Slashdot Mirror

ChrisPaget writes "I'm planning a pretty significant demonstration of GSM insecurity at Defcon next week, where I'll intercept and record cellular calls made by my attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required. As you can imagine, intercepting cellphones is a Very Big Deal in the eyes of the law; this blog post is an attempt to reassure everyone that their privacy is being taken seriously despite the nature of the demo. I'm not just making it up either — the EFF have helped significantly with the details."

whisper_jeff writes "The US government on Monday announced new rules making it officially legal for iPhone owners to 'jailbreak' their device and run unauthorized third-party applications, as well as the ability to unlock any cell phone for use on multiple carriers." The EFF has further details on this and some of the other legal protections granted in the new rules.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Lawsuits are never cheap, even if you're on the winning side. But not many cost as much as Viacom's lawsuit against Google. The search giant won before trial, and even so Google spent $100 million defending themselves. Incidentally, Viacom is appealing the ruling, so it's not even over yet. Perhaps it's no wonder our rights are vanishing online when it takes $100M to protect just one of them."

Deep Thought writes "Texas Instruments, already infamous thanks to the signing key controversy last year, is trying a new trick to lock down its graphing calculators, this time directed toward its newest TI-Nspire line. The TI-Nspires were already the most controlled of TI's various calculator models, and no third-party development of any kind (except for its very limited form of TI-BASIC) was allowed until the release of the independent tool Ndless. Since its release, TI has been determined to prevent the large calculator programming community from using it. Its latest released operating system for the Nspire family (version 2.1) now prevents the calculators from downgrading to OS 1.1, needed to run Ndless. This is TI's second major attack on Ndless, as the company has already demanded that websites posting the required OS 1.1 remove it from public download [PDF, in French], obviously to prevent use of the tool. Once again, TI is preventing calculator hobbyists from running their own software on calculators they bought and paid for."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Donald Knuth is planning to make an 'earthshaking announcement' on Wednesday, at TeX's 32nd Anniversary Celebration, on the final day of the TUG 2010 Conference. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what it is. So far speculation ranges from proving P!=NP, to a new volume of The Art of Computer Programming, to his retirement. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever has been ported to MMIX?" Let the speculation begin.

climenole writes "HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites. Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use. For instance, they may default to unencrypted HTTP, or fill encrypted pages with links that go back to the unencrypted site. The HTTPS Everywhere extension fixes these problems by rewriting all requests to these sites to HTTPS."

linzeal writes "Directors whose films have done poorly at the box office are increasingly being solicited by high-powered law firms to file lawsuits with offers of settlement. This practice, which the EFF has been calling extortive and 'mafia-like', has resulted in courts starting to rule in favor of the consumer, and in some cases throwing out the lawsuits. This is all fine and dandy, however, when you are considered the world's worst director and you largely finance films through your own holding company. At that point, the rhetoric and ridicule gets ratcheted up rather quickly."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In the new mass filesharing suit brought in Washington, DC, on behalf of a filmmaker, Achte/Neunte v. Does 1-2094, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen, and two ACLU organizations have filed an amicus curiae brief supporting a motion by Time Warner to quash the subpoena. EFF commented: 'We've long been concerned that some attorneys would attempt to create a business by cutting corners in mass copyright lawsuits against fans, shaking settlements out of people who aren't in a position to raise legitimate defenses and becoming a category of 'copyright trolls' to rival those seen in patent law.'" And reader ericgoldman notes a case that arguably falls under the same umbrella: "Sherman Frederick, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, wrote a blog post declaring 'Copyright theft: We're not taking it anymore.' Apparently upset that third-party websites are republishing its stories in full, the newspaper 'grubstaked and contracted with a company called Righthaven ... a local technology company whose only job is to protect copyrighted content.' Righthaven has brought 'about 22' lawsuits on behalf of the newspaper, including lawsuits against marijuana- and gambling-related websites. Frederick hopes 'if Righthaven shows continued success, that it will find other clients looking for a solution to the theft of copyrighted material' and ends his 'editorial' (or is it an ad?) inviting other newspapers to become Righthaven customers. A couple of months back Wendy Davis of MediaPost deconstructed some of Frederick's logic gaps."

trawg writes "You paid for it, you have the DVD in your drive and the box on the floor next to your desk, but do you own the game? That's the question the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will rule on next week in the case between Blizzard, publisher of World of Warcraft, and MDY, publisher of the Glider bot. The Glider bot plays World of Warcraft for you, but Blizzard frowns on this, saying it voids the license agreement — you don't own the game, you only have a license to use it, and bots like Glider invalidate the license. The EFF has a good summary of the case as well. The case is due to be resumed on Monday."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Free Software Foundation has discovered that an application currently distributed in Apple's App Store is a port of GNU Go. This makes it a GPL violation, because Apple controls distribution of all such programs through the iTunes Store Terms of Service, which is incompatible with section 6 of the GPLv2. It's an unusual enforcement action, though, because they don't want Apple to just make the app disappear, they want Apple to grant its users the full freedoms offered by the GPL. Accordingly, they haven't sued or sent any legal threats and are instead in talks with Apple about how they can offer their users the GPLed software legally, which is difficult because it's not possible to grant users all the freedoms they're entitled to and still comply with Apple's restrictive licensing terms."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Free Software Foundation has discovered that an application currently distributed in Apple's App Store is a port of GNU Go. This makes it a GPL violation, because Apple controls distribution of all such programs through the iTunes Store Terms of Service, which is incompatible with section 6 of the GPLv2. It's an unusual enforcement action, though, because they don't want Apple to just make the app disappear, they want Apple to grant its users the full freedoms offered by the GPL. Accordingly, they haven't sued or sent any legal threats and are instead in talks with Apple about how they can offer their users the GPLed software legally, which is difficult because it's not possible to grant users all the freedoms they're entitled to and still comply with Apple's restrictive licensing terms."

alphadogg writes "Even without cookies, popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox give websites enough information to get a unique picture of their visitors about 94 percent of the time, according to research compiled over the past few months by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. [The Research] puts quantitative assessment on something that security gurus have known about for years, said Peter Eckersley, the EFF senior staff technologist who did the research. He found that configuration information — data on the type of browser, operating system, plugins, and even fonts installed — can be compiled by websites to create a unique portrait of most visitors. This means that most Internet users are a lot less anonymous than they believe, Eckersley said. 'Even if you turn off cookies and you use a proxy to hide your IP address, you could still be tracked,' he said."

An anonymous reader writes "Tim Jones over at the EFF's Deep Links Blog just posted an interesting article on the widespread use of deceptive interface techniques on the Web. He began by polling his Twitter and Facebook audience for an appropriate term for this condition and received responses like 'Bait-and-Click' and 'Zuckerpunched.' Ultimately, he chose 'Evil Interfaces' from Greg Conti's HOPE talk on malicious interface design and follow-up interview with media-savvy puppet Weena. Tim then goes on to dissect Facebook (with pictures). So, what evil interfaces have you encountered on (or off) the Web?"

rueger writes "Over a couple of years I have actually found Facebook pretty useful and/or entertaining. It has certainly allowed me to stay connected with a lot of people with whom I otherwise would have lost track, and for all its weaknesses it was handy for sharing links and such. This week, though, the privacy escapades have pushed me (and a lot of other people) over the edge. If Twitter's 140 characters aren't enough, LinkedIn is too business-oriented, MySpace too ugly, and Buzz — does anyone even use Buzz? What social media options are out there for all of those non-uber-techy folks?"

mjn writes "In yet another backtrack from their privacy policy, Facebook has decided to retroactively move more information into the public, indexable part of profiles. The new profile parts made public are: a list of things users have become 'fans' of (now renamed to 'likes'), their education and work histories, and what they list under 'interests.' Apparently there is neither any opt-out nor even notice to users, despite the fact that some of this information was entered by users at a time when Facebook's privacy policy explicitly promised that it wouldn't be part of the public profile."

