Slashdot Mirror

legal_tinker writes "At grep.law, Tait Graves writes: 'In a majority of states, you can be enjoined from starting a new job because of what you know, even if you have done nothing wrong.' A California court just rejected that idea in California."

mrbnsn writes "The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is conducting a study of Internet filtering in countries worldwide. As part of this study, they have put up a web page where you can get a real-time report on whether any URL you submit is blocked by the Great Firewall. Check whether you'd be able to read your favorite web sites in Beijing!" I've also heard that there are some "western" hotels that have non-blocked connections. Anyone from China care to tell us what it's like?

mrbnsn writes "The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is conducting a study of Internet filtering in countries worldwide. As part of this study, they have put up a web page where you can get a real-time report on whether any URL you submit is blocked by the Great Firewall. Check whether you'd be able to read your favorite web sites in Beijing!" I've also heard that there are some "western" hotels that have non-blocked connections. Anyone from China care to tell us what it's like?

jko9 writes "First proposed almost 20 years ago by Donald Knuth, the idea of Literate Programming is basically that of making program documentation primary, and embedding code in the documentation, rather than vice versa. Despite some obvious advantages apparent to anyone who has struggled to understand a poorly documented program, literate programming never really caught on. That all could change, however, with the release of a new program called Leo, written by Edward K. Ream. Leo supports standard literate programming languages like noweb and CWEB, but with a crucial difference - Leo adds outlines. The effect is striking: overall organization of a program is always visible and explicit. Much of the narrative of the documentation gets placed in the outline, making documentation simpler, and allowing viewers to approach the code at various levels of detail. Screenshots and tutorials for Leo are here - if that site gets slashdotted, you can download the visual tutorials in .chm form or html form from Leo's Sourceforge site. Leo is an open source program written in Python. Any current practioners of Literate Programming techniques out there? People who have tried it and given it up? Can the addition of outlines to Literate Programming make it more powerful / popular?"

mpawlo writes: "As reported by Greplaw, the Norweigan 'Byrett' (district court) will try the Jon Johansen DVD case on December 9, 2002. The trial was supposed to take place this summer, but the court decided to postpone the trial to find a technology savvy judge. The case will be tried by one judge and a panel of two lay assessors. Jon Johansen is being prosecuted by the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit (OKOKRIM) under Norwegian Criminal Code 145(2). Johansen created DeCSS software that can enable DVD playback on Linux. It is argued that the DeCSS software is a piracy tool." Here is the Greplaw story with more links.

BawbBitchen writes "The BBC is running an interesting story about a bunch of Astronomers who have produced a snapshot of the Solar System as of 26 July 2002. Here is the full image and here is a 5.1MB animated GIF (each frame is 961 x 961 pixels) of the map. The credits say it was generated on an OpenVMS system using the PGPLOT graphics library and the animation was done on a RISC OS 4.03 system."

BawbBitchen writes "The BBC is running an interesting story about a bunch of Astronomers who have produced a snapshot of the Solar System as of 26 July 2002. Here is the full image and here is a 5.1MB animated GIF (each frame is 961 x 961 pixels) of the map. The credits say it was generated on an OpenVMS system using the PGPLOT graphics library and the animation was done on a RISC OS 4.03 system."

John writes: "Saudi Arabia blocks its citizens' internet access to some sites on pornography, religious information (including some on the state religion: Islam) humor, music, movies, and homosexuality, and programs that translate web pages into Arabic, according to this Boston Globe article. (Secure Computing Corp.) provides the Saudis with Smartfilter to block network of proxy servers. The article does not describe the criteria used to block various cites. I wonder if Slashdot is one of them?" Update: 07/17 15:02 GMT by T : A brief mention ran yesterday at the Censorware Project as well, linking to the referenced report itself.

Last week the Berkman Center held their second annual Internet Law Program, an intensive course in (surprise) internet law and developments. You probably didn't spend the time/money to attend, but the topics covered are interesting enough (to me anyway) to check it out even second-hand. Dan Gillmor attended and posted his notes: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 part 1 and Day 5 part 2. Donna Wentworth was there, trying to record the seminar in real-time; hopefully she's learned her lesson. There is tons of interesting stuff in there - it's worth your time to read through if you have any interest in the subject matter at all.

Last week the Berkman Center held their second annual Internet Law Program, an intensive course in (surprise) internet law and developments. You probably didn't spend the time/money to attend, but the topics covered are interesting enough (to me anyway) to check it out even second-hand. Dan Gillmor attended and posted his notes: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 part 1 and Day 5 part 2. Donna Wentworth was there, trying to record the seminar in real-time; hopefully she's learned her lesson. There is tons of interesting stuff in there - it's worth your time to read through if you have any interest in the subject matter at all.

mpawlo writes: "Greplaw reports that a broadcast flag is a digital tagging technique used for television programs distributed through digital TV stations. The broadcast flag is used as information stating that the program may not be redistributed. It is not your everyday digital watermarking technique. The idea is to mandate a standard for a broadcast flag. The content providers, through The Motion Picture Association ('MPAA'), will most likely aim for the standard to be lobbied into a law through The Broadcast Protection Discussion Group. Hence, the law would require all hardware able to play the digital TV content to carry broadcast flag equipment (not playing unmarked content). The Electronic Frontier Foundation ('EFF') fears that a law stipulating the standard would threaten creativity. The MPAA has published a list of frequently asked questions ('FAQ') regarding broadcast flags. The EFF has commented the MPAA FAQ."

