New York Times - free registration required A New Direction for Intellectual Property.
Perceiving an overly zealous culture of copyright protection, a group of law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their work as freely shareable.
Creative Commons, which is to be officially announced this week at a technology conference in Santa Clara, Calif., has nearly a million dollars in start-up money. The firm's founders argue that the expansion of legal protection for intellectual property, like a 1998 law extending the term of copyright by 20 years, could inhibit creativity and innovation. But the main focus of Creative Commons will be on clearly identifying the material that is meant to be shared. The idea is that making it easier to place material in the public domain will in itself encourage more people to do so.
The firm's first project is to design a set of licenses stating the terms under which a given work can be copied and used by others. Musicians who want to build an audience, for instance, might permit people to copy songs for noncommercial use. Graphic designers might allow unlimited copying of certain work as long as it is credited.
The goal is to make such licenses machine-readable, so that anyone could go to an Internet search engine and seek images or a genre of music, for example, that could be copied without legal entanglements.
LAW.com - 'Commons' Sense for Copyrighted Material?.
IP attorneys aren't sure whether many authors and artists will volunteer to make their copyrighted works freely available to the public. But they say Lawrence Lessig's new initiative may be a first step to making copyrighted material more accessible.
Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and director of its Center for Internet and Society, has teamed up with other law professors and technology experts to form Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization intended to expand the number of creative works in the public domain.
[ ... ]
Creative Commons is led by a board of directors consisting of Lessig, Eldred, James Boyle of Duke University School of Law, Michael Carroll of Villanova University School of Law, Hal Abelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Eric Saltzman, executive director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The group shares space and staff with Stanford's Center for Internet and Society.
Seattle Post-intelligencer - Puget Sound Journal: I won't be a card-ccarrying columnist.
QFC's move to require an "Advantage Card" for its cheapest prices irked me for three reasons. First, I do not want another blasted plastic card in my wallet. It already takes too much time to find my insurance card when I go to the doctor.
And the prices I used to get just by walking through QFC's doors are now available only if I present my Advantage Card. If you dare to shop at QFC without the card, you'll pay premium prices.
But most important: To get the cheaper prices, you're required to hand over your name, address, phone number, birth date and marital status. And then every time you check out, the store calculates what you've bought during the year and what you paid for it.
What does the store do with that information?
I called QFC to find out.
CIO White paper (Advertising supplement)- Privacy, Security, Personal Health Records and the Enterprise.
Appears to have been sponsored by CISCO
CBS Marketwatch - Congress sets sights on online privacy.
All but shelved when national security concerns dominated headlines following Sept. 11, the issue of online privacy has resurfaced in Congress, with both chambers now considering legislation that would decide what companies can do with personal information they get from consumers.
CBS News | Big Brother Is Watching, Listening.
It is America's new reality: security and surveillance. From intense scrutiny at airports to expanded government authority to track Internet use, federal agents now watch American citizens more closely than ever,
National Underwriter - Alliance Blasts Web Privacy Bill.
The Alliance of American Insurers today expressed opposition to the online privacy bill scheduled for markup tomorrow in the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
ZDNet Commentary - Privacy: Are you aware of the trade-offs?
The main industry initiative facilitating user privacy is the W3C initiative, Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). P3P provides a way for site authors to make their privacy policies available in an automated and structured manner. There's nothing about it that enforces privacy, though. The site's policy may say that they'll sell your name and e-mail address to every pornographer who'll pay for it, and then it's fine for them do that, because you've been warned. Clearly this is not the be-all and end-all of privacy, nor does it claim to be.
[ ... ]
IE6 did not implement P3P completely; it used only "compact policies." Compact policies are very terse codes sent as headers with a Web page--as opposed to full, verbose XML documents. There are two advantages to compact policies: They're easier to implement, and they add only a small amount of overhead to the page retrieval process. A full P3P implementation could involve retrieving and parsing long XML documents with every page.
Microsoft shipped IE6 with P3P activated, but in its "medium" setting (see the Privacy tab in IE6's Tools/Internet Options menu). This means that certain cookies will be rejected if the site lacks a privacy policy or if the policy doesn't meet certain conditions. The important point here is that IE6 rejects cookies from some sites that were accepted by earlier versions of IE. (Microsoft's explanation of IE's P3P implementation can be found here.)
[ ... ]
Site authors probably look at the P3P spec and groan at having to learn all that new stuff, but there's less to it than you'd think. IBM and Microsoft both offer good tools, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and the W3C has links to others as well. I've heard great things about AT&T Research's Privacy Bird. The tricky part--because you'll need to involve other people in your company--is deciding exactly what the policy should be, not just the implementation of it.
Insurance Journal - AAI Opposes Senate Version of Online Privacy Bill.
The Alliance of American Insurers expressed its opposition to the online privacy bill scheduled for markup on May 16 in the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
Sponsored by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC), the Online Personal Privacy Act (S2201) pre-empts state privacy statutes, requiring online businesses to adhere to stricter privacy regulations than traditional businesses.
"Senator Hollings is reinventing the wheel," Kenneth Schloman, Alliance Washington Counsel, commented. "His bill would overturn the privacy constraints in Gramm-Leach-Bliley and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act before we have sufficient information on how well these provisions have functioned."
InfoWorld - Industry, government endorse P3P.