Locke2005 writes "In what promises to be one of the quickest threads to become Godwin'ed, YouTube has pulled scores of parodies of the 'Hitler Finds Out' scene from the movie The Downfall. Ironically, I had never heard of this movie before this — and now I want to watch it." Here is the EFF complaint. David Weinberger has posted some details on Google's Content Identification tool, which is being used in the shotgun takedowns.

renek writes "If you think the RIAA/MPAA's tactics have been outlandish, laughable, and disconcerting in the past, you haven't seen anything yet. From government-mandated spyware that deletes infringing content to border searches of media players, this reads like an Orwellian nightmare. Given the US government's willingness to bend over for Big Media it wouldn't be terribly surprising to see how far this goes and how under the radar it stays."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Most people have already heard western media reactions to Google leaving China proper and redirecting search traffic to its Hong Kong branch, but ChinaSMACK has translated comments from average Chinese internet users so that non-Chinese can understand how the Chinese public feels. While many of them are supportive of the government on some level, they were able to obtain many comments by those critical of the government before they could be 'harmonized' (deleted) and translated those as well. The deleted comments often complain about the wumao (50 cent party), government employees who are paid 50 cents RMB per post supporting the government, and worry that the Chinese Internet will become a Chinese LAN."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Eric Goldman, an Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law, has an excellent analysis of the dueling summary judgment motions in Viacom v. YouTube. Basically, both sides have been trotting out the most damning things they can find and asking the judge to rule against the other party. Viacom is mad that Chad Hurley, one of YouTube's co-founders, lost his email archive and couldn't remember some old emails. Worse, YouTube founder Karim once uploaded infringing content. But then Google points out that only a very small percentage of the users are engaged in infringing activity (some 0.016% of all YouTube accounts have been deleted for infringement), one of the clips Viacom is suing over is only one second long (what about fair use?), and most of YouTube's content is non-infringing, including the campaign videos which all major US presidential candidates posted to YouTube." (More below.) "But the worst thing they found is that Viacom can't make up their mind. They spent $1M advertising on YouTube and tried to buy it. And even though they demanded that YouTube remove videos containing Viacom property on sight, Viacom had a complex internal policy authorizing some clips, including ones disguised as 'leaks' and put out by their marketers. Viacom was so conflicted internally that their very expensive lawyers couldn't figure out what Viacom had authorized to be uploaded even after doing extensive research as required by court rules, only to discover that some of the clips Viacom was suing over were ones Viacom uploaded themselves. The lawyers then had to go to court and drop those clips from their case — twice. They missed some the first time."

SpuriousLogic passes along this excerpt from the ChiTrib: "The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter, too. US law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting. ... The document... makes clear that US agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target's friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs, and video clips. Among other purposes: Investigators can check suspects' alibis by comparing stories told to police with tweets sent at the same time about their whereabouts. Online photos from a suspicious spending spree... can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries." The FoIA lawsuit was filed by the EFF, which has posted two documents obtained from the action, from the DoJ and Internal Revenue (more will be coming later). The rights group praises the IRS for spelling out limitations and prohibitions on deceptive use of social media by its agents — unlike the DoJ. The US Marshalls and the BATFE could not find any documents related to the FoIA request, so presumably they have no guidelines or prohibitions in this area.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "PJ of Groklaw has found some really interesting documents coming out of the never-ending SCO trial. Specifically, in SCO v. Novell, SCO doesn't want the jury to find out about the email Blake Stowell (then a PR guy for SCO) sent to Maureen O'Gara that asked her to 'send a jab PJ's way.' For those who don't remember that far back in the SCO saga, the 'jab' was when O'Gara wrote an inaccurate, rambling and irrelevant 'exposé' on PJ which got O'Gara fired for violating journalistic ethics after angry readers complained to the publisher — an act which caused Ms. O'Gara to tell SCO, 'I want war pay.' For those wondering how they can keep going after that final judgment against SCO over a year ago, it's hard to do the saga justice without glossing over everything, but the short version is that SCO ran to bankruptcy after they were mostly dead, but before becoming completely dead. That automatically stopped all the cases against SCO due to standard bankruptcy court rules, then SCO effectively re-litigated a bunch of issues via bankruptcy court rules. Currently, they're accusing Novell of 'slander of title' over copyrights that two different courts have ruled SCO does not own, and we're waiting to see if a jury will reach the same conclusion. They're also trying to use the company's lawsuits as assets and to sell them to various SCO insiders so that the legal wranglings can continue even if nothing is left of SCO. From the very start, SCO has always been the type to fight dirty."

nigham writes "The EFF is publicly disclosing a version of Apple's iPhone developer program license agreement. The highlights: you can't disclose the agreement itself (the EFF managed to get it via the Freedom of Information Act thanks to NASA's recent app), Apple reserves the right to kill your app at any time with no reason, and Apple's liability in any circumstance is limited to 50 bucks. There's also this gem: 'You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise create any Application or other program that would disable, hack, or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod Touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so.' The entire agreement (PDF) is up at the EFF's site."

nigham writes "The EFF is publicly disclosing a version of Apple's iPhone developer program license agreement. The highlights: you can't disclose the agreement itself (the EFF managed to get it via the Freedom of Information Act thanks to NASA's recent app), Apple reserves the right to kill your app at any time with no reason, and Apple's liability in any circumstance is limited to 50 bucks. There's also this gem: 'You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise create any Application or other program that would disable, hack, or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod Touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so.' The entire agreement (PDF) is up at the EFF's site."

Slashdot frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes a piece advocating for Pop-Ups and even more obtrusive advertising. But not for the reasons you might think. He says "Annoying pop-up ads have been a great friend to Internet freedom, by enabling the operation of proxy sites that would be too expensive to operate otherwise. With the rising costs of making new proxy sites to stay ahead of the 'censorware' companies, even more intrusive ads could be an even bigger friend to Internet freedom. Got any ideas for how those more intrusive ads could work?" Clicky clicky below to read his point.

Most news and information websites carry advertisements, but usually not more than one pop-up ad, if they have pop-ups at all. This is because the costs of running the sites are low enough that they can usually pay for their costs with revenue from regular ads. Surely the site owners would like the extra money that they could get from pop-ups, if their viewers had nowhere else to go. But if they tried to get away with too many pop-ups on a typical news site, visitors would just leave for their competitors' sites instead. Competition keeps the "prices" — in terms of the ads that you have to view in order to visit a website — low.

By contrast, most proxy sites [that's not a link to one of my sites, so quit yer whining] — sites that you can use to get around Internet blocking, by using a form to type in the URL of the site that you want to access so the proxy site will fetch its contents for you — are festooned with pop-up ads, sometimes on every page load. As I can easily attest, the bandwidth and hardware costs of running a proxy site are sufficiently high that there would be no way to pay for the sites with the revenue from normal banner ads and AdSense blurbs. It's no exaggeration to say that most proxy sites, which enable people to circumvent government filtering in countries like China and Iran (not to mention helping millions of students get on Facebook and YouTube from school), would not exist without the pop-up ads to prop them up. (This may not be true of a proxy site that your high school classmate set up for himself and some friends, but it's true of most proxies created to serve a wide audience.)

Unfortunately it's becoming more expensive to run an effective proxy service that enables users to get around most enterprise filtering programs. If it gets to the point where normal pop-up ads do not bring in enough revenue to pay for the service, we might need a new breed of even more intrusive (and better-paying) ads. More intrusive than the drop-down ads that play noisy videos. More intrusive than the Flash animations that crawl across the screen on top of the words you're trying to read. I'm going to argue that a company that figures out how to run the most intrusive ads of all, could be the new best friend of Internet freedom. But first a note about why the costs are increasing.

Two years ago, I thought the cost of maintaining a proxy site to help people get around Internet filtering, would steadily fall, as bandwidth and processing power got cheaper. But bandwidth and hosting costs didn't drop as much as I had hoped, and the cost of maintaining an effective anti-filtering service has actually gone up, due to some advances made by Internet censoring programs. In 2007, the then-current versions of filtering programs like Smartfilter, Websense, and the 8e6 R3000 would typically only download updates to their blacklists once in the middle of the night. This meant that I could mail out a new proxy site to my proxy mailing list just after midnight, and it would be accessible to the mailing list subscribers all of the following day. (You wouldn't be able to get to them if your local network administrator subscribed to the mailing list and added the new sites to the local blacklist as soon as they came out, but most network admins didn't bother.) As of 2010, though, the latest versions of most enterprise filters are configured to automatically update their lists every hour or two. So to stay ahead of the filters, I have to mail out several sites every morning to different portions of the mailing list, so that the filtering companies generally learn about them and block them at different points throughout the day. Just registering several .com domains every day is not cheap. (GoDaddy sells .info domains for less than a dollar apiece, but this proved to be an ineffective solution because too many censored networks simply block all .info sites.)

There are also the increasing costs of maintaining compatibility with complex sites like Facebook and YouTube. Accessing Facebook through a proxy is still a hit-or-miss proposition. (I steer my users toward accessing the mobile version of Facebook, http://m.facebook.com/ , through the proxy, because it's a stripped-down version built for compatibility with mobile devices, and this simpler version is less likely to break when accessed with a proxy script.) YouTube access depends mainly on whether the latest YouTube plugin for the Glype proxy script is compatible with the current YouTube interface, and likewise can be working one week and broken the next. It's not hard to run a proxy site that provides compatibility with the most popular sites that people want to access, but it takes real work -- you can't just upload the script and forget about it.

(Many users in censored countries also use tools like Tor and UltraSurf to bypass their country's filters, but some of my contacts in those countries say that those tools are often too slow for them, so they end up using proxy sites instead. Since UltraSurf and Tor are free services, funded by donations and staffed by volunteers, the demand for those services can easily swell until they slow down from the overload.)