Hettinga writes: "Through many popular books and articles in the New York Times, Peter Wayner has done more to promote the field of applied financial cryptography, and in particular open source financial cryptography, than any other author writing today. His new book, Translucent Databases, from Flyzone Press, is no exception." Read on for the rest of the review. Translucent Databases author Peter Wayner pages 185 publisher Flyzone Press rating Outstanding. 5 Stars. Buy this Book. reviewer Robert Hettinga ISBN 0-9675844-1-8 summary Translucent Databases cure "Database Nation" and the "Transparent Society"?

Translucent Databases has all the hallmarks of Wayner's books: clear, easy to read exposition of the main issues, why they're important, and, in his technical books, excellently documented code written for the most popular platforms for the technology in question.

This book in particular should be an instant classic because like all great books, it takes what should be a very simple idea, encrypted databases, and expands it to some amazing conclusions.

For a long time now, I've been interested in what I call the geodesic economy, where all information, including information controlling financial assets, is fractally "surfacted", like so much grease in soapy dishwater, as far out into the edges of a ubiquitous internetwork as Moore's Law will allow, using financial cryptography protocols to secure transactions and markets on a nominally insecure, but ubiquitous, public internetwork.

People who are familiar with my thinking about such things over the past 8 years will see quite quickly why I think Peter's new book is so important. Transparent databases represent a way not only to link the batch-settled, book-entry debit-for-credit world of modern financial operations with a more simply founded, but much more sophisticated world which uses cryptographic tokens representing control of various financial and real assets. They also show us how to actually account for those tokens in such a fashion that every financial actor in that market, man or machine, can trust that their bearer certificates are authentic ones, and done in such a fashion that a given token retains its cryptographic integrity, including the functionally anonymous characteristics that made it so cheap to use in the first place.

The singular feature of Wayner's translucent databases is that, like internet bearer transactions themselves, the cryptography securing data in them can happen in the client, and not a centrally vulnerable server. More to the point, by using data stored in this fashion, the data can be dispersed as far out in the network as... well, Moore's Law allows, in extremely fast and lightweight files, and, instead of creating summaries of data for reports, the data can be polled for as close to its source as possible, instantaneously, in realtime, instead of being rolled up into increasingly larger batch-processed summaries taking weeks, sometimes months, to produce and audit.

There are obvious implications for my own particular hobby-horses, like anonymous but accurate double spend databases for bearer transactions, where only a simple blinded m-of-n cryptographic hash of a given promise to pay is necessary to prevent the duplication of that promise to more than one person at a time. However, for the rest of us :-), Wayner also points to a whole host of much less esoteric applications in the lots of the usual places where absolute privacy and extremely authentic information, is at a premium. Examples for military, medical, and anti-rape databases, for accounting systems and securities transactions, and even for internet poker -- the paradigm of completely untrusted parties cooperating for what each player hopes will be his own, preferrably cash, benefit -- are all presented in clear writing and running code.

There has been a lot of lip-service in the privacy community about "owning" your own data. Unfortunately, by involving the state at all, these "advocates" almost always favor inadvertantly draconian political solutions to the problem presented by the ubiquity of database technology and its otherwise beneficial presense in our lives. They ususally present this nonsense as a "sacrifice" for the "greater good" that would make Hayek's Road to Serfdom look like Lilac Sunday at the local arboretum.

In Translucent Databases, Wayner shows, in precise detail, with code, how to solve that problem, without trusting lawyers, much less guys with guns.

Though quite a short read, the scope of the book itself is quite considerable. Wayner starts from simple hashes of data to merely obscure it, through various kinds of encryption, quantization of data, and even accounting with encrypted data using what amounts to virtual cumulative crossfoots like the kind you would see on all good accounting reports. In so doing, Wayner explains, quite simply, something that people like Eric Hughes made great, complicated hay out of years ago with gangling theories of encrypted "open" books.

Ultimately, Wayner really does end up where a lot of us think databases will be someday, particularly in finance: repositories of data accessible only by digital bearer tokens using various blind signature protocols, neatly, and quite literally, "dis-integrating" the ability of databases to be used against us as a tool of totalitarianism, exemplified most recently by Simpson Garfinkel in his book Database Nation , and, oddly enough, not because someone or other wants to strike a blow against the empire, but simply because it's safer -- and cheaper -- to do that way.

Every database programmer should have a copy of this simple and elegant book on his reference bookshelf. Particularly if he cares about the integrity of his data, the liability to the database's owner should information be misappropriated, and, not least, about freedom itself in a world of ubiquitous, and, frankly, necessary, stored detail: details about practically every person on earth, their property and finances, and, ultimately, everything they do.

Translucent Databases presents a simple, frankly beautiful, solution to David Brin's world of ubiquitous surveillance, one not requiring, as Brin seems to want, "trust" of state force-monopolists, much less their lawyers and apparatchiks.

In fact, it's such an elegant solution that, as Schopenhauer liked to say about the public acceptance of important new ideas, soon enough, people will say it was obvious all along.

