Lots of newsbits about copyright infringement today - let's mash them all together with some egg whites and breadcrumbs and see what we get. marklyon writes "The DOJ announced that they are planning to prosecute filesharers under the The No Electronic Theft ("NET") Act. John Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general, made the pronouncement at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's annual technology and politics summit Tuesday. Cnet has extended coverage." Reader M_Talon writes "According to this article on ZDNET the RIAA is using one of the DMCA's more nasty clauses...the right to subpoena an ISP for a suspected pirate's personal information. They want to force Verizon to reveal the customer's information, and Verizon is refusing on the grounds that the pirated material isn't on their servers." Reader MattW writes "Apparently some theaters are consenting to run anti-piracy ads before movies. After all, these are not a bunch of fat cats we're talking about -- piracy now threatens the livelihood of the rank and file workers of Hollywood. After all, the movie studios are having a terrible year, right?" Finally, the Washington Post (probably one of the last articles we post from their site, as they go registration-required) discovers spoofed files on Gnutella, and public radio is reporting that the RIAA will drop their suit against listen4ever.com, since it's, uh, gone.

Editor: Sorry about the nonstandard formatting for the above post. The italics are not from the Privacy Digest editor, the whole thing comes as is from SlashDot. For some reason my cleanup/formatting process turns this into a bit of killer text. Trying to process it after formatting kill my CMS so I've left it untouched so I can post it and move on to Thursday's entries.

eWeek - IBM at Work on Hippocratic Database.

IBM researchers are working on a new database design that takes consumer privacy into account in the way it stores and retrieves information.

IBM Fellow Rakesh Agrawal this week is presenting the idea, called a Hippocratic database, at the Very Large Data Base 2002 conference in Hong Kong. The design is based on the Hippocratic oath that serves as the basis of doctor-patient relationships. The concept occurred to Agrawal while being challenged by his brother, who is a doctor, about the inability of technology like databases to take individuals' privacy concerns into account.

"More and more databases are keeping personal and private information, and we are sort of relying on databases for our day-to-day existence," said Agrawal, lead scientist on the project at the IBM Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, Calif. "If we don't treat it with respect, people are going to get hurt."

One tenet of the Hippocratic oath includes a statement on privacy that states, "... whatever I may see or hear ... in the life of human beings ... I will remain silent, holding such things to be unutterable." The Hippocratic database concept hinges on this principle.

Hippocratic databases would negotiate the privacy of information exchanged between a consumer or individual and companies. The database owner would have a policy built into the database about storage and retrieval of personal information, and the database donor would be able to accept or deny it.

Each piece of data would have specifications of the database owner's policies attached to it. The policy would specify the purpose for which information is collected, who can receive it, the length of time the data can be retained and those who are authorized to access it.

The increased ubiquity of the Internet and use of databases for data mining in marketing have led to the need for database systems that limit the type of data stored, how it is used and how long it is stored, researchers say. At the same time, regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, along with tough European Union privacy laws, are forcing companies to take privacy more seriously.

[ ... ]

The architecture for the Hippocratic database concept is to be based on 10 guiding principles: purpose specification, consent, limited collection, limited use, limited disclosure, limited retention, accuracy, openness and compliance.

The Hippocratic database and its components would work in the following way, according to IBM officials. First, metadata tables would be defined for each type of information collected. A Privacy Metadata Creator would generate the tables to determine who should have access to what data and how long that data should be stored. A Privacy Constraint Validator would check whether a site's privacy policies match a user's preferences, and once this is verified the data would be transmitted from the user to the database.

[ ... ]

In the final step, a Data Retention Manager would delete any items stored beyond the length of their intended purpose. Audit trails of queries also would be kept to allow for privacy audits and to guard the database from suspicion that it has been misused.

theage.com.au - Cracking the hackers' code.

CNET NEWS.COM - Web site flouts linking bans . Want David Sorkin to link to your Web site? Just ask him not to.

Sorkin, associate professor of law at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Ill., is the man behind Don't Link to Us, a Web site that exists merely to flout what it terms "stupid linking policies."

Sorkin's site was launched in reaction to recent legal decisions in which courts upheld Web site terms and conditions that prohibited or restricted links.