So what happens if maintaining an effective anti-censorship service becomes too expensive to pay for using just pop-up ads? Well, you could charge money for using your proxy site, but that brings with it a whole host of other problems. You have to set recurring billing in order to be paid through PayPal or some similar service, and run the risk of your funds being frozen if someone files a crank complaint against you. If one user has a paid account, you have to worry about them sharing the account with their friends or posting the account credentials on a public message board. And there are many proxy operators (including me) who would like to think that the proxies do provide a valuable public service to the world, and wouldn't want to exclude people who can't afford the monthly access fee.

I propose that ads which are even more intrusive than pop-ups -- thus grabbing more of the user's attention and providing more value to the advertiser, thus enabling them to pay more to sites which run the ads -- would enable proxy site operators to fund more of the costs of their operation, and hence would be a Good Thing. The existence of such intrusive ads does not mean that they would suddenly be plastered all over every proxy site. If your user base can be served for a lower cost, then you don't have to "charge" as much (in terms of advertisement intrusiveness) to use your proxy service. Over 90% of the traffic to my proxy sites is to domains that have already been blocked a long time ago by Websense, Smartfilter, Lightspeed, and most of the rest of the censorware companies. Apparently there are a lot of users who are on censored networks and who need proxies, but whose network admins just haven't updated the blacklists in a very long time, or who haven't paid the subscription fee to keep downloading database updates. Since you don't need to register 10 new domain names every day to serve that audience, there would continue to be proxies for those users with less-intrusive ads on them. But the more-intrusive (and higher-paying) ads would also enable proxy webmasters to serve a "higher-end" audience, the ones who need several new sites every day, to stay ahead of the more frequently-updated filters.

I can think of several ways that more intrusive ads might work. My favorite would be a "quiz" model wherein a drop-down advertisement appears in front of the site you're trying to access, consisting of some promotional content, and a little form at the bottom. In order to make the drop-down ad disappear, you have to read the ad and fill in the answers to some one-word questions or multiple-choice questions about the content, to prove you actually read it.

Perhaps I'm biased in favor of this idea because I'm tired of ads that contain splashy graphics and expensively licensed music and never contain any actual information. The only television ad that I can recall viewing in the past year which prompted me to actually buy the advertiser's product, was the Pizza Hut ad announcing that you could get a large pizza with any number of toppings for $10. That's what I want in an ad. I give you $10. You give me a pizza. (And this extra plug for their $10 pizza promotion, can be considered a thank-you to them for running an ad that actually had something to say.) Most ads on TV are far less informative, serving mostly to give a glossy sheen to the advertiser's brand name. Yet these ads are paid for by corporations who do the market research and the focus grouping, so the ads must work. Many economists, including Tim Harford in The Undercover Economist and Steven Landsburg in The Armchair Economist, have explained why companies pay for ads that do nothing except look expensive: Because they prove to the viewer that the company intends to be around for a long time, in order to capitalize on the long-term exposure given to them by the ad. This has become so standard that making an ad which actually gives the user information seems tawdry by comparison. The most ghetto-sounding word in TV advertising is "infomercial".

But I think that some companies could benefit from greater exposure of actual information about their product, just as there are companies that pay for informercials. And if a company like Linksys really wanted to run a splashy ad that contained no actual information, and then make me answer some questions at the bottom like:

Linksys is:
(a) the leading manufacturer of wireless adapter cards
(b) the leading manufacturer of wireless routers
(c) the leading manufacturer of wireless monitoring cameras
(d) all of the above!!!

then that's their prerogative. The quiz-advertisement model only says that advertisers can require users to answer a question before closing the ad; it would be up to the advertiser to decide what question works best. I suspect that the actual-information model would work better for quiz ads, but advertisers could try both and see what works.

There are already some websites that require you to "complete an offer" (i.e. become a customer of some third-party company, at least for a free trial period) in order to use their services, but most proxy sites have so far declined to carry advertisements like these. Evidently their users consider this too high of a price to pay to access a proxy site. Filling out an offer is not just time-consuming, but leaves the door open to future problems -- will they sell your name or your e-mail address? Will they make it hard to cancel your "free trial", and then start billing you? The problem seems to be that there is too large of a gap between the "fees" associated with the two options -- a normal advertisement doesn't bring enough money to the proxy operator, but a complete-an-offer advertisement is such a steep price that most users won't pay it. The "quiz ad" is like a "fee" that falls nicely in the middle -- a smaller time commitment, and your worries are over after you fill in the quiz and hit submit.

If the very thought of such an ad still seems too annoying for words, then I think that objection misses the point. If the revenue from "normal" ads (pop-ups, drop-downs, AdSense widgets) is enough to pay for the operation of a "high-end" proxy service (catering to the people who need several new proxies every day), then such proxy services with "normal" ads will continue to exist. Indeed, anyone who tried running the more annoying "quiz ads" would not be able to get off the ground, because users would flock to the competing proxy sites using normal ads instead. If "high-end" proxy services flourished that were using quiz ads, it would only be because you simply can't provide a high-end service for less money than the quiz ads are bringing in.

It's possible that some advertisers would be reluctant to display ads in a manner that users would continue an annoying obstacle, but I'm not sure that's really a problem. The most intrusive advertisements currently in use on mainstream websites are probably the "premercials" that display before some news videos on CNN.com and other news sites. Unlike drop-down ads which can be closed with the click of a button, the video pre-mercials can't be skipped. Since you're actually expecting the news video to come up immediately when you click the link to start playing the video, you would think that many users would grit their teeth in annoyance upon seeing the "pre-mercial", and transfer that irritation to the advertiser's brand name, but there are so many big-name companies buying those pre-mercials that they must believe it's having a positive effect. So intrusiveness itself doesn't seem to tarnish a brand.

But I don't propose to micro-manage suggestions for how the more intrusive ads would look, or how advertisers should tailor their ads to fit the format. I'm just saying that a new breed of more intrusive ads, even more annoying than pop-ups, might be just what we need to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated Internet censors. It's still technically quite trivial to release a steady stream of new proxy sites that defeat most Internet filters, but it costs money to buy domains and maintain the service, and the money has to come from somewhere.

alphadogg writes "The US Patent and Trademark Office has agreed to review a controversial patent issued in 2001 that is claimed to cover much of the technology underlying VoIP. The patent, held by a small company called C2 Communications Technologies, is one of 10 that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been trying to strike down for several years through its Patent Busting Project. On Friday, the patent office granted the EFF's request for a re-examination. The digital civil-liberties organization argued that another applicant had submitted basically some of the same technology to the patent office before C2 did. Patent No. 6,243,373, 'Method and apparatus for implementing a computer network/Internet telephone system,' is credited to David L. Turock as inventor and is owned by C2, previously called Acceris Communications Technologies."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "As of Winter Quarter 2010, UCLA professors will no longer be able to post videos on their course websites. Although they've long relied upon fair use protections for educational use, the Association for Information Media and Equipment has made claims that they're copyright infringers, even though the videos are only available on campus and the students are allowed to watch the videos in the Instructional Media Lab. Even though they believe their use of the materials to be fair, the UCLA has decided to back down rather than face litigation. Many professors have commented that this will hurt students, because they now have to watch all videos at the IML, which isn't open on weekends, forcing students to try to fit assigned videos between classes."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, called for the creation of an 'Internet Driver's License' at the World Economic Forum in Davos, saying, 'If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance.' Of course, there are quite a few problems with this. For starters, internet use cannot yet cause death or dismemberment like car accidents can; and this would get rid of most of the good of internet anonymity while retaining all of the bad parts, especially in terms of expanding the market for stolen identities. Even though telephone networks have long been used by scammers and spammers/telemarketers, we've never needed a 'Telephone Driver's License.'"

master_p writes "The FCC's formally issued draft net neutrality regulations have a huge copyright loophole in them; a loophole that would theoretically permit Comcast to block BitTorrent just like it did in 2007 — simply by claiming that it was 'reasonable network management' intended to 'prevent the unlawful transfer of content.' The new proposed net neutrality regulations would allow the same practices that net neutrality was first invoked to prevent, even if these ISP practices end up inflicting collateral damage on perfectly lawful content and activities."

Peter Eckersley writes "The EFF has launched a research project called Panopticlick, to determine whether seemingly innocuous browser configuration information (like User Agent strings, plugin versions and fonts) may create unique fingerprints that allow web users to be tracked, even if they limit or delete cookies. Preliminary results indicate that the User Agent string alone has 10.5 bits of entropy, which means that for a typical Internet user, only one in about 1,500 (2 ^ 10.5) others will share their User Agent string. If you visit Panopticlick, you can get a reading of how rare or unique your browser configuration is, as well as helping EFF to collect better data about this problem and how best to defend against it." I remember laughing years ago when I would see users who had modified their user agent string with some sort of defiant pro-privacy message, without realizing that their action made them uniquely identifiable out of hundreds of thousands of others.

