage over old-style journalism. It could marshall the knowledge and resources of thousands, rather than the certitudes of the few.”

What to do if anyone ever tries to fire you: demand to see all company e-mails relating to you.

According to this interesting Financial Times article, the tendency to commit things to e-mail that people would never dream of writing on paper appears unaffected by knowledge of the legal – not to mention reputational – trap it sets for the employer.

Charles Russell, the law firm, paid an estimated £10,000 compensation to a black secretary last month after she accidentally caught sight of an e-mail sent between two lawyers concerning her replacement.

“Can we go for a real fit busty blonde this time?” wrote Adam Dowdney. “She can’t be any more trouble and at least it would provide some entertainment!”

A shame faced Mr Dowdney later apologised for the message as being a “senseless and thoughtless joke”.

“It’s common on e-mail to find a forthright discussion about someone’s performance or about possibly making them redundant,” says Tim Russell, head of the employment group at Norton Rose, the law firm. “If I’m acting for someone, I always seek pre-determinative e-mails for proof that they’ve been stitched up.”

How to tell if a ‘cease and desist’ letter from a lawyer trying to close your Website down is serious…

Click on Chilling Effects, and you will find all kinds of useful information about your legal rights and entitlements posted by law students from Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley. According to this New York Times piece, the site invites Internet users to submit the notices they have received, all of which will be annotated by the students. As the database grows, the site’s operators plan to publish a regular update that they hope will help document for legislators and others how intellectual property holders are using or abusing their rights.

What a great use of the Web!

According to this article by James Cowan, there are now upwards of half a million Weblogs out there.