"I created my Dontlink.com site in part as a reaction to Newsbooster and similar cases," Sorkin wrote in an e-mail interview. "But I've really focused more on sites that don't seem to have any plausible reason for wanting to restrict links--in other words, that are doing so out of mere ignorance."

In last month's Newsbooster case, a Danish court ruled that the Newsbooster Web site could not link to stories within 28 associated Danish news sites.

Once Sorkin started looking more closely at the Web's various link restrictions, he said he was surprised to find not merely curbs on so-called deep links (to pages beyond a site's home page) or links to pages that incorporated a trademark, but outright bans on linking to a site altogether.

Don't Link to Us!. Stupid linking policies

Don't Link to Us! links to sites that attempt to impose substantial restrictions on other sites that link to them. The Linking Policy for Don't Link to Us! precludes us from requesting permission to link to a site, and compels us to link directly to the targeted page (i.e., a "deep link") rather than to a site's home page. Descriptions of sites' linking policies generally are accurate (though often not complete) at the time they are posted here but are likely to change over time. On occasion a web site will modify its linking policy in response to public ridicule. Perhaps their appearance in Don't Link to Us! will help encourage some of these sites to move forward into the 20th century.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Restrictive Linking Policies & The Net.

Masem writes "News.com reports on a new site set up by Prof. David Sorkin of the John Marshall Law School that points out web sites with restrictive linking policies, entitled Don't Link To Us. Sorkin set up the site as a way to enlighten net users on the impact of such policies in the aftermath of past and pending court cases over deep linking policies. An owner of one site on the list, law.com, was suprised to discover that their site has a restrictive linking policy, and already plans to implement changes to it."

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - EU Still Looking at Mandatory Data Retention.

An anonymous reader writes "Following up on a previous Slashdot article, European civil rights advocacy group Statewatch is detecting more rumbles of a possible weakening of privacy rights in the EU. The European council has been testing the waters for a new policy mandating retention of communications "traffic data" by all member states. The previous policy (adopted May 30) merely allowed an exception to EU privacy law for member states who wished to retain such data. Under the leaked draft proposal, law enforcement is to be allowed access to "traffic data" (identifying source, destination, time, etc.), which is similar to current US law. However, much worse is the requirement that telco providers retain such data for 12-24 months. Text of the draft framework decision is available. Also analysis by Statewatch. Backup link (in case of Slashdot effect)."

Slashdot | "Ask Slashdot" - The Need for Open Hardware.

bwt asks: "With all the talk of DRM lately, it occurs to me that the entire concept depends on limiting the choice for computer hardware. OK, so the proper reaction to the copyright industry's attempts at PC market control is to be able to build a PC that they can't control. I know there have been some discussions on open hardware, but most if it was prior to the emergence of DRM as a real threat. In fact, Richard Stallman wrote an editorial in 1999 and said 'Because copying hardware is so hard, the question of whether we're allowed to do it is not vitally important.' DRM has perhaps changed that. Isn't the need for open hardware becoming critical? What is the status of the open hardware efforts?"

toledoblade.com - Colleges halt radio broadcasts on Internet.

Terry Teagarden at the University of Toledo likes to think of radio broadcasts over the Internet as a great equalizer.

"You go from the signal which carries four to eight miles away [for UT] to the possibility of being able to webcast across the world," said the coordinator of student media. "That's something that certainly would be very attractive to us."

Financially, though, such options no longer may be viable for small, noncommercial stations.

The University of Toledo and a number of other colleges are no longer broadcasting online, fearing that new national fee and reporting regulations could price them out of the business.

[ ... ]

For many of the 500 college radio stations "streaming" music over the Internet, the fees are prohibitive and dozens have stopped, according to Will Robedee, vice chairman of Collegiate Broadcasters, Inc., an association of college radio and television stations.

Furthermore, he argued, the rules overlook the educational mission of college radio stations and their tendencies to play underexposed artists and genres.

Still, while webcasting is a growing industry, it is not a major part of most college programs, Mr. Gainey said.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Ohio Schools Drop Webcasts Because Of DMCA.

An anonymous reader writes "The Toledo Blade is reporting that several Ohio universities have dropped their internet radio broadcasts due to the DMCA and CARP fees. It mentions how conviently parents, students and administrators used to be able to keep track of school news from accross the country and world. Now their silent thanks to the money and time that would be needed to comply with the new regulations."