Robert Hettinga is founder of IBUC, the Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation, which will, hopefully, someday, :-), use translucent databases full of internet bearer certificates to reduce transaction costs by three orders of magnitude. You can purchase Translucent Databases through the publisher. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit yours, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

mpawlo writes "As reported by Greplaw, Macromedia, the company behind Flash-technology and more, has applied for open source certification of one of its licenses. The Macromedia license is based on the IBM Public License. You can see the Application for certification as well as the The Macromedia licence."

mpawlo writes "As reported by Greplaw, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) together with Privacyactivism has released an interactive video game designed to educate players about their privacy and fair use rights. The game is focused on digital rights management technologies, online spyware, and data profiling servers. We have seen similar games in Sweden from the Anti-piracy Bureau and Flash movies from BSA in the US, however striking a different tune. Play Carabella." Cute idea.

dipfan writes: "Opening briefs have now been filed with the Supreme Court for the Eldred v Ashcroft copyright case, arguing that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is unconstitutional. The anti-extension case has attracted some big name supporters, including Intel, and Nobel prize winning economist Milton Freidman, who argue it is "highly unlikely that the economic benefits from copyright extension" outweigh the additional costs, and that copyright extension reduces consumer welfare. (Previous coverage of the case on /. here and here)"

The case of Intel v. Hamidi has been going on for a few years now, and it's now reached the California Supreme Court. Hamidi is an ex-Intel employee with a grievance against the company who sent several mass-emails to most of Intel's staff. Intel attempted to block him from sending email via technical measures, and when that failed filed suit against him claiming that he was causing some harm to their property (company mail servers and computers) - there's an ancient legal concept called "trespass to chattels" which Intel is attempting to use in their case. Now, in real-dollar terms, Intel has suffered very little - a few megabytes of email more or less is a miniscule cost in terms of computer wear and tear, indeed, too small to measure (Intel is not alleging that Hamidi sent any sort of mail-bomb or that his emails caused damage). So the case comes down to an unsettled legal point: if someone has made some use of your electronic equipment, which you may not have desired but which has not damaged your property nor deprived you of its use, do you have a legal cause of action against them?

The case of Intel v. Hamidi has been going on for a few years now, and it's now reached the California Supreme Court. Hamidi is an ex-Intel employee with a grievance against the company who sent several mass-emails to most of Intel's staff. Intel attempted to block him from sending email via technical measures, and when that failed filed suit against him claiming that he was causing some harm to their property (company mail servers and computers) - there's an ancient legal concept called "trespass to chattels" which Intel is attempting to use in their case. Now, in real-dollar terms, Intel has suffered very little - a few megabytes of email more or less is a miniscule cost in terms of computer wear and tear, indeed, too small to measure (Intel is not alleging that Hamidi sent any sort of mail-bomb or that his emails caused damage). So the case comes down to an unsettled legal point: if someone has made some use of your electronic equipment, which you may not have desired but which has not damaged your property nor deprived you of its use, do you have a legal cause of action against them?

mpawlo writes "Creative Commons just opened to the public. From the initial statement: "We are building a Web-based application for dedicating copyrighted works to the "public domain," and for generating flexible, generous licenses that permit copying and creative reuses of copyrighted works." Read also the article in the New York Times." There's also an older story that summarizes the concept behind the site, although I think their FAQ's do a pretty good job. A page at the Berkman Center documents some of the development of the project (although it doesn't render properly in konqueror for whatever reason). rbeattie describes it like so: "At O'Reilly's ongoing Emerging Technology Conference today, Creative Commons gave a presentation about their new service, an "easy way for people (like scholars, musicians, filmmakers, and authors--from world-renowned professionals to garage-based amateurs) to announce that their works are available for copying, modification, and redistribution." They've provided an online wizard where you can choose the type of license and restrictions you want to put on your work, and then they'll provide a circled CC logo you can put on your website with links to the license. In addition they are providing search functionality for those looking for public domain content - the license is provided in "machine readable form" (read: XML probably) so that it can be easily indexed/searched."

Greplaw writes "The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this evening that an anti-abortion website that featured "wanted" posters of various abortion doctors constituted a "true threat." The website, called The Nuremberg Files, is therefore not protected by the First Amendment and is illegal under a 1994 law prohibiting threats against abortion doctors. The full opinion of the court is available on Findlaw. This case marks one of the first times that a website has been ruled to constitute such a threat." Our previous story has the background on the case. The District Court found the website was an unlawful threat; a three-judge panel of the Appeals court found that it wasn't; and now the entire Appeals court has found, by a 6-5 vote, that it was indeed unlawful. The case could be appealed to the Supreme Court next. The accepted definition of a threat unprotected by the First Amendment is one which "on its face and in the circumstances in which it is made is so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate and specific as to the person threatened, as to convey a gravity of purpose and imminent prospect of execution", and there is considerable dissent among the judges over whether a website can or cannot meet that standard.

anewsome writes "Yale Law School students conducted a mock Eldred v. Ashcroft trial, heard before judges Hugh Bownes on the First Circuit, John Walker Jr. on the Second, and Morris Arnold on the Eighth. Surprise: Eldred Won. Check out the full story here. In related news, here's a terrific Recorder piece on the debate over the IP section of ABA taking sides in the case."

lodri writes "The Berkman Center for Internet and Society is starting its online series on Privacy in Cyberspace. It's a six-part online series covering topics such as government and workplace data collection as well as cryptography and possible solutions for protecting privacy. All that's required is registration for access to the topics covered and it looks like the site will be up after the series ends."

lodri writes "The Berkman Center for Internet and Society is starting its online series on Privacy in Cyberspace. It's a six-part online series covering topics such as government and workplace data collection as well as cryptography and possible solutions for protecting privacy. All that's required is registration for access to the topics covered and it looks like the site will be up after the series ends."

tramm writes "The FAA, working with the EAA have put together a proposal to release old type certificates and blueprints once the copyright holders no longer exist. Sort of like Abandonware for airplanes. This very closely resembles Lawrence Lessig's idea of a creative commons, into which source code would be escrowed. Once the copyright expired or became abandonded, the sources would be released. "This set of legal guidelines will help the FAA develop a set of procedures to legally release what had previously been unnecessarily protected as proprietary data.". Hopefully the Copyright office will take note of the success here, as well as the Supreme Court's hearing of Eldred v Reno."

