Salon.com Technology | Letters - Spyware vs. anti-spyware and more. Readers sound off on spyware

Yale's LawMeme: Top Ten New Copyright Crimes.

To help develop Mr. Kellner's unfortunately common (at least in Hollywood) view of copyright, LawMeme offers the top ten new copyright crimes, as well as further choice quotes and commentary from Mr. Kellner's interview.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Top Ten New Copyright Crimes.

SiliconValley.com part of San Jose Mercury News - SonicBlue ordered to track ReplayTV users' viewing choices.

A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on thousands of digital video recorder users -- monitoring every show they record, every commercial they skip and every program they send electronically to a friend.

Central District Court Magistrate Charles F. Eick told SonicBlue to gather ``all available information'' about how consumers use the Santa Clara company's latest generation ReplayTV 4000 video recorders, and turn the information over to the film studios and television networks suing it for contributing to copyright infringement.

``We've been ordered to invade the privacy of our customers,'' said Ken Potashner, SonicBlue's chairman and chief executive. ``This is something that we find personally very troubling.''

Privacy advocates condemned the ruling which came during the pre-trial discovery process of a series of lawsuits against SonicBlue.

[ ... ]

The court ruling also requires SonicBlue to track individual users -- not by name, but through ``unique identification numbers.''

``The concern is once you collect information about an individual, the individual may be concerned that he or she could be linked to that information at some time,'' said Pulgram.

Privacy advocates said the ruling is a more egregious invasion of privacy than TiVo committed. In that case, TiVo collected aggregated data that was purposefully separated from personal details about the viewer. And consumers could opt-out, keeping their viewing habits from being collected.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - SonicBlue Ordered to Spy on ReplayTV Viewers.