Peter Eckersley writes "The EFF has launched a research project called Panopticlick, to determine whether seemingly innocuous browser configuration information (like User Agent strings, plugin versions and fonts) may create unique fingerprints that allow web users to be tracked, even if they limit or delete cookies. Preliminary results indicate that the User Agent string alone has 10.5 bits of entropy, which means that for a typical Internet user, only one in about 1,500 (2 ^ 10.5) others will share their User Agent string. If you visit Panopticlick, you can get a reading of how rare or unique your browser configuration is, as well as helping EFF to collect better data about this problem and how best to defend against it." I remember laughing years ago when I would see users who had modified their user agent string with some sort of defiant pro-privacy message, without realizing that their action made them uniquely identifiable out of hundreds of thousands of others.

Peter Eckersley writes "The EFF has launched a research project called Panopticlick, to determine whether seemingly innocuous browser configuration information (like User Agent strings, plugin versions and fonts) may create unique fingerprints that allow web users to be tracked, even if they limit or delete cookies. Preliminary results indicate that the User Agent string alone has 10.5 bits of entropy, which means that for a typical Internet user, only one in about 1,500 (2 ^ 10.5) others will share their User Agent string. If you visit Panopticlick, you can get a reading of how rare or unique your browser configuration is, as well as helping EFF to collect better data about this problem and how best to defend against it." I remember laughing years ago when I would see users who had modified their user agent string with some sort of defiant pro-privacy message, without realizing that their action made them uniquely identifiable out of hundreds of thousands of others.

Peter Eckersley writes "The EFF has launched a research project called Panopticlick, to determine whether seemingly innocuous browser configuration information (like User Agent strings, plugin versions and fonts) may create unique fingerprints that allow web users to be tracked, even if they limit or delete cookies. Preliminary results indicate that the User Agent string alone has 10.5 bits of entropy, which means that for a typical Internet user, only one in about 1,500 (2 ^ 10.5) others will share their User Agent string. If you visit Panopticlick, you can get a reading of how rare or unique your browser configuration is, as well as helping EFF to collect better data about this problem and how best to defend against it." I remember laughing years ago when I would see users who had modified their user agent string with some sort of defiant pro-privacy message, without realizing that their action made them uniquely identifiable out of hundreds of thousands of others.

Slashdot frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The EFF is seeking over $400,000 in attorney's fees from Universal Music Group after Universal sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, demanding the removal of a video posted by user Stephanie Lenz. Lenz had posted a video of her toddler dancing to a 30-second clip of the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy"; after Universal sent the takedown notice, the EFF sent YouTube a counter-notice on behalf of Lenz arguing that the video was fair use, and YouTube restored it. Now the EFF is asking the judge to award them attorney's fees for their work." Use your magical clicking device below to read many more words.

Section 512(f) of the DMCA says pretty clearly that anyone who "knowingly materially misrepresents under this section... that material or activity is infringing... shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees", which would seem to apply here; the EFF argues that Universal should have reasonably known that the video obviously constituted fair use. In a Law.com article about the case, attorney Kelly Klaus, representing Universal, countered that "Congress also said that there was another remedy, which is the counter-notice procedure, which is what happened here." But this seems to miss the point -- the DMCA says that the remedies are the counter-notice procedure and an award for attorney's fees. (Klaus's firm did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) Anyway, as EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry points out, if there were no possible award for attorney's fees against copyright holders who make false accusations, then there would be no disincentive for copyright holders not to file frivolous accusations in the first place.

I'm an EFF member and support their request for attorney's fees, but let's play devil's advocate. Suppose you were an indie musician who sold your songs online, and you found a number of YouTube videos that used your song without permission, so you sent a long list of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube. Included in that list was one video that used only a brief portion of your song, short enough to count as fair use. Is $400,000 a fair punishment for accidentally including one video in your list that wasn't a bona fide copyright infringement?

On the other hand, if the EFF doesn't get their attorneys fees, then they have to eat the cost of the work they did, and that doesn't seem fair either.

The problem is that once you have a $400,000 bill on the table, someone has to pay it, which punishes one or both parties usually vastly out of proportion to any wrongdoing. ($400,000 is almost half of what Reebok had to pay when one of their lead-tainted bracelets killed a child.) Huge attorney's fees awards also limit access to the court system for plaintiffs who might have a reasonable case, but can't afford the risk of having to pay attorney's fees if they lose, and for defendants who might also have a reasonable case, but are under pressure to settle quickly to avoid the risk of a huge attorney's fees award against them.

This suggests an economics / game theory problem: Could you come up with a system that takes into account the incentives of parties on both sides, and that prevents huge legal bills from being generated?

Now, any argument about the legal system usually raises two kinds of objections. The first is that the existing system "works". Well, in many ways it does, but everybody also knows that wealthy corporations and individuals enjoy a huge advantage in the court system, even though courts are supposed to treat all parties equally. So at least in that respect it doesn't "work" the way it's supposed to. The second objection is that it's too hard to change the rules and traditions that are built into legal proceedings, so it's better just to work within the system. True, but that's not the question I'm asking. I'm posing it as a logical brainteaser: If you had carte blance to modify the way that legal disputes were held, could you do it in a way that respects the rights and interests of all parties and still minimizes the legal fees incurred? (Whether I'm right or wrong, my goal is to make this argument more interesting to mathematicians and game theorists, than to lawyers; otherwise, I've failed.)

From a game-theoretic point of view, you might argue that large attorney's fees serve a useful purpose by discouraging frivolous lawsuits. The problem is that the fees don't just discourage frivolous lawsuits but also non-frivolous lawsuits where there's a reasonable chance of losing. On the other hand, a person who is already broke would have little disincentive to file a frivolous lawsuit, since the worst that can happen is that they'd get hit with a huge award for attorney's fees and have to declare bankruptcy, which they might consider worth the risk for a small shot at a million-dollar payout. So assume that attorney's fees are not themselves the best way to deter frivolous lawsuits, and that avoiding large fees in general is still a desirable thing. How do you design rules to achieve that?

I think you could save a lot of money by enforcing a rule that a lawyer is not allowed to seek attorney's fees from the other side for arguing any points that the other side offered to concede anyway. So the incentive would be that if party A's lawyer concedes some point of fact or point of law, and party B ultimately wins the case and an award for attorney's fees, then party B is not allowed to seek attorney's fees for arguing the point conceded by party A's lawyer.

In all of my legal cases where the other side was represented by a lawyer who was getting paid by their client up front, it was clear from reading the other side's briefs (and my own lawyers agreed with me) that opposing counsel had spent a lot of time spinning their wheels and arguing obvious or irrelevant points before getting to the crux of the dispute. If their client wants to pay them for that busy-work, that's between them and their client, but if they had won the case and an award for attorney's fees, I would have objected that they shouldn't be allowed to charge us for time they spent arguing points that we would have given to them anyway. The hypothetical savings from implementing and enforcing this rule, are not trivial.

So how does game theory predict that the two sides would behave under this rule? Suppose MegaCorp is suing or being sued by IndieActivist. MegaCorp's first priority is to win, and if possible to hit IndieActivist with a huge award for attorney's fees to discourage other would-be IndieActivists. MegaCorp doesn't want to lose, but if they do lose, they don't much care about the attorney's fees award they would have to pay to IndieActivist's lawyers. In this scenario, they would be expected to concede very little, disputing trivial points in order to drag out the case as long as possible, hoping that IndieActivist's lawyers would run out of time or money and pressure their client to settle. In other words, MegaCorp would behave about the same as they would under the existing rules.

For IndieActivist, on the other hand, their first priority is to win, but they also care very much about not having to pay a staggering award for attorney's fees if they lose. So they would be expected to concede any points of fact or law, even if favorable to MegaCorp, if those points are so obvious that they don't think the judge would be likely to rule in their favor on those questions anyway. This way, even if IndieActivist loses and has to pay attorney's fees to MegaCorp, those fees would be limited to the time spent arguing the actual point of disagreement that formed the crux of the lawsuit.

Suppose, for example, that Universal had actually sued Lenz for violating Prince's copyright by using a 30-second excerpt of his song in her video. Lenz or her lawyers could have filed a brief conceding all the obvious points that they would expect Universal's lawyers to make: Prince was the holder of the copyright, the copyright had been filed with the Copyright Office, Lenz never sought permission for using the recording, etc. Very quickly, the whole case could be distilled down to: "Show this video to the judge and let them decide if it qualifies as 'fair use'." Any effort spent arguing any points beside that, is wasteful. And if the legal system encourages lawyers to rack up billable hours arguing other points, then the system is wasteful. Concede the obvious, and everybody's costs are kept under control.

This only partially addresses the problem of large attorney's fees, because it still leaves the fees that are generated in the process of arguing points that the other side wouldn't concede. Solving this problem is much harder, because while you can simply eliminate the work that's spent on arguing points that the other side would give to you anyway, you can't eliminate the work spent on points that are genuinely in dispute, you can only try to make that work shorter and cheaper. I've argued for my own fairly complicated remedy in a separate article, but my main point was that legal costs aren't driven up so much by the complexity of the law as by the ambiguity in it. The Windows programming interface, after all, is also very complex, but if you can write a clear description of what you want a simple program to do, you can often get a programmer to write the program for you for dirt cheap. In arguing a legal case, on the other hand, the number of possible outcomes grows exponentially with each point of ambiguity in the law where there's no way to predict how the judge will interpret a particular rule.