An anonymous submitter writes: "Antitrust lawyer Chris Sprigman has written a thoughtful column In Findlaw's Writ on the issues behind the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act and the legal challenge (Eldred v. Ashcroft) to that law. I only spotted one mistake. Sprigman states that Disney's 1967 movie The Jungle Book came out a year after Kipling's copyright expired, but I can't see how, under the terms of the 1909 copyright law, an 1894 book could have had its U.S. copyright expire much later than 1950. Except for that one glitch, (if that's what it is) it's a fine column. There's no explicit mention of computer software except in the mention of the title of a 1970 article by Stephen Breyer, but everything he says about the usefulness of the public domain in literature applies with a vengeance to source code. And his is discussion of the U.S. Constitution's framers reminds us (though Sprigman doesn't develop this point extensively, and might not himself put it in as blunt terms as I'm about to) that there's even a deeper reason than utility to cherish the public domain: it is our right."

Default.cfg writes: "The telescope system for NASA's Space Infrared Telescope Facility arrived February 20 at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., Sunnyvale, Calif., where it will be integrated with the spacecraft. The system, called the cryogenic telescope assembly, contains the telescope, liquid helium cooling tank and three science instruments. It was shipped on February 19 from Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo., where it was built. The Space Infrared Telescope Facility, scheduled to launch on January 9, 2003, will study the early universe and hunt for planet-forming regions in dust disks around nearby stars. It will also detect objects by looking for the heat they emit in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The Space Infrared Telescope Facility is the fourth and final mission under NASA's Great Observatories Program, which includes the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Chandra Advanced X-ray Observatory. The observatory is also the first new mission of NASA's Origins Program, which will study the formation of galaxies, stars, planets and life, and seek to answer the questions: Where did we come from? Are we alone?"

Wendy Seltzer writes: "The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, EFF, and other major law school clinics have launched ChillingEffects.org to combat the chilling effect of Cease & Desist letters with ungrounded legal threats. (Slashdot readers got a site preview in the story on the Bnetd Cease & Desist, already in our database.) If you have received a Cease & Desist, we invite you to add it to the database, where law students will analyze the legalese and annotate the C&Ds with Frequently Asked Questions and answers. The site already offers several sets of general legal FAQs."

Wendy Seltzer writes: "The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, EFF, and other major law school clinics have launched ChillingEffects.org to combat the chilling effect of Cease & Desist letters with ungrounded legal threats. (Slashdot readers got a site preview in the story on the Bnetd Cease & Desist, already in our database.) If you have received a Cease & Desist, we invite you to add it to the database, where law students will analyze the legalese and annotate the C&Ds with Frequently Asked Questions and answers. The site already offers several sets of general legal FAQs."

Sir Homer writes: "Blizzard Entertainment has shut down the bnetd project using the DMCA, as declared in their site. The bnetd project is a battle.net server emulator licenced under the GNU/GPL originally for Linux and also works on most Unix variants. Project details can be found on this freshmeat.net page." As I understood it, bnetd was a complete re-implementation of battle.net, so it isn't clear what copyright violation Blizzard alleges occurred. Note to bnetd: under the DMCA, you can file a counter-notice with the hosting provider asserting that Blizzard was wrong.

These guys hacked a dartboard to serve scores over a wireless network. There is an OpenGL client that grabs the scores, runs the games, stores the results in a database, and suggests moves based on player's past performance. On top of all this, the client looks exactly like the dartboard, so it can be projected over the real thing.

Patrick Fitzgerald writes: "The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to intervene in a fight over copyrights, deciding whether Congress has sided too heavily with writers and other inventors. The outcome will determine when hundreds of thousands of books, songs and movies will be freely available on the Internet or in digital libraries." Openlaw's Eldred v. Ashcroft page has more information about the case, which seeks to challenge the most recent retroactive extension of copyright terms.

Dr. A. van Code writes: "NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured a stunning view of the center of our Milky Way galaxy, with hundreds of white dwarf stars, neutron stars and black holes bathed in an incandescent fog of 10-million-degree gas around a supermassive black hole. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and co-workers took the 30 separate images covering a 400- by 900-light-year swath of the center of the galaxy, a region 26,000 light years away from Earth, using the orbiting X-ray satellite's Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS). His paper appears in the Jan. 10, 2002, issue of the journal Nature. There is also a Chandra page at Harvard, and an AP wire story."

Wouter wrote in to tell us about new X-Ray pics of Venus. Scientists belive this will enable them to get a better feel for character of the planets opaque atmosphere.

On Wednesday I attended a hearing in Felten vs. RIAA, the lawsuit filed by Professor Felten, other Princeton researchers, and USENIX against the RIAA, SDMI, Verance, and the Department of Justice. As you already know, the judge dismissed the case. But taking a look at the hearing might provide some insight into how the judicial system works.

An incredibly brief review of the case: SDMI created an open challenge to break various forms of technical restrictions they had designed to allow music publishers to control how people use legitimately purchased music. A team led by Felten participated and was mostly successful at breaking them. The team wrote a paper, intending to publish it at a scientific conference. The RIAA/SDMI sent a letter to Felten, his employer, and the conference threatening them with legal action. Private legal discussions and a very public flap broke out. Felten filed a pre-emptive lawsuit, seeking to have his right to publish vindicated without waiting for a suit from the RIAA or SDMI. Immediately afterward, the RIAA publicly and repeatedly withdrew their threat to sue. Eventually the paper was, in fact, published, but the suit has continued.

Or just read through the Slashdot stories.

On to yesterday's hearing. The judge has before him a request from the defense to dismiss the case - they state that there is no real issue since the threat has been withdrawn. The Plaintiffs oppose this - they feel the threat is real, even if the RIAA has now withdrawn it.