The "Platform for Privacy Preferences" (P3P) specification may not be a panacea for the online privacy dilemma, but panelists at a conference here Tuesday said it will go a long way to help consumers better understand Web sites' privacy policies.
[ ... ]
While lauding P3P's ability to decode Web site policies, another conference speaker said the specification solves but one piece of the privacy puzzle.
"There is no such thing as a silver bullet in the privacy world," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), an Internet civil liberties public interest group. "It's not sufficient alone. Companies' main concern should be focused on what consumers are looking for." Some baseline legislation that outlines consumers' privacy rights is needed, he added.
Newsbytes - Microsoft Denies Changing Passport Users' Privacy Settings.
Microsoft [NASDAQ:MSFT] officials today denied reports that they have changed their privacy practices at the company's .NET Passport sign-on service to make it easier for marketers to contact users.
But the company conceded that some services require that it share users' e-mail addresses with other sites that participate in its Passport service.
[ ... ]
According to the user, who claimed he checks the settings on his Hotmail account "about once a month," he recently noticed that the account had been configured to allow Microsoft to share his e-mail address, birth date, ZIP code, gender, occupation, and other information.
A Microsoft spokeswoman today said MSN has made no changes to its privacy policy or practices regarding the protection of users' personal information.
"MSN has never changed its users' preferences. While consumers can certainly update their preferences at any time, once they've set an option to `no,' it remains `no,'" said the representative.
WashTech.com part of the Washington Post - Rights Group Joins Fight Against DVR Snooping Order.
A civil liberties coalition has joined SonicBlue to fend off a court order that SonicBlue begin logging what customers do with its ReplayTV 4000 digital video recorder (DVR).
In a "friend-of-the-court" brief filed in a Los Angeles federal court Monday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) argued that court-order surveillance of ReplayTV users to satisfy litigious movie studious and television broadcasters would trample on the consumers' privacy rights.
SonicBlue told U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in a brief sent on Friday that Central District Magistrate Charles Eick went too far when he included the surveillance as part of evidence collection in a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the company.
[ ... ]
Facing SonicBlue in the lawsuit are movie studios such as Paramount, Disney and Twentieth Century Fox, and television networks such as NBC, ABC, CBS and Home Box Office.
Represented by the EPIC brief are such online civil rights groups as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Media Access Project, the" Privacy Foundation", Pubic Knowledge and the Center for Digital Democracy.
Privacy News from Wired News - Airport Face Scanner Failed.
Facial recognition technology tested at the Palm Beach International Airport had a dismal failure rate, according to preliminary results from a pilot program at the facility.
The system failed to correctly identify airport employees 53 percent of the time, according to test data that was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under Florida's open records law.
The preliminary results at the Palm Beach International Airport confirm that the use of facial recognition technology is simply ineffective and of no value," said Randall Marshall, legal director of the state ACLU chapter.
The manufacturer of the system, Visionics, said the results were poor because their product was not used correctly.
Ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, face scanning technology has been touted by manufacturers as the perfect device for recognizing terrorists in airports. In theory, the systems use surveillance cameras to scan crowds for bad guys and sound an alarm when a match is made between a live person and the system's database of known criminals.
Business News from Wired News - Stock Woes for Chip Implanter.
Applied Digital Solutions -- the company best known for implanting microchips in people -- is now running into difficulties for the less controversial practice of extending stock options to humans.
On Wednesday, the Palm Beach County, Florida, company told investors that it would delay filing its quarterly financial results as it tries to resolve a dispute with its former accountants.
New York Times - Editorial Op-Ed: free registration required Protecting Internet Speech.
The most troubling part of the Supreme Court's 8-to-1 decision was its holding concerning "community standards." The act requires courts to look to the standards of the community in which the speech occurs. The decision reversed an appeals court ruling that the First Amendment does not permit "community standards" to determine when online speech will and will not be allowed. The appeals court was right on this point, and the Supreme Court should have let that holding stand. Under the protection act, a Web site operated in Greenwich Village can be forced to limit its speech to the standards of, say, Trent Lott's hometown of Pascagoula, Miss. The result, as Justice John Paul Stevens noted in dissent, is that "a law that criminalizes a particular communication in just a handful of destinations effectively prohibits transmission of that message to all of the 176.5 million Americans [who] have access to the Internet."
Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Judge: Freedom of the Press for Commercial Use Only.
Slashdot | Developers - XML Web Services & Security.
Handy writes "Web Services (SOAP, .net, WSDL?, UDDI?) create an even greater need for robust security. Exposed interfaces and fragmented administration coupled with a need for app-level security points to a greater need for a centralized managed security services model."
Yahoo! News - SONICblue Wins Stay of Tracking Order.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. (Reuters) - Electronic device maker SONICblue Inc. said on Wednesday it won a stay of a court order that would have forced it to track the television viewing habits of people using its ReplayTV (news - web sites) digital video recorder.
Movie studios including Viacom Inc.'s Paramount and the Walt Disney Co. , as well as TV networks including General Electric Co.'s NBC, have sued the company, alleging features of the ReplayTV allow people to violate their copyrights.
Santa Clara, California-based SONICblue said federal Judge Florence-Marie Cooper halted the April 26 order in which a federal court ordered SONICblue to install tracking software on ReplayTV and report viewing results to movie and TV companies.
Slashdot | Sonicblue Wins Stay of Spying Order.
Slashdot | Fun with Fingerprint Readers.
|
