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2007 International Privacy Rankings (from EPIC and Privacy International)
Just published at Privacy International At the same time, technological advances, technology standards, interoperability between information systems and the globalisation of information have placed extraordinary pressure on the few remaining privacy safeguards. The effect of these developments has been to create surveillance societies that nurture hostile environments for privacy. Continue reading
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David Byrne’s “Survival Tips” for Musicians (and Record Companies)
In the January issue of Wired David Byrne reviews the current economics of the music industry. The classic model of a recording company handling production (the recording studio), promotion (touring), and distribution (CDs) is being displaced at each step. Recording studios are now laptops, promotion is now a MySpace page, and distribution is now a… Continue reading
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Creative Uses of Office for Mac
The folks at Microsoft’s MacBU have taken some heat for this (as the decision to develop and promote a community site for innovative Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents when Office 2008 is, well, late). Some cool examples nonetheless. What would Professor Lessig say about the copyright to these examples… www.artofoffice.com Continue reading
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Real Estate in Second Life
In the past few years, MMORPGS have become more than a place to play games or engage in virtual conversations evolving into a place for commerce and economic experiments. It is common for people to sell game objects (swords, spells) from MMORPGs like Everquest on eBay for real currency. Companies have begun using these enviornments… Continue reading
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Municipal WiFi
As we become more reliant on computers in business and education a new type of poverty is created, that of technology haves and have-nots. This gap is commonly referred to as the “digital divide.” This Wired magazine article discuss one effort to bridge that gap using the power of free, wireless Internet access. http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/04/wifiproject_0403 Continue reading
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Register – Google Changes “Street View” Privacy Policy
Google’s Street View — think of it as zooming in beyond the rooftops from Google Earth — captures precise images of everything in a 360? radius as its photographers (mounted cameras in VW Bugs) cruise U.S. streets. The benefit is that you can check out, say, landmarks for that restaurant you want to visit, or… Continue reading
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Tracking Electronic Downloads
Content owners and their associations (in the U.S., the RIAA and MPAA) are developing more sophisticated techniques for detecting pirated content. Two articles: The first from a pro-sharing site focused on the Bit Torrent technology discussing methods in the U.K. ; the second an article on software employed by copyright holders to track and identify… Continue reading
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Document Retention Policies
As more information is stored electronically, producing that information for the purposes of litigation creates challenges and perils for companies. In the U.S., new rules governing the retention and production of electronically stored information (“ESI”) went into effect in December, 2006, rules that impose obligations for record retention. http://www.masslawblog.com/?p=122 http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/continuity/features/article.php/3642421 https://www.lexisnexis.com/applieddiscovery/lawlibrary/whitePapers/ADI_WP_ElementsOfAGoodDocRetentionPolicy.pdf Continue reading
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HP Leak Case
One of the most fascinating examples of how technology may be used to infringe on one’s privacy is the recent case involving HP that turned on three factors:- One, the availability of personal information online (in this case cell phone records) – Two, the lack of effective authentication on those sites – Three, the lack… Continue reading
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Turnitin Case
Technology presents all manner of new challanges for copyright law… Turnitin is a Web-based tool to allow educators to check the originality of student’s work — it does block text comparisons of papers against its database to find exact or too-close matches. Problem is (from an IP law standpoint) is that students have a copyright… Continue reading