Each side is represented by a half-dozen attorneys. Felten and several of the other plaintiffs are present as well. There are four or five press representatives. Other than that, the courtroom is empty. The first thing the judge does is take care of some routine business - the plaintiffs have requested that a C program, tinywarp.c, be filed under judicial seal with the court. The judge accepts this. He then goes briefly over the case so far, saying that he feels fully briefed by the papers submitted by both sides. He invites the plaintiff's lawyer, Gino Scarselli, to speak and respond to the last set of papers filed by the defense, but cautions him to avoid repeating any of the arguments set forth already in the many papers filed.

Scarselli emphasizes that the plaintiffs are in court for more than just the single threatening letter - he notes that the threat of legal action was considered quite real by the universities, who assigned lawyers to deal with the threat. He notes that Felten's paper was described as a "recipe for circumvention" by the defendants. He says that Felten also fears criminal prosecution due to his desire to publish a paper on SDMI in Scientific American - since Scientific American pays for papers, unlike the conference, this makes publication of the paper a commercial enterprise which might be charged as a criminal violation of the DMCA.

The judge is rather skeptical. He states that the difference between Felten and Sklyarov is "night and day". Sklyarov's actions are clearly criminal to the judge - Felten's actions not at all.

Scarselli and the judge spar a bit over a possible amendment to the complaint, regarding what exactly the plaintiffs were seeking in the lawsuit, and Scarselli retires from battle. Next up is David Kendall for the RIAA, responding to Scarselli.

Kendall starts off by talking about a stipulation (an agreement on facts) that both parties were negotiating over. Apparently both sides had almost been able to reach an agreement, except that the RIAA wanted the agreement to include dismissing the lawsuit and the plaintiffs did not. Kendall moves on to emphasize the argument they are making - that the suit should be dismissed because there is no conflict between the RIAA/SDMI and Felten. There are three reasons why a suit might be dismissed in this fashion - for mootness, because the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the suit, or because the issue isn't ripe. The judge asks Kendall which of the three would apply to this case - Kendall disclaims mootness (because that implies there once was an issue, but no longer), and states that this could be dismissed under either of the other reasons.

Richard Phillips is called to speak for the Department of Justice. Phillips states that his argument has been covered by the papers submitted and sits back down.

At this point only 40 minutes or so has elapsed. Normally, the judge might now take the case for decision, then some time later issue a written decision - instead, he decides (obviously he planned to do this in advance, since he has notes prepared) to render his decision in the case orally and immediately. He notes that he's doing so to save both parties further time and trouble, which indicates that he agrees with the defense that the case should be dismissed.

The judge starts off with the basics, which must have been rather boring to the lawyers involved. Under the Constitution, courts are limited to deciding cases where there is an actual case or controversy. He states flat-out that he sees no case or controversy here, in case anyone in the courtroom missed the hint he's already given.

He now takes a deep breath and begins going through his notes. He recaps the case from the beginning. I'll spare you that, read the documents if you wish.

Finally we get to his analysis. There are two separate issues - is there a case against the private entities? Is there a case against the Federal Government? The judge looks at the private entities first.

Again he discusses the requirement that cases be limited to actual controversies, that judges can't rule on abstract, theoretical, or speculative cases. He uses the word "speculative" approximately 20 times during his opinion, always referring to the plaintiffs' case. He relates a rambling analogy about bank fraud, essentially saying that the plaintiffs were asking for blanket immunity against ever being sued or prosecuted, which was impossible. He covers in great detail the RIAA's retraction of their threatening letter, how they've plainly denied any desire to sue Felten or anyone else over Felten's original paper.

The judge now looks at the First Amendment considerations relating to the suit against the RIAA/SDMI. He notes that the courts are required to avoid Constitutional questions if at all possible. He also notes that according to case law on the subject, there must be a real and immediate threat, that must remain throughout litigation, in order for the courts to consider the Constitutional questions around a non-criminal law (that is, the part of the DMCA that doesn't involve criminal penalties, only the possibility of civil lawsuits). Since the threat has not remained throughout litigation, he sees no Constitutional questions relating to the non-criminal part of the DMCA. He also notes that Plaintiffs do not allege they intend to violate the statute [ed. note: I'm not sure which part of the DMCA the judge was talking about right now - he may have been getting ahead of himself and talking about the criminal penalties.] and thus proceeding further would be "pre-enforcement review", which is not permitted. He closes this section by saying that he finds the Step-Saver and Salvation Army cases (referred to in the briefs submitted by both parties) instructive.

Somewhere during this speech, one of the attorneys for SDMI starts grinning, hugely, as if his team has just won the Super Bowl. He continues grinning and looking over at the attorneys for the plaintiffs until the hearing is over. None of the other attorneys for either side show any particular reaction.

The judge now continues with the suit against the Federal Government for Constitutional violations. He notes that the plaintiffs have not been directly threatened by the Government, nor prosecuted. He contrasts Felten's situation with that of Dmitry Sklyarov - the plaintiffs don't sell their program to the public, they do it for scientific purposes. Again he mentions the Step-Saver case. He quotes from the DMCA extensively. He states that the Government and plaintiffs have no adverse legal interests - that is, there is no possible criminal threat to Felten for doing what he's doing, in the judge's opinion. He notes that in the Sklyarov case there is such an adverse legal interest - obviously, Sklyarov was imprisoned! - and suggests that the Sklyarov case is a better way to get any First Amendment consequences of the DMCA adjudicated by the courts. The plaintiffs are not "manufacturing", according to the judge; nor are they offering their code for sale. The judge segues to what he sees as deficiencies in the plaintiff's legal complaint - they did not assert they planned to fully violate the criminal sections of the DMCA, mainly their assertions were that the Act is unclear and vague. Finally he closes - the plaintiffs must have an "objectively reasonable fear" of prosecution in order for the required legal conflict to exist, and the judge sees no such objectively reasonable fear.

