When elephants dance, it's best to get out of the way. That's exactly what's happening now as the entertainment industry--the recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainly--attempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isn't it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective mind's eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the tools--computers mostly--that allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. That's all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturers--the companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD players--have aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for us--both authors and customers--we're likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: "If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; they're too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc."

An interesting piece.

New York Times - free registration required Braking for Dummies.

Surveillance programs reduce crime, the experts say, and there are plenty of statistics to back them up. But there is a new trend in surveillance, and it seems to be working, too: fake surveillance.

Last week the New York City Department of Transportation announced it was joining London, Tokyo and other cities around the world in adding Imitation Security programs to their efforts to deter traffic violations.

Since 1993, New York has put up 50 real cameras on unobtrusive 14-foot steel and aluminum poles in high-incident areas to capture red-light renegades on film. The result: the total collection of $50 fines mailed to registered owners of the violating cars has exceeded $10 million. The city has seen the greatest success on Queens Boulevard, once coined the Boulevard of Death for its pedestrian death rate, where moving violations have dropped 40 percent.

Over the next six to eight weeks, New York will perch 200 fake cameras on the same kinds of poles, in the same kinds of trouble spots.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Medical Privacy Rules To Be Gutted.

Industry Click/Catalog Age - DMA report finds Web marketers responding to privacy challenges.

Most Web catalogers are opting in to offering opt-outs. According to the new E-Commerce Industry Report 2001-2002 from the Direct Marketing Association, nearly all respondents (96%) said they provide their customers the ability to opt-out of future e-mail offers. When prospecting, most respondents (60%) said they do not rent third-party e-mail lists or send non-targeted e-mail to prospects (74%).

Among other key report findings: · The majority of Web marketers maintain an in-house e-mail list.

CNN.com - HHS proposal would relax medical privacy rules.

The Bush administration has proposed changing the rules that protect the privacy of a patient's medical records.

The plan would loosen a provision that requires doctors, hospitals and other providers to get written consent for patients before using or releasing medical information for treatment.

San Jose Mercury News By Dan Gillmor- Medical privacy takes turn for worse.

When the insurance industry applauds new regulations on the privacy of your personal medical information, you can be sure that privacy is just about the last thing the rules will provide. The Bush administration, bowing to health industry demands, this week torched patients' privacy in key ways.

For example, you won't be allowed to decide ahead of time who gets access to your records, something the original rules would have required. That effectively neuters regulations, first proposed in the Clinton administration's latter days, that would have taken a serious step toward real privacy.

There was some logic in the change -- namely, ensuring that patients could get timely care in the case of an emergency. But rewritten rules go far beyond solving this narrow problem.

One of Bush's 2000 campaign applause lines was his supposed commitment to privacy. Given the president's debt to the powerful interests that paid for his campaign, no one should be surprised that his performance would not match the rhetoric.

The Register (UK) - Encryption patent firm stakes claim on industry.

A previously unknown Californian firm which has obtained a patent for application-independent file encryption is seeking to enforce licensing from other companies in the security industry.

The move has spurred anger among vendors hit by patent infringement claims; they say they will contest the action vigorously.

Maz Technologies was granted a patent last year for a "method of transparent encryption and decryption for an electronic document management system". Recently the company appointed lawyers to press its claims.

[ ... ]

Avritch, is heavily critical of the US Patent Office's lack of knowledge of the basics of encryption, and said its actions in granting the patent place him a difficult position in defending his firm against the patent infringement claim.

"The patent application failed to disclose a single encryption product. Unreal for 1998," Avritch said

Slashdot | Patent Claimed on System-Level Encryption.

Slashdot | He Writes Back.

The Spam Letters.  I can't remember why I started writing back....

One user starts responding to his SPAM letters. No comments about site since it was slashdotted when I tried to bring it up. Give it a little time to settle down the concept sounds like it might be worth a chuckle.