But still, even if you can't reduce the ambiguity in how a legal question will be interpreted, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary attorney's fees by distilling the case just down to that particular question. Is it fair use to use a 30-second clip of Prince's song in a video of a dancing toddler? Let the judge decide. But if that's the one and only point that both sides can't agree on, then neither side should be able to bill for time spent arguing about anything else.

Perhaps someone mathematically or logically inclined can come up with a better algorithm for avoiding the billing hours generated by arguing the obvious. I'm not entirely happy with my own solution, because it still allows MegaCorp to concede absolutely nothing, and to try and bleed IndieActivist dry by forcing them to argue even the most trivial points. IndieActivist's lawyer could be reimbursed for that time if they win and get an award for attorney's fees, but they might run out of money or patience before then. To counter this tactic, you could allow either side to seek penalties for Frivolously Arguing The Super-Obvious. If IndieActivist's lawyer wants MegaCorp to concede an obvious point and MegaCorp won't do it, IndieActivist could seek a FATSO penalty, and the judge could decide whether to award them that penalty if the point is really and truly obvious, without deciding on the merits of the case as a whole. The penalty doesn't have to be large enough to hurt MegaCorp, it just has to be large enough to compensate IndieActivist's lawyer for their time, so that MegaCorp can't run them into the ground by forcing them to argue every point unnecessarily. However, economic game theorists might think of some unintended consequence of the FATSO rule. Could MegaCorp flood IndieActivist's lawyer with a gigantic list of requested concessions, so that if IndieActivist's lawyer screws up and forgets to concede one of the points that the judge turns out to consider "obvious", MegaCorp could hammer them with a FATSO award too? It's hard to anticipate all the ways that either party might abuse a new rule of the game.

Meanwhile, under the existing system, while it may be unfair to Universal in some cosmic sense that they have to pay out $400,000 for sending one mistaken DMCA takedown notice, it would be more unfair to force the EFF to eat those costs, and in any case the DMCA does clearly allow for an award of attorney's fees. But it would be better for everyone in the long run -- especially for the EFF and the kind of relatively powerless clients that they usually represent -- if there were more ways to keep legal costs from spiraling out of control in the first place.

Slashdot frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The EFF is seeking over $400,000 in attorney's fees from Universal Music Group after Universal sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, demanding the removal of a video posted by user Stephanie Lenz. Lenz had posted a video of her toddler dancing to a 30-second clip of the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy"; after Universal sent the takedown notice, the EFF sent YouTube a counter-notice on behalf of Lenz arguing that the video was fair use, and YouTube restored it. Now the EFF is asking the judge to award them attorney's fees for their work." Use your magical clicking device below to read many more words.

Section 512(f) of the DMCA says pretty clearly that anyone who "knowingly materially misrepresents under this section... that material or activity is infringing... shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees", which would seem to apply here; the EFF argues that Universal should have reasonably known that the video obviously constituted fair use. In a Law.com article about the case, attorney Kelly Klaus, representing Universal, countered that "Congress also said that there was another remedy, which is the counter-notice procedure, which is what happened here." But this seems to miss the point -- the DMCA says that the remedies are the counter-notice procedure and an award for attorney's fees. (Klaus's firm did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) Anyway, as EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry points out, if there were no possible award for attorney's fees against copyright holders who make false accusations, then there would be no disincentive for copyright holders not to file frivolous accusations in the first place.

I'm an EFF member and support their request for attorney's fees, but let's play devil's advocate. Suppose you were an indie musician who sold your songs online, and you found a number of YouTube videos that used your song without permission, so you sent a long list of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube. Included in that list was one video that used only a brief portion of your song, short enough to count as fair use. Is $400,000 a fair punishment for accidentally including one video in your list that wasn't a bona fide copyright infringement?

On the other hand, if the EFF doesn't get their attorneys fees, then they have to eat the cost of the work they did, and that doesn't seem fair either.

The problem is that once you have a $400,000 bill on the table, someone has to pay it, which punishes one or both parties usually vastly out of proportion to any wrongdoing. ($400,000 is almost half of what Reebok had to pay when one of their lead-tainted bracelets killed a child.) Huge attorney's fees awards also limit access to the court system for plaintiffs who might have a reasonable case, but can't afford the risk of having to pay attorney's fees if they lose, and for defendants who might also have a reasonable case, but are under pressure to settle quickly to avoid the risk of a huge attorney's fees award against them.

This suggests an economics / game theory problem: Could you come up with a system that takes into account the incentives of parties on both sides, and that prevents huge legal bills from being generated?

Now, any argument about the legal system usually raises two kinds of objections. The first is that the existing system "works". Well, in many ways it does, but everybody also knows that wealthy corporations and individuals enjoy a huge advantage in the court system, even though courts are supposed to treat all parties equally. So at least in that respect it doesn't "work" the way it's supposed to. The second objection is that it's too hard to change the rules and traditions that are built into legal proceedings, so it's better just to work within the system. True, but that's not the question I'm asking. I'm posing it as a logical brainteaser: If you had carte blance to modify the way that legal disputes were held, could you do it in a way that respects the rights and interests of all parties and still minimizes the legal fees incurred? (Whether I'm right or wrong, my goal is to make this argument more interesting to mathematicians and game theorists, than to lawyers; otherwise, I've failed.)

From a game-theoretic point of view, you might argue that large attorney's fees serve a useful purpose by discouraging frivolous lawsuits. The problem is that the fees don't just discourage frivolous lawsuits but also non-frivolous lawsuits where there's a reasonable chance of losing. On the other hand, a person who is already broke would have little disincentive to file a frivolous lawsuit, since the worst that can happen is that they'd get hit with a huge award for attorney's fees and have to declare bankruptcy, which they might consider worth the risk for a small shot at a million-dollar payout. So assume that attorney's fees are not themselves the best way to deter frivolous lawsuits, and that avoiding large fees in general is still a desirable thing. How do you design rules to achieve that?

I think you could save a lot of money by enforcing a rule that a lawyer is not allowed to seek attorney's fees from the other side for arguing any points that the other side offered to concede anyway. So the incentive would be that if party A's lawyer concedes some point of fact or point of law, and party B ultimately wins the case and an award for attorney's fees, then party B is not allowed to seek attorney's fees for arguing the point conceded by party A's lawyer.

In all of my legal cases where the other side was represented by a lawyer who was getting paid by their client up front, it was clear from reading the other side's briefs (and my own lawyers agreed with me) that opposing counsel had spent a lot of time spinning their wheels and arguing obvious or irrelevant points before getting to the crux of the dispute. If their client wants to pay them for that busy-work, that's between them and their client, but if they had won the case and an award for attorney's fees, I would have objected that they shouldn't be allowed to charge us for time they spent arguing points that we would have given to them anyway. The hypothetical savings from implementing and enforcing this rule, are not trivial.

So how does game theory predict that the two sides would behave under this rule? Suppose MegaCorp is suing or being sued by IndieActivist. MegaCorp's first priority is to win, and if possible to hit IndieActivist with a huge award for attorney's fees to discourage other would-be IndieActivists. MegaCorp doesn't want to lose, but if they do lose, they don't much care about the attorney's fees award they would have to pay to IndieActivist's lawyers. In this scenario, they would be expected to concede very little, disputing trivial points in order to drag out the case as long as possible, hoping that IndieActivist's lawyers would run out of time or money and pressure their client to settle. In other words, MegaCorp would behave about the same as they would under the existing rules.

For IndieActivist, on the other hand, their first priority is to win, but they also care very much about not having to pay a staggering award for attorney's fees if they lose. So they would be expected to concede any points of fact or law, even if favorable to MegaCorp, if those points are so obvious that they don't think the judge would be likely to rule in their favor on those questions anyway. This way, even if IndieActivist loses and has to pay attorney's fees to MegaCorp, those fees would be limited to the time spent arguing the actual point of disagreement that formed the crux of the lawsuit.

Suppose, for example, that Universal had actually sued Lenz for violating Prince's copyright by using a 30-second excerpt of his song in her video. Lenz or her lawyers could have filed a brief conceding all the obvious points that they would expect Universal's lawyers to make: Prince was the holder of the copyright, the copyright had been filed with the Copyright Office, Lenz never sought permission for using the recording, etc. Very quickly, the whole case could be distilled down to: "Show this video to the judge and let them decide if it qualifies as 'fair use'." Any effort spent arguing any points beside that, is wasteful. And if the legal system encourages lawyers to rack up billable hours arguing other points, then the system is wasteful. Concede the obvious, and everybody's costs are kept under control.