A few more sentences and he's done. He reminds everyone that he may revise his written/final opinion from what he just dictated. He doesn't provide a time-frame for when the written opinion might be expected.

And that's it. My impression is that the most important phrase in the decision is "night and day". Judge Brown saw Sklyarov as a pirate, well-deserving of a long imprisonment term, and Felten as a goodie-two-shoes scientist who didn't have a care in the world. The very factors that made Felten a "good" subject for a civil liberties case allowed the judge to rule that there wasn't a case at all. Both the Justice Department and the RIAA prefer to have their test cases with suitably unsavory defendants - Russian pirates and shady hacker magazines are much preferred over all-American Princeton professors. The RIAA won't make the mistake of sending threat letters to professors again - not until the DMCA issues have been well-settled in the courts, anyway. Some people have criticized the EFF for over-reaching - trying to make a case out of nothing. But to a great extent the civil liberties groups have to play with the hand they're dealt. Felten was legitimately threatened, and even if the RIAA saw their mistake and starting trying to weasel out of it, I can't fault the civil liberties groups for trying to pursue this. They plan to appeal, of course.

A Semi-Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article a researcher at Harvard University has developed techniques for self assembly of nanoscale wires that operate without resistance due to a property called ballistic conductivity. He hopes the research will provide an 'end run' around convential top-down circuit designs, allowing much smaller, faster and more energy efficient computers."

Robert Wilde writes: "Three major television networks have sued Sonicblue over the ReplayTV 4000 and asked the court to grant an injunction to prevent the sale of the device." Here's another blurb about the lawsuit. All you readers that predicted that Replay would get sued over this device, give yourselves a pat on the back.

Ben Edelman writes: "In the context of the ACLU's pending challenge to the Children's Internet Protection Act (PDF), I recently prepared a list of some 6000+ web sites that, by and large, fail to meet the category definitions of popular Internet filtering programs yet are blocked by at least one such program. This topic may be old hat, but my work is new: I have prepared an unusually large list of sites (including police departments, libraries, home-schooling sites, candidates for political office, and on and on), and I have retested these sites over a period of several months."

Ben Edelman writes: "In the context of the ACLU's pending challenge to the Children's Internet Protection Act (PDF), I recently prepared a list of some 6000+ web sites that, by and large, fail to meet the category definitions of popular Internet filtering programs yet are blocked by at least one such program. This topic may be old hat, but my work is new: I have prepared an unusually large list of sites (including police departments, libraries, home-schooling sites, candidates for political office, and on and on), and I have retested these sites over a period of several months."

DrRobin asks: "For the past couple of years, some of the techie parents in my town (Needham, MA) have been giving talks for parents of local elementary schools about online kid/family safety. I know there are a lot of weighty issues here in general but I want to ask if people here have any specific thoughts about the sub-topic I am supposed to cover: viruses (and worms, trojans, etc.). The parents are pretty sharp in general but not necessarily clued in to the net world. I have been on the net since '83 but my principal expertise is the little bitty wetware viruses that make you ill, rather than the software kind that infect computers. Any pointers people think would be helpful to parents would be appreciated."

handspring_cjf asks: "I'm doing some work on non-technical projects: organizations/companies that are using the ideals that originated with the Open Source movement in the commercial/non-profit marketplace. So far, I've come up with the OpenLaw project at Harvard Uni, but that seems to be the only big one that I can find. I'm sure that there are others out there that I don't know about. Any help that people could offer would be greatly appreciated."

Phil Bewig writes: "Results of the 2001 ICFP Programming Contest (previously mentioned at SlashDot here and here) have been announced. First place is to a program in Haskell, second place is to a program in Dylan, and the judges' prize is to a program in Erlang. The judges also named third place (ocaml) and fourth place (C) entries that were not awarded prizes. ICFP Programming Contest pages for prior years are available: 2000, 1999, and 1998."

chromatin writes: "A filmmaker at a college in boston has been working on the potentially endless history of Henrietta Lacks which is a fascinating story of where biotechnology comes from and what it does. Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, but a small sample of her cancer cells were found to live in culture dishes... and still do. As the first immortal human cell line, HeLa cells are used by researchers today for lots of experiments which whole people simply can't or shouldn't be used for. Working in labs like this with cells like this for several years, it's the first time I've heard her entire name! The Lacks family has never been compensated or really recognized by the scientific community - is this how patenting genes will work?" An odd story, that I've heard mentioned before but never knew much about.

chromatin writes: "A filmmaker at a college in boston has been working on the potentially endless history of Henrietta Lacks which is a fascinating story of where biotechnology comes from and what it does. Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, but a small sample of her cancer cells were found to live in culture dishes... and still do. As the first immortal human cell line, HeLa cells are used by researchers today for lots of experiments which whole people simply can't or shouldn't be used for. Working in labs like this with cells like this for several years, it's the first time I've heard her entire name! The Lacks family has never been compensated or really recognized by the scientific community - is this how patenting genes will work?" An odd story, that I've heard mentioned before but never knew much about.

