On March 4, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced the Benefit Authors without Limiting Advancement or Net Consumer Expectations, or BALANCE Act, that mirrors the text of H. R. 5522, the Digital Choice and Freedom Act of 2002, introduced by Lofgren October 2, 2002. From yesterday’s press release: “This legislation would ensure that consumers are able… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Digital Rights
File Swapping and Free Speech on College Campuses
From Findlaw’s Writ, the author of Should Universities Crack Down On Illegal Swapping? champions the position that “universities should take the lead in mounting free speech and “fair use” challenges to the application of NETA and the DMCA.” See also my February 27 posting on this issue, P2P File Sharing on Campuses. Continue Reading
Digital Rights Management and Business Models
From the Digital Rights Management Conference, February 27- March 1, 2003, sponsored by the The Berkeley Center for Law and Technology: Lon Sobel, DRM as an Enabler of Business Models: ISPs as Digital Retailers, 18 Berkeley Tech. L.J. xx (forthcoming 2003) (Word, PDF, HTML). See also this New York Times article, Pondering Value of Copyright… Continue Reading
P2P File Sharing on Campuses
The Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held an oversight hearing on “Peer-to-Peer Piracy On University Campuses,” February 26, 2003. The following documents and testimony are available via their website: the Witness List, Statement of Chairman Lamar Smith, testimony of Molly Broad (President of the University of North Carolina), testimony of Hilary Rosen… Continue Reading
Microsoft's Digital Rights Management Plan
On February 21, Microsoft announced the Windows Rights Management Services For Windows Server 2003. The company also released a white paper, Continue Reading
The New Copyright Frontier
The March 2003 issue of Scientific American includes an article, Some Rights Reserved, on the non-profit Creative Commons licensing project that promotes a new avenue of sharing copyrighted works while retaining different levels of rights of authorship. See my previous post on this topic here. Continue Reading
New Global Online Forum on Science and Technology
ICSU (International Council of Scientific Unions) launched a new online global discussion forum focused on ensuring universal access to scientific knowledge. There are currently 26 articles posted on the site from authors around the world, and issues addressed include copyright, privacy, digital rights and the free and unfettered publication and distribution of scientific research via… Continue Reading
Ruling on Verizon Privacy Dispute Anticipated
Verizon has requested a stay in Judge John D. Bates’ (United States District Court for the District of Columbia) ruling in favor of RIAA, compelling Verizon to release personal customer data on a subscriber who downloaded copyrighted music. See my previous post on this issue here. Continue Reading
File Sharing Limitations for College Students
As previously reported, college and university students are under growing scrutiny for downloading digital files using campus provided ISP access. Brown University is the latest institution in the news to formalize efforts to control the parameters of student use of file sharing applications. Keeping the DMCA (PDF) firmly in mind, and with an awareneess of… Continue Reading
Monitoring File Sharing Downloads
Copyright and piracy issues associated with file sharing are the subject of news articles, lawsuits and web forum discussion groups. Add another element to this mix: a company whose business is to monitor file sharing traffic from popular applications such as Kazaa and Morpheus. The company is called BigChampagne, and it tracks 25 million searches… Continue Reading
Record Company President Supports Music Downloading
Embrace file-sharing, or die is a new article from Salon, available free and in full-text (but requiring that you view ads in between pages). It is actually the text of a presentation made last week by John Snyder, president of Artist House Records, to the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) and the… Continue Reading
USPTO Hearing on Protection of Copyrighted Works
The USPTO held a hearing yesterday in accordance with the requirements of the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002 (known as the TEACH Act), Public Law 107-273. See my previous post here on this issue of protecting digitized copyrighted works that are used in distance education. Public comments from the Federal Register notice… Continue Reading