This only partially addresses the problem of large attorney's fees, because it still leaves the fees that are generated in the process of arguing points that the other side wouldn't concede. Solving this problem is much harder, because while you can simply eliminate the work that's spent on arguing points that the other side would give to you anyway, you can't eliminate the work spent on points that are genuinely in dispute, you can only try to make that work shorter and cheaper. I've argued for my own fairly complicated remedy in a separate article, but my main point was that legal costs aren't driven up so much by the complexity of the law as by the ambiguity in it. The Windows programming interface, after all, is also very complex, but if you can write a clear description of what you want a simple program to do, you can often get a programmer to write the program for you for dirt cheap. In arguing a legal case, on the other hand, the number of possible outcomes grows exponentially with each point of ambiguity in the law where there's no way to predict how the judge will interpret a particular rule.

But still, even if you can't reduce the ambiguity in how a legal question will be interpreted, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary attorney's fees by distilling the case just down to that particular question. Is it fair use to use a 30-second clip of Prince's song in a video of a dancing toddler? Let the judge decide. But if that's the one and only point that both sides can't agree on, then neither side should be able to bill for time spent arguing about anything else.

Perhaps someone mathematically or logically inclined can come up with a better algorithm for avoiding the billing hours generated by arguing the obvious. I'm not entirely happy with my own solution, because it still allows MegaCorp to concede absolutely nothing, and to try and bleed IndieActivist dry by forcing them to argue even the most trivial points. IndieActivist's lawyer could be reimbursed for that time if they win and get an award for attorney's fees, but they might run out of money or patience before then. To counter this tactic, you could allow either side to seek penalties for Frivolously Arguing The Super-Obvious. If IndieActivist's lawyer wants MegaCorp to concede an obvious point and MegaCorp won't do it, IndieActivist could seek a FATSO penalty, and the judge could decide whether to award them that penalty if the point is really and truly obvious, without deciding on the merits of the case as a whole. The penalty doesn't have to be large enough to hurt MegaCorp, it just has to be large enough to compensate IndieActivist's lawyer for their time, so that MegaCorp can't run them into the ground by forcing them to argue every point unnecessarily. However, economic game theorists might think of some unintended consequence of the FATSO rule. Could MegaCorp flood IndieActivist's lawyer with a gigantic list of requested concessions, so that if IndieActivist's lawyer screws up and forgets to concede one of the points that the judge turns out to consider "obvious", MegaCorp could hammer them with a FATSO award too? It's hard to anticipate all the ways that either party might abuse a new rule of the game.

Meanwhile, under the existing system, while it may be unfair to Universal in some cosmic sense that they have to pay out $400,000 for sending one mistaken DMCA takedown notice, it would be more unfair to force the EFF to eat those costs, and in any case the DMCA does clearly allow for an award of attorney's fees. But it would be better for everyone in the long run -- especially for the EFF and the kind of relatively powerless clients that they usually represent -- if there were more ways to keep legal costs from spiraling out of control in the first place.

Slashdot frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The EFF is seeking over $400,000 in attorney's fees from Universal Music Group after Universal sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, demanding the removal of a video posted by user Stephanie Lenz. Lenz had posted a video of her toddler dancing to a 30-second clip of the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy"; after Universal sent the takedown notice, the EFF sent YouTube a counter-notice on behalf of Lenz arguing that the video was fair use, and YouTube restored it. Now the EFF is asking the judge to award them attorney's fees for their work." Use your magical clicking device below to read many more words.

Section 512(f) of the DMCA says pretty clearly that anyone who "knowingly materially misrepresents under this section... that material or activity is infringing... shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees", which would seem to apply here; the EFF argues that Universal should have reasonably known that the video obviously constituted fair use. In a Law.com article about the case, attorney Kelly Klaus, representing Universal, countered that "Congress also said that there was another remedy, which is the counter-notice procedure, which is what happened here." But this seems to miss the point -- the DMCA says that the remedies are the counter-notice procedure and an award for attorney's fees. (Klaus's firm did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) Anyway, as EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry points out, if there were no possible award for attorney's fees against copyright holders who make false accusations, then there would be no disincentive for copyright holders not to file frivolous accusations in the first place.

I'm an EFF member and support their request for attorney's fees, but let's play devil's advocate. Suppose you were an indie musician who sold your songs online, and you found a number of YouTube videos that used your song without permission, so you sent a long list of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube. Included in that list was one video that used only a brief portion of your song, short enough to count as fair use. Is $400,000 a fair punishment for accidentally including one video in your list that wasn't a bona fide copyright infringement?

On the other hand, if the EFF doesn't get their attorneys fees, then they have to eat the cost of the work they did, and that doesn't seem fair either.

The problem is that once you have a $400,000 bill on the table, someone has to pay it, which punishes one or both parties usually vastly out of proportion to any wrongdoing. ($400,000 is almost half of what Reebok had to pay when one of their lead-tainted bracelets killed a child.) Huge attorney's fees awards also limit access to the court system for plaintiffs who might have a reasonable case, but can't afford the risk of having to pay attorney's fees if they lose, and for defendants who might also have a reasonable case, but are under pressure to settle quickly to avoid the risk of a huge attorney's fees award against them.

This suggests an economics / game theory problem: Could you come up with a system that takes into account the incentives of parties on both sides, and that prevents huge legal bills from being generated?

Now, any argument about the legal system usually raises two kinds of objections. The first is that the existing system "works". Well, in many ways it does, but everybody also knows that wealthy corporations and individuals enjoy a huge advantage in the court system, even though courts are supposed to treat all parties equally. So at least in that respect it doesn't "work" the way it's supposed to. The second objection is that it's too hard to change the rules and traditions that are built into legal proceedings, so it's better just to work within the system. True, but that's not the question I'm asking. I'm posing it as a logical brainteaser: If you had carte blance to modify the way that legal disputes were held, could you do it in a way that respects the rights and interests of all parties and still minimizes the legal fees incurred? (Whether I'm right or wrong, my goal is to make this argument more interesting to mathematicians and game theorists, than to lawyers; otherwise, I've failed.)

From a game-theoretic point of view, you might argue that large attorney's fees serve a useful purpose by discouraging frivolous lawsuits. The problem is that the fees don't just discourage frivolous lawsuits but also non-frivolous lawsuits where there's a reasonable chance of losing. On the other hand, a person who is already broke would have little disincentive to file a frivolous lawsuit, since the worst that can happen is that they'd get hit with a huge award for attorney's fees and have to declare bankruptcy, which they might consider worth the risk for a small shot at a million-dollar payout. So assume that attorney's fees are not themselves the best way to deter frivolous lawsuits, and that avoiding large fees in general is still a desirable thing. How do you design rules to achieve that?

I think you could save a lot of money by enforcing a rule that a lawyer is not allowed to seek attorney's fees from the other side for arguing any points that the other side offered to concede anyway. So the incentive would be that if party A's lawyer concedes some point of fact or point of law, and party B ultimately wins the case and an award for attorney's fees, then party B is not allowed to seek attorney's fees for arguing the point conceded by party A's lawyer.

In all of my legal cases where the other side was represented by a lawyer who was getting paid by their client up front, it was clear from reading the other side's briefs (and my own lawyers agreed with me) that opposing counsel had spent a lot of time spinning their wheels and arguing obvious or irrelevant points before getting to the crux of the dispute. If their client wants to pay them for that busy-work, that's between them and their client, but if they had won the case and an award for attorney's fees, I would have objected that they shouldn't be allowed to charge us for time they spent arguing points that we would have given to them anyway. The hypothetical savings from implementing and enforcing this rule, are not trivial.

So how does game theory predict that the two sides would behave under this rule? Suppose MegaCorp is suing or being sued by IndieActivist. MegaCorp's first priority is to win, and if possible to hit IndieActivist with a huge award for attorney's fees to discourage other would-be IndieActivists. MegaCorp doesn't want to lose, but if they do lose, they don't much care about the attorney's fees award they would have to pay to IndieActivist's lawyers. In this scenario, they would be expected to concede very little, disputing trivial points in order to drag out the case as long as possible, hoping that IndieActivist's lawyers would run out of time or money and pressure their client to settle. In other words, MegaCorp would behave about the same as they would under the existing rules.

For IndieActivist, on the other hand, their first priority is to win, but they also care very much about not having to pay a staggering award for attorney's fees if they lose. So they would be expected to concede any points of fact or law, even if favorable to MegaCorp, if those points are so obvious that they don't think the judge would be likely to rule in their favor on those questions anyway. This way, even if IndieActivist loses and has to pay attorney's fees to MegaCorp, those fees would be limited to the time spent arguing the actual point of disagreement that formed the crux of the lawsuit.

Suppose, for example, that Universal had actually sued Lenz for violating Prince's copyright by using a 30-second excerpt of his song in her video. Lenz or her lawyers could have filed a brief conceding all the obvious points that they would expect Universal's lawyers to make: Prince was the holder of the copyright, the copyright had been filed with the Copyright Office, Lenz never sought permission for using the recording, etc. Very quickly, the whole case could be distilled down to: "Show this video to the judge and let them decide if it qualifies as 'fair use'." Any effort spent arguing any points beside that, is wasteful. And if the legal system encourages lawyers to rack up billable hours arguing other points, then the system is wasteful. Concede the obvious, and everybody's costs are kept under control.

