From the press release: “The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property approved H.R. 1561, the United States Patent and Trademark Fee Modernization Act of 2003. The Department of Commerce’s U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is fully funded by user fees. The new fee structure contained in the legislation will fund… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: May 2003
Gov’t Surveillance Projects Proceed Unmonitored
Experts Say Technology Is Widely Disseminated Inside and Outside Military – “Congressional efforts to rein in a Pentagon surveillance project may be ineffective because new surveillance technology is being widely disseminated both inside and outside of the military and other less visible federal offices are pursuing similar research, industry executives and computer scientists say.” Continue Reading
Search Engines: To Pay or Not to Pay
An update to my April 23 posting on the Summit on Web Credibility – Here is a link to edited transcripts of presentations made at the conference, wherein Experts Discuss Paid vs. ‘Pure’ Search Results. Said experts are from Hewlett-Packard, Google, Overture, ConsumerReports.org and Consumer WebWatch. Continue Reading
Challenge of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act Continues
See the following updates on The Eric Eldred Act website: The Eric Eldred Act FAQ What precisely are we talking about? (a one-page discussion draft – “To allow unused copyrighted works to enter the public domain after 50 years, while allowing copyright owners the full protection of the established copyright term.”) Continue Reading
Google Hacks Hits New York Times Best Seller List
Kudos to Tara Calishain and co-author Rael Dornfest, whose book, Google Hacks, is on the New York Times Paperback Bestseller List! Continue Reading
Campus File Sharing Dialogue
The Chronicle of Higher Education published the text of a dialogue, New Approaches to File Sharing, between Penn State President Graham Spanier and students from throughout the country and abroad. Issues addressed included the possible institution of fees for using P2P applications via campus networks, acceptable use policies, the implementation of legitimate file sharing applications… Continue Reading
Search Engines and Privacy
Search Privacy: An Issue?, Part 1 Danny Sullivan details Google’s privacy and data collection policies. Continue Reading
Are Wikis the Next Hot Web Tool?
Business Is Toying With a Web Tool puts the spotlight on an innovative, user friendly open-source tool called a wiki, used to create inter-related web pages. Not new to the scene (the technology was first used in 1995), but perhaps ready to be embraced along the lines of blogging applications, wiki technology offers many interesting… Continue Reading
Google’s Plans for Blogger
According to Dan Gillmor, “Google co-founder Sergey Brin said there were no plans to segregate weblog content from the main search engine results.” Continue Reading
More on the DARPA Surveillance Program
From AP: Pentagon readies massive spy system, “To thwart terrorists, the Pentagon is developing a computer surveillance system that would give U.S. agents fingertip access to government and commercial records from around the world that could fill the Library of Congress more than 50 times.” Continue Reading
Gov’t Surveillance Programs in Spotlight
Today’s Wall Street Journal article, Data Collection Is Up Sharply Following 9/11 (subscription req’d), documents examples of the rapid acceleration and increasing sophistication of text mining programs created by private contractors to populate huge, searchable database systems. Used on both a state and federal level, these systems, which are increasingly linked via network applications, are… Continue Reading
Colorado Super DMCA Bill Vetoed
The EFF reports that on May 21, Colorado Governor Bill Owens vetoed House Bill 1303, the so called Super DMCA legislation for which the Motion Picture Association provided the draft model language used in state legislatures throughout the country. Continue Reading