Julius Su writes: "The LA Times reports that the Pentagon is interested in developing a "space bomber" that could be used to drop bombs on any Earthly target within 90 minutes of takeoff -- from an altitude of 300,000 feet. At this height, bombs don't need explosives to function. Critics worry about the start of a new arms race in space. Not to worry, Pentagon officials say -- the plane would fly in a suborbital path and would only attack Earth targets. The plane itself would be adapted from the X-33 Venture Star, originally developed at the Skunk Works as a vertical-take-off glider-landing reusable space vehicle." NASA needs to simply glue machine guns to every launch vehicle they have to assure permanent funding.

mindpixel writes: "Harvard scientists have concieved a revolutionary technology for probing, and eventually sequencing, individual DNA molecules using single-channel recording techniques. The technique essentially pulls a single strand of DNA through a nanopore, reading off the individual bases electrically. The technique could allow for decoding of a person's genome in hours instead of years." While the sequencing in hours instead of years is something that's pretty darn cool, our holdup in using this data is actually now what the genes are, and how they interact. That will still take years for us to figure out.

KjetilK writes: "The Nature web site carries a section with a debate on the future of scientific publishing. Prompted by the Open Letter on the Public Library of Science, this important subject has been brought to the surface. While arXiv.org for many years have provided services similar to that wanted by the Public Library of Science and services such as Astrophysics Data System has been developed to support researchers find what they are looking for and crosslink papers, it is not before now this debate has really taken off. /.-ers will find papers submitted by people they know well, such as RMS, Tim O'Reilly and Tim Berners-Lee, but papers have been submitted from publishers, scientists, database maintainers and so on as well. The whole site contains many very interesting articles. My personal perspective on this, is that I love things like ADS and arXiv.org, and it is fine if the dead-tree publishers are obsoleted, but it is very important that institutionalized peer-review isn't undermined in the process." We've linked to this Nature debate before, but they've added a lot of new content since, and this is such a nicely written submission I can hardly refuse it.

Yesterday in a toasty courtroom in lower Manhattan, Stanford Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan faced off against lawyers for the world's biggest movie companies and a lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department with oral arguments in the appeal of the 2600 case. One of the three judges hearing the case -- Jon Newman -- appeared to be the designated questioner. He asked nearly all of the questions in both this case and the ones heard earlier in the day. He probed both sides about equally, trying to find flaws in the arguments of whoever was speaking at the time. I'll cover the hearing below, and there's possibly a few areas where the Slashdot crowd could assist in the case.

Sullivan spoke first. She argued that since the DMCA restricts speech, under the First Amendment the government must narrowly tailor the law to only restrict those specific areas of speech that it is targeting. Furthermore, the government bears the burden of proving that the speech it is restricting is a problem in some way -- usually it does this by holding hearings, getting testimony, etc., in the process of passing a law. She noted that none of this was done for the DMCA, and that the DMCA restricts many areas of speech that cannot constitutionally be restricted.

She also made much of a rather telling fact: there is no piracy attributable to DeCSS whatsoever. Not one traditional copyright infringement has ever been attributed to DeCSS, and the movie studios admitted in the case that they could not produce even one example of an infringement due to DeCSS. (Technically-literate people may realize that mass DVD copying is performed by stamping complete copies of the DVDs, encryption and all, no decryption required, though that wasn't covered in the hearing.) But Sullivan jumped on this point for all it was worth and then some -- the judges seemed fairly skeptical about accepting it, trying to insist that widepsread and massive copyright infringement due to DeCSS must be occurring, somehow, somewhere. It just must be.

She ran into her first really hard question when she stated that computer programs were expressive, and the judge asked her to explain. Her answer was that programs were beautiful in and of themselves, that they could represent scientific research, that they could be poems, and that they could do things -- their functional nature. I felt the response was lacking. Sullivan managed to work in the recent ruckus over a Princet on scientist unable present his work due to DMCA threats, which was cunning of her. If a Slashdot reader can create a pithy and short explanation for how and why a computer program is expressive speech and/or what it expresses, it might be useful.

Sullivan also argued that under free-speech precedent, if less restrictive alternatives were available to the government and it failed to use them, the law must be overturned. The judge mentioned the Audio Home Recording Act -- the law passed in 1992 which both implemented serial-copy protection in digital audio tapes and explicitly legalized home taping. Sullivan pointed to AHRA's serial copy prevention as an example of a law which restricted copying but which was not as restrictive as the DMCA turned out to be. This argument seemed to be pretty powerful with the judge.

The next point to be discussed concerned the injunction issued by Judge Kaplan, and his written opinion in the case. The Appeals judge made the point that the injunction could not be considered to apply to anyone except the specific defendants -- that is, just because 2600 was enjoined from posting or linking to DeCSS, doesn't mean that anyone else necessarily would. On the other hand, the reasoning applied in the opinion could be assumed to apply to other U.S. citizens wanting to post DeCSS. The gist was that Sullivan couldn't argue her case as if anyone would be enjoined from linking to DeCSS, but only regarding the specific defendants that were.

Finally they got to the idea of "disseminat ion," since the DMCA prohibits dissemination of circumvention devices. What does disseminate mean on the internet? The judge and Sullivan agreed that the New York Times is in the business of disseminating information (the NYT being today's quintessential example of "the press"). The judge asked if the New York Times intends to disseminate all of the information on every page it links to in its online edition. Sullivan said yes. The judge asked if the NYT specifically intends to disseminate every bit of info on every single page that it ever links to -- again Sullivan said yes.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Alter was up next. He started with a hypothetical: What if someone developed a program that could shut off the navigation system in commercial airplanes? What if someone developed a program that could shut off smoke detectors in public buildings? Surely, he said, the government could ban the publication of programs which were a threat to people's lives. He proceeded with the standard quotable rhetoric: DeCSS is a "digital crowbar." Hey, if you're a reporter covering the case and you don't understand it, at least you got a phrase that jumped out at you screaming to be quoted.