This only partially addresses the problem of large attorney's fees, because it still leaves the fees that are generated in the process of arguing points that the other side wouldn't concede. Solving this problem is much harder, because while you can simply eliminate the work that's spent on arguing points that the other side would give to you anyway, you can't eliminate the work spent on points that are genuinely in dispute, you can only try to make that work shorter and cheaper. I've argued for my own fairly complicated remedy in a separate article, but my main point was that legal costs aren't driven up so much by the complexity of the law as by the ambiguity in it. The Windows programming interface, after all, is also very complex, but if you can write a clear description of what you want a simple program to do, you can often get a programmer to write the program for you for dirt cheap. In arguing a legal case, on the other hand, the number of possible outcomes grows exponentially with each point of ambiguity in the law where there's no way to predict how the judge will interpret a particular rule.

But still, even if you can't reduce the ambiguity in how a legal question will be interpreted, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary attorney's fees by distilling the case just down to that particular question. Is it fair use to use a 30-second clip of Prince's song in a video of a dancing toddler? Let the judge decide. But if that's the one and only point that both sides can't agree on, then neither side should be able to bill for time spent arguing about anything else.

Perhaps someone mathematically or logically inclined can come up with a better algorithm for avoiding the billing hours generated by arguing the obvious. I'm not entirely happy with my own solution, because it still allows MegaCorp to concede absolutely nothing, and to try and bleed IndieActivist dry by forcing them to argue even the most trivial points. IndieActivist's lawyer could be reimbursed for that time if they win and get an award for attorney's fees, but they might run out of money or patience before then. To counter this tactic, you could allow either side to seek penalties for Frivolously Arguing The Super-Obvious. If IndieActivist's lawyer wants MegaCorp to concede an obvious point and MegaCorp won't do it, IndieActivist could seek a FATSO penalty, and the judge could decide whether to award them that penalty if the point is really and truly obvious, without deciding on the merits of the case as a whole. The penalty doesn't have to be large enough to hurt MegaCorp, it just has to be large enough to compensate IndieActivist's lawyer for their time, so that MegaCorp can't run them into the ground by forcing them to argue every point unnecessarily. However, economic game theorists might think of some unintended consequence of the FATSO rule. Could MegaCorp flood IndieActivist's lawyer with a gigantic list of requested concessions, so that if IndieActivist's lawyer screws up and forgets to concede one of the points that the judge turns out to consider "obvious", MegaCorp could hammer them with a FATSO award too? It's hard to anticipate all the ways that either party might abuse a new rule of the game.

Meanwhile, under the existing system, while it may be unfair to Universal in some cosmic sense that they have to pay out $400,000 for sending one mistaken DMCA takedown notice, it would be more unfair to force the EFF to eat those costs, and in any case the DMCA does clearly allow for an award of attorney's fees. But it would be better for everyone in the long run -- especially for the EFF and the kind of relatively powerless clients that they usually represent -- if there were more ways to keep legal costs from spiraling out of control in the first place.

Slashdot frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes "The EFF is seeking over $400,000 in attorney's fees from Universal Music Group after Universal sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, demanding the removal of a video posted by user Stephanie Lenz. Lenz had posted a video of her toddler dancing to a 30-second clip of the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy"; after Universal sent the takedown notice, the EFF sent YouTube a counter-notice on behalf of Lenz arguing that the video was fair use, and YouTube restored it. Now the EFF is asking the judge to award them attorney's fees for their work." Use your magical clicking device below to read many more words.

Section 512(f) of the DMCA says pretty clearly that anyone who "knowingly materially misrepresents under this section... that material or activity is infringing... shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees", which would seem to apply here; the EFF argues that Universal should have reasonably known that the video obviously constituted fair use. In a Law.com article about the case, attorney Kelly Klaus, representing Universal, countered that "Congress also said that there was another remedy, which is the counter-notice procedure, which is what happened here." But this seems to miss the point -- the DMCA says that the remedies are the counter-notice procedure and an award for attorney's fees. (Klaus's firm did not respond to requests for comment for this article.) Anyway, as EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry points out, if there were no possible award for attorney's fees against copyright holders who make false accusations, then there would be no disincentive for copyright holders not to file frivolous accusations in the first place.

I'm an EFF member and support their request for attorney's fees, but let's play devil's advocate. Suppose you were an indie musician who sold your songs online, and you found a number of YouTube videos that used your song without permission, so you sent a long list of DMCA takedown notices to YouTube. Included in that list was one video that used only a brief portion of your song, short enough to count as fair use. Is $400,000 a fair punishment for accidentally including one video in your list that wasn't a bona fide copyright infringement?

On the other hand, if the EFF doesn't get their attorneys fees, then they have to eat the cost of the work they did, and that doesn't seem fair either.

The problem is that once you have a $400,000 bill on the table, someone has to pay it, which punishes one or both parties usually vastly out of proportion to any wrongdoing. ($400,000 is almost half of what Reebok had to pay when one of their lead-tainted bracelets killed a child.) Huge attorney's fees awards also limit access to the court system for plaintiffs who might have a reasonable case, but can't afford the risk of having to pay attorney's fees if they lose, and for defendants who might also have a reasonable case, but are under pressure to settle quickly to avoid the risk of a huge attorney's fees award against them.

This suggests an economics / game theory problem: Could you come up with a system that takes into account the incentives of parties on both sides, and that prevents huge legal bills from being generated?

Now, any argument about the legal system usually raises two kinds of objections. The first is that the existing system "works". Well, in many ways it does, but everybody also knows that wealthy corporations and individuals enjoy a huge advantage in the court system, even though courts are supposed to treat all parties equally. So at least in that respect it doesn't "work" the way it's supposed to. The second objection is that it's too hard to change the rules and traditions that are built into legal proceedings, so it's better just to work within the system. True, but that's not the question I'm asking. I'm posing it as a logical brainteaser: If you had carte blance to modify the way that legal disputes were held, could you do it in a way that respects the rights and interests of all parties and still minimizes the legal fees incurred? (Whether I'm right or wrong, my goal is to make this argument more interesting to mathematicians and game theorists, than to lawyers; otherwise, I've failed.)

From a game-theoretic point of view, you might argue that large attorney's fees serve a useful purpose by discouraging frivolous lawsuits. The problem is that the fees don't just discourage frivolous lawsuits but also non-frivolous lawsuits where there's a reasonable chance of losing. On the other hand, a person who is already broke would have little disincentive to file a frivolous lawsuit, since the worst that can happen is that they'd get hit with a huge award for attorney's fees and have to declare bankruptcy, which they might consider worth the risk for a small shot at a million-dollar payout. So assume that attorney's fees are not themselves the best way to deter frivolous lawsuits, and that avoiding large fees in general is still a desirable thing. How do you design rules to achieve that?

I think you could save a lot of money by enforcing a rule that a lawyer is not allowed to seek attorney's fees from the other side for arguing any points that the other side offered to concede anyway. So the incentive would be that if party A's lawyer concedes some point of fact or point of law, and party B ultimately wins the case and an award for attorney's fees, then party B is not allowed to seek attorney's fees for arguing the point conceded by party A's lawyer.

In all of my legal cases where the other side was represented by a lawyer who was getting paid by their client up front, it was clear from reading the other side's briefs (and my own lawyers agreed with me) that opposing counsel had spent a lot of time spinning their wheels and arguing obvious or irrelevant points before getting to the crux of the dispute. If their client wants to pay them for that busy-work, that's between them and their client, but if they had won the case and an award for attorney's fees, I would have objected that they shouldn't be allowed to charge us for time they spent arguing points that we would have given to them anyway. The hypothetical savings from implementing and enforcing this rule, are not trivial.

So how does game theory predict that the two sides would behave under this rule? Suppose MegaCorp is suing or being sued by IndieActivist. MegaCorp's first priority is to win, and if possible to hit IndieActivist with a huge award for attorney's fees to discourage other would-be IndieActivists. MegaCorp doesn't want to lose, but if they do lose, they don't much care about the attorney's fees award they would have to pay to IndieActivist's lawyers. In this scenario, they would be expected to concede very little, disputing trivial points in order to drag out the case as long as possible, hoping that IndieActivist's lawyers would run out of time or money and pressure their client to settle. In other words, MegaCorp would behave about the same as they would under the existing rules.

For IndieActivist, on the other hand, their first priority is to win, but they also care very much about not having to pay a staggering award for attorney's fees if they lose. So they would be expected to concede any points of fact or law, even if favorable to MegaCorp, if those points are so obvious that they don't think the judge would be likely to rule in their favor on those questions anyway. This way, even if IndieActivist loses and has to pay attorney's fees to MegaCorp, those fees would be limited to the time spent arguing the actual point of disagreement that formed the crux of the lawsuit.

