Adam Kessel writes "Judge John D. Bates heard arguments this morning in RIAA v. Verizon, the "test case" for the subpoena provisions of the DMCA (section 512(h)). Both parties were given upwards of 45 minutes to develop their arguments and rebuttals, and the Judge permitted amicus Motion Picture Association of America to make a brief argument which for the most part said that the Motion Picture Industry had a large financial stake in DMCA enforcement." --- Read on for Adam Kessel's full report.

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Report From RIAA v. Verizon Case.

LawGeek writes "Adam Kessel has provided Greplaw with exclusive coverage of today's RIAA v. Verizon hearing, in which the RIAA is attempting to force Verizon to produce information about a user who allegedly shared files using P2P technology. It sounds as though the judge had a good grasp of the technology, and has promised to rule quickly. Slashdot has previously covered Verizon's stance on this and other P2P issues."

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Boucher Introduces New Bill.

brandido writes "The Register is reporting that Rep. Rick Boucher unveiled his attempt at returning some rights to consumers. According to the Register: "As we reported yesterday, some of the biggest names in IT names were on hand to support a legislation from Rep. Rick Boucher unveiled this morning. Boucher vowed to strike out the repressive portions of the DMCA, and 'directs the Federal Trade Commission to undertake a rulemaking to assure adequate notice to the public of any lack of functionality which may attend the purchase of copy protected CDs.'" Details of the bill can be found in PDF format , as can a summary and Boucher's Statement (taken from The Reg story)." --- Oddly, this bill focuses on notification that you're buying copy-restricted music disks instead of CDs (which is useful, but hardly major), and only contains a few vague amendments to the DMCA itself. Neither of these is worth paying much attention to: Congress is about to wrap up and go home for the year, and will start afresh in January with a clean slate. Perhaps in January some bright Congressperson will introduce a bill which actually takes strong steps toward repealing the DMCA.

Slashdot | InvisibleNet Presents IIP.

An anonymous submitter writes: "A new and ever growing project has launched into the alternative network realm, changing the pace by focusing directly on speech, rather than file sharing. The Invisible Irc Project, a peer distributed secure and anonymous internet relay chat network has popped up at some of the recent conventions this past year. The creator, and project leader, known as 0x90, has been seen at CodeCon 2002 introducing it to the public, at that time in more of a primitive state, and today, almost a year later, the software has noticeably been more usable by the masses. 0x90 just gave a talk at ToorCon 2K2 on designing a robust & secure Peer-2-Peer framework, and their InvisibleNet site just released new software along with a two part interview that was taken in July. A good read that details the depths of their project, including the state it is in now, and the future vision of a privately distributed steganographical crypto-net. I have tried out the software and it is very easy to set up, and it supports the freenixes, OS X, and Win32 machines. You can use any irc client with it seemlessly, and the cryptography is handled transparently within your "IIP" node. It's GPL so peer review is welcome, as it also states this on their site. It appears to have a nice community of users with a range of discussions. So if you have a bit of time on your hands to engage in some chatting online, give this a try. It's alternative, creative, and possibly a standard setting step to securing IRC as we know it."

LawMeme (Yale) - Features: Law School in a Nutshell, Part 1.

Future lawyers spend three years in law school learning how to read and write legalese, but what serious geek has that kind of time to spare? This series will cover the basics of Legal; by the end of it, you should be ready to pick up a legal brief and know what's going on and how to find out more.

To keep things close to reality, we'll use as a case study a particularly important piece of recent legal writing: the good guys' brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft (ed. Link is a PDF file)) . We'll walk through the brief, seeing how the conventions of legal writing interact with the arguments Lessig and company are making.

In this first installment, we'll look at the front matter of the brief: all the boilerplate and technicalities needed to set the scene for the argument itself. We'll go over some Supreme Court procedure, learn a bit about the federal court system, and find out what those strange strings of numbers in the middle of otherwise normal sentences mean. (continues inside . . .)

LawMeme (Yale) - Features: Law School in a Nutshell, Part II.

Welcome back to Part II of Law School in a Nutshell, LawMeme's hacker-oriented introduction to reading legal documents and understanding the strange way in which lawyers look at the world. (You can go read Part I if you missed it at the time.)

In today's installment, we're going to look at the "Statement of the Case," the factual foundation on which the Eldred brief's legal case will rest. We'll learn some more about the American legal system, what the word "fact" means to a lawyer, and look at some of the clever strategery hiding under some of Larry Lessig's polished words. (continues inside . . .)

Slashdot | Your Rights Online - Law Documents in a Nutshell.

Ramakrishnan M writes "LawMeme has a two part article (more to come) on reading and interpreting Legalese for geeks, titled "Law School in a nutshell". Here is the Part 1 and part 2"