Tech Law

If you use one of America’s top Internet service providers, you may share server space with an organization that enables worldwide terrorism, says a new study by Tel Aviv University.
A workshop on terrorist organizations and the Internet was organized for the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) by the Netvision Institute for Internet Studies (NIIS) and [...]

A fascinating new paper from the Journal of Consumer Research investigates the seven-year war on music downloading that unfolded among corporate music executives and music downloaders. Markus Giesler (York University) uses a performance-ethnography approach, studying the music marketplace as a cultural stage on which consumers and producers interact as dramatic players to reach their conflicting [...]

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has resolved to formally request the Free Software Software Foundation (FSF) modify the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) so that mass collaborative projects such as Wikipedia can use and license existing GFDL content under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license.
“We are grateful for the wonderful work the Free Software [...]

The American Chemical Society (ACS) today praised House passage of legislation seeking to improve federal coordination, dissemination and investment in green chemistry research and development (R&D). The Green Chemistry Research and Development Act of 2007 (HR 2850) aims to provide safer, more sustainable technological options to replace traditional products and processes.
H.R. 2850 was introduced in [...]

Gnomie Mark Van Patten of Bowling Green, Kentucky writes:
Hello,
I watched some of Gnomedex online and am hoping you are the person to help.
Why aren’t you and others laughing at this?

ConnectKentucky has facilitated efforts garnering unprecedented success in broadband deployment
and technology advancement.

America is watching Kentucky’s success story and as a result, states are considering the possibility [...]

XM Satellite Radio and SIRIUS Satellite Radio today issued the following comment on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision adopting new rules for digital audio broadcasting:
“The FCC decision underlines that HD radio on the AM/FM bands provide a real alternative to satellite, and that the current audio entertainment market is broad, robust and competitive. The [...]

Charging online content providers such as Yahoo! and Google for preferential access to the customers of Internet service providers might not be in the best interest of the millions of Americans, despite claims to the contrary, a new University of Florida study finds.
“The conventional wisdom is that Internet service providers would have greater incentive to [...]

Sometimes, the email surprises me. This is especially the case with some of the email about the Julie Amero case that has been discussed on these pages and links given on FlyingHamster. A number of the correspondences have centered on the theme that I (and people who are drawing attention to the Amero matter) are [...]

Alex Eckelberry, the president of Sunbelt Software, has written an excellent article about the Julie Amero case. Alex writes:
“The machine was a haggard old system that was not adequately protected against these types of threats (Windows 98 running Internet Explorer 5 with only middling antivirus protection, no firewall, no antispyware program, no popup blocking and [...]

It would seem that there is universal agreement that child pornography is evil. On the main page of FlyingHamster on January 15, 2007, there was a posting about the case of sixteen year old Matthew Brady:
“It sounds like a rite of passage - a high school boy looking at sexually explicit Web sites. So why [...]

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the world’s largest charitable funder of type 1 diabetes research, applauded today’s important vote to expand federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research with the passage of H.R. 3 - the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007.
“The passage of the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act marks an important [...]

The music publishing industry reached a tentative deal with operators of the Kazaa file-sharing network over claims of copyright infringement, an industry group said.
Publishers pursuing a class-action suit against Kazaa informed U.S. District Court on Monday that the peer-to-peer network had agreed to pay “a substantial sum” under the agreement, the National Music Publishers’ Association [...]

A network administrator for a peer-to-peer Internet file-sharing system has been sentenced to five months in prison for copyright infringement.
Grant T. Stanley, 23, was also given five months of home detention, three years of supervised probation, and a $3,000 fine for his role in the Elite Torrents service, which used a sharing technology known as [...]

Robert McMillan of itWorldCanada writes:
After winning a US$11.7 million judgment against the Spamhaus Project Ltd., e-mail marketer e360 Insight LLC is asking a federal court to shut down the antispam service.
E360 has filed a proposed court order with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois that calls on the organizations responsible for [...]

Saw this coming a mile away. It’s always fascinating when people - or companies - show their true colors.
Apple Computers is sending cease and desist letters, apparently, to a number of companies and organizations that are using the term “pod” in their positioning or names, claiming it causes confusion in the marketplace. Podcast Ready is [...]

To many of you out there, this must sound silly. No one can own this concept of perceived usability, right? Or can they?

I could see why adult-oriented business might have been a little annoyed with the notion of being forced to move their online smut huts to an .xxx domain (for reasons I mentioned a couple of months ago), but I’d have thought conservative groups would have championed the idea as an easier way to censor such [...]

“Oops! I saw boobs!” I wonder if art museums are going to have to comply with this law if it passes. Declan McCullagh of CNET News writes:
Web site operators posting sexually explicit information must place official government warning labels on their pages or risk being imprisoned for up to five years, the Bush administration proposed [...]

Batten down the hatches, Pierre! Looks like the French National Assembly is hoisting the Jolly Roger over the issue of online piracy. Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribune reports:

Big business can be intrusive - especially when that big business is run by your government. Even more so when your government is China. Peter Svensson of the Associated Press (via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer) writes:
A U.S. maker of network management systems said Wednesday it had received an order from Shanghai Telecom Co. for a system [...]