Suppose, for example, that Universal had actually sued Lenz for violating Prince's copyright by using a 30-second excerpt of his song in her video. Lenz or her lawyers could have filed a brief conceding all the obvious points that they would expect Universal's lawyers to make: Prince was the holder of the copyright, the copyright had been filed with the Copyright Office, Lenz never sought permission for using the recording, etc. Very quickly, the whole case could be distilled down to: "Show this video to the judge and let them decide if it qualifies as 'fair use'." Any effort spent arguing any points beside that, is wasteful. And if the legal system encourages lawyers to rack up billable hours arguing other points, then the system is wasteful. Concede the obvious, and everybody's costs are kept under control.

This only partially addresses the problem of large attorney's fees, because it still leaves the fees that are generated in the process of arguing points that the other side wouldn't concede. Solving this problem is much harder, because while you can simply eliminate the work that's spent on arguing points that the other side would give to you anyway, you can't eliminate the work spent on points that are genuinely in dispute, you can only try to make that work shorter and cheaper. I've argued for my own fairly complicated remedy in a separate article, but my main point was that legal costs aren't driven up so much by the complexity of the law as by the ambiguity in it. The Windows programming interface, after all, is also very complex, but if you can write a clear description of what you want a simple program to do, you can often get a programmer to write the program for you for dirt cheap. In arguing a legal case, on the other hand, the number of possible outcomes grows exponentially with each point of ambiguity in the law where there's no way to predict how the judge will interpret a particular rule.

But still, even if you can't reduce the ambiguity in how a legal question will be interpreted, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary attorney's fees by distilling the case just down to that particular question. Is it fair use to use a 30-second clip of Prince's song in a video of a dancing toddler? Let the judge decide. But if that's the one and only point that both sides can't agree on, then neither side should be able to bill for time spent arguing about anything else.

Perhaps someone mathematically or logically inclined can come up with a better algorithm for avoiding the billing hours generated by arguing the obvious. I'm not entirely happy with my own solution, because it still allows MegaCorp to concede absolutely nothing, and to try and bleed IndieActivist dry by forcing them to argue even the most trivial points. IndieActivist's lawyer could be reimbursed for that time if they win and get an award for attorney's fees, but they might run out of money or patience before then. To counter this tactic, you could allow either side to seek penalties for Frivolously Arguing The Super-Obvious. If IndieActivist's lawyer wants MegaCorp to concede an obvious point and MegaCorp won't do it, IndieActivist could seek a FATSO penalty, and the judge could decide whether to award them that penalty if the point is really and truly obvious, without deciding on the merits of the case as a whole. The penalty doesn't have to be large enough to hurt MegaCorp, it just has to be large enough to compensate IndieActivist's lawyer for their time, so that MegaCorp can't run them into the ground by forcing them to argue every point unnecessarily. However, economic game theorists might think of some unintended consequence of the FATSO rule. Could MegaCorp flood IndieActivist's lawyer with a gigantic list of requested concessions, so that if IndieActivist's lawyer screws up and forgets to concede one of the points that the judge turns out to consider "obvious", MegaCorp could hammer them with a FATSO award too? It's hard to anticipate all the ways that either party might abuse a new rule of the game.

Meanwhile, under the existing system, while it may be unfair to Universal in some cosmic sense that they have to pay out $400,000 for sending one mistaken DMCA takedown notice, it would be more unfair to force the EFF to eat those costs, and in any case the DMCA does clearly allow for an award of attorney's fees. But it would be better for everyone in the long run -- especially for the EFF and the kind of relatively powerless clients that they usually represent -- if there were more ways to keep legal costs from spiraling out of control in the first place.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."

Presto Vivace writes "Reporting for Computer World, Grant Gross writes that the RIAA is asking the FCC not to make the net neutrality rules so strict that they 'would limit broadband providers' [flexibility] to "address" illegal online file sharing.' It seems the RIAA is unclear on the concept of the Fourth Amendment. 'The FCC should not only avoid rules prohibiting ISPs from blocking illegal file trading, but it should actively encourage ISPs to do so, the RIAA said. ... Other groups called on the FCC to stay out of the copyright enforcement business. If ISPs are required to check for copyright infringement, they could interfere with legal online activities, said six digital rights and business groups, including Public Knowledge, the Consumer Electronics Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "EFF reports that Cory Doctorow spoke to a crowd of about a hundred librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and students at the National Reading Summit on How to Destroy the Book and said that 'anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself.' Doctorow says that for centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books and that when you own a book 'it’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children' and that 'the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned.'"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Professor Johannes Skaar's Quantum Hacking group at NTNU have found a new way to break quantum encryption. Even though quantum encryption is theoretically perfect, real hardware isn't, and they exploit these flaws. Their technique relies on a particular way of blinding the single photon detectors so that they're able to perform an intercept-resend attack and get a copy of the secret key without giving away the fact that someone is listening. This attack is not merely theoretical, either. They have built an eavesdropping device and successfully attacked their own quantum encryption hardware. More details can be found in their conference presentation."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Verizon is defending its decision to double its Early Termination Fee from $175 to $350 after being called to account by the FCC. They claim it's because the higher fees allow them to offer more expensive phones with a lower up-front cost (PDF), and they also say that because they pro-rate the fee depending on how much of your contract is left, they still lose money. Apparently doing something about the Verizon customer service horror stories isn't as good a way to retain customers as telling them that they have to pay several hundred dollars to leave."

Hackajar writes "Have you ever caught yourself running for the volume control when a TV commercial comes on? Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA) has, and is submitting legislation that would require TV commercials in the US to stay at volume levels similar to the programming they are associated with. From the article: 'Right now, the government doesn't have much say in the volume of TV ads. It's been getting complaints ever since televisions began proliferating in the 1950s. But the FCC concluded in 1984 there was no fair way to write regulations controlling the "apparent loudness" of commercials.'"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Microsoft Office 2003 bug is locking people out of their own files, specifically those protected with Microsoft's Rights Management Service. Microsoft has a TechNet bulletin on the issue with a fix. It looks like they screwed up and let a certificate expire. There's no information on when the replacement certificate will expire, though, or what will happen when it does."

Fuzzzy writes "For a long time, people have suspected that Israeli ISPs are blocking or delaying P2P traffic. However, no hard evidence was provided, and the ISPs denied any interference. Today Ynetnews published a report on comprehensive research that for the first time proves those suspicions. Using Glasnost and Switzerland, an Internet attorney / blogger found evidence of deep packet inspection and deliberate delays. From the article: 'Since 2007 Ynet has received complaints according to which Israeli ISPs block P2P traffic. Those were brought to the media and were dismissed by the ISPs. Our findings were that there is direct and deliberate interference in P2P traffic by at least two out of the three major ISPs and that this interference exists by both P2P caching and P2P blocking.'"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to Ambassador Ron Kirk, the head of US Trade Representatives, the secrecy around the ACTA copyright treaty is necessary because without that secrecy, people would be 'walking away from the table.' If you don't remember, that treaty is the one where leaks indicate that it may contain all sorts of provisions for online copyright enforcement, like a global DMCA with takedown and anti-circumvention restrictions, three-strikes laws to terminate offending internet connections, and copyright cops. FOIA requests for the treaty text have been rebuffed over alleged 'national security' concerns. One can only hope that what he has said is true and that sites like Wikileaks will help tear down the veil of secrecy behind which they're negotiating our future."

Last month we discussed news that Microsoft had banned hundreds of thousands of Xbox users for using modified consoles. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now pointed to this round of bans as a prime example of the power given to providers of online services through 'Terms of Service' and other usage agreements. "No matter how much we rely on them to get on with our everyday lives, access to online services — like email, social networking sites, and (wait for it) online gaming — can never be guaranteed. ... he who writes the TOS makes the rules, and when it comes to enforcing them, the service provider often behaves as though it is also the judge, jury and executioner. ... While the mass ban provides a useful illustration of their danger, these terms can be found in nearly all TOS agreements for all kinds of services. There have been virtually no legal challenges to these kinds of arbitrary termination clauses, but we imagine this will be a growth area for lawyers."

pickens writes "The EFF is reaching out for help after a company called Volomedia got the Patent Office to grant them exclusive rights to 'a method for providing episodic media' that could threaten the community of podcasters and millions of podcast listeners. 'It's a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years,' writes Rebecca Jeschke. 'Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners.' To bust this patent, EFF is looking for additional 'prior art' — evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use (PDF) before November 19, 2003. 'In particular, we're looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes.'"

pickens writes "The EFF is reaching out for help after a company called Volomedia got the Patent Office to grant them exclusive rights to 'a method for providing episodic media' that could threaten the community of podcasters and millions of podcast listeners. 'It's a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years,' writes Rebecca Jeschke. 'Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners.' To bust this patent, EFF is looking for additional 'prior art' — evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use (PDF) before November 19, 2003. 'In particular, we're looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes.'"

netbuzz writes "Recognizing that public shame is a potent weapon, the Electronic Frontier Foundation today launched a new Web site — its Takedown Hall of Shame — that will shine an unflattering spotlight on those corporations and individuals who abuse copyright claims to stifle free speech. Among the early inductees are NPR, NBC, CBS, and Diebold."