He then got down to the meat of his argument -- that the government can regulate conduct even if there's a speech component to it. He used the example of Giboney V. Empire Storage and Ice Co., a case where picketers (a constitutionally protected activity) were successfully prevented from picketing due to the functional intent of the picketing, which was apparently to violate certain laws relating to restraint of trade. Alter argued that the DeCSS case was similar -- the intent of distributing DeCSS is to promote violations of copyright law, therefore the speech part of such distribution can be ignored by the courts and the courts can focus on regulating actions without concerning themselves about speech issues.

Alter proceeded to postulate that the government has the ability to create and regulate a market in expression, and correct any market flaws that may exist. Viewed from this vantage point, the existence of the Internet and all of those unrestricted personal computers connected to it is one large market flaw which the government has the power to correct. He used the example of must-carry laws for cable systems -- cable television must carry local broadcast channels, and the official reasoning behind that is that otherwise cable systems would drive broadcast television into bankruptcy and the government is preserving a vibrant market in broadcast television through the must-carry laws.

He stated flatly that the problem with digital works is that they can be copied. He argued that the DMCA is actually pro-First Amendment, as a means to promote the market for digital works. So in the calculus of the government attorney, increasing the speech of a dozen movie studios at the cost of decreasing the speech of 260 million citizens is a win for the First Amendment.

The judge asked about the Audio Home Recording Act and serial copying -- why wouldn't the "no serial copies" approach taken to DAT recordings with SCMS under that law represent a less restrictive means for the government to promote copyright in the digital age? The attorney argued, of course, that the DAT law was inapplicable since it predated the massive growth of the Internet -- and this is where he pulled a fast one on the court. Alter stated that, due to the Internet, one only needs a single copy for "catastrophic" infringement, so even that one copy permitted by the Digital Audio Tape serial copy scheme would be too much. One copy, the judge asked? Yes, he said, just one copy and put it on the Internet and ...disaster. Apparently, in the attorney's world, once that lone copy is made, it pretty much automatically puts itself on the Internet with no further acts by any individual. The point Alter narrowly evaded evaded it is that the act of publishing a copyrighted work to the world is a copyright violation in the traditional sense, and is punishable under traditional laws.

So, the judge said, Congress needs a more restrictive technique to prevent copyright infringement because the Internet is now a factor? The DA claimed that it does.

The judge next moved to one of the most interesting questions of the day -- does fair use require access to a work in its original form? That is, one cannot excerpt a digital clip of a CSS-encrypted DVD, but one could point a video camera at the screen and create a clip, albeit of poor quality. Is that sufficient for fair use? This question has disturbing ramifications, depending on who is asking it and how it is answered. It seems odd, at first glance, to insist that one must be able to make fair use of a work in its full, unfettered, most-advanced, highest-quality form. But after thinking about it for a bit, I realized that anything else utterly destroys fair use. What if I could make clips of 256 kilobits/second mp3s, but the clips were at 16 kilobits/second? Would that be sufficient? Is a 16 kilobit/second mp3 even recognizable as music? What if book publishers could designate the Swahili version of a book as the "fair use" version, and completely shut down any quoting from the English version -- ("After all, you can still quote freely from the Swahili version; it may have a few words missing, and it's in Swahili of course, but you can still quote from it.") The judges seemed to be actually considering that filming a DVD movie from the television set or getting some macrovision-corrupted analog output might be sufficient for fair use purposes, and I hope they think it through and reject that idea entirely.

The attorney moved on to linking. He argued that 2600's actions ought to be examined in their entirety; that 2600 was effectively "shuttling" people over to commit a crime by linking to the DeCSS code. According to him, the entire conduct of the defendants should be considered to divine the purpose behind linking to the DeCSS code. If it were for some legitimate purpose, a link would be okay. But if the purpose were to "shuttle" people to commit a crime, that wouldn't be. The number of links would be important, the context would be important, and the intent of the writer would be important to this analysis. Search engines, according to the attorney, would be okay they are just providing lots of links without the harmful intent that the attorney felt was necessary. So apparently something like this:

"This is a scholarly discussion of DeCSS. We are a major media outlet, and would never encourage lawlessness, so this link to DeCSS is okay."

... is fine, while this:

"Hey all you l337 h4x0rz, come get DeCSS and use it to copy movies and watch them automatically distribute themselves via the Internet!"

... is not. How context works, I'm not sure. Certainly the vast majority of 2600's links that it has ever published are not "shuttling" people to copyright infringement -- the vast majority are for the standard journalistic purposes of disseminating information. But somehow under Alter's analysis, 2600 came up lacking while the NYT did not.

The judge cut deep with a hard question: "Can you prosecute a newspaper who publishes a list of stores where obscenity can be purchased?" The parallels to this case should be obvious. The attorney dodged the question with an outstanding answer: "Yes and no." He tried to go back to his theory of looking at the overall conduct of the newspaper, but it was clear that he didn't want to say "Yes, we can prosecute the newspaper for publishing the list of stores" but did want 2600's actions to be covered, and wasn't sure how to reconcile those two desires ... and neither were the judges. I'm not sure they bought his argument.

Finally, Charles Sims, the lawyer for the MPAA.

He had had time to pay attention to the previous efforts and tailor his argument somewhat. He tried to cover weak areas -- insisting, for instance, that no record of harm is required for Congress to regulate pure speech. He brought up the Congressional record (hearings, testimony, etc.) that pre-dated the DMCA, and said it showed "actual harm" to the movie industry.

Actual harm, the judge asked? "Yes. Actual harm," he replied. "Well, actual threat of harm." That got a laugh from the audience, and scored him no points with the judges. He didn't use the "digital crowbar" metaphor, but insisted that publishing DeCSS was like publishing the combination to a bank vault in a newspaper -- something which is not, as far as I know, a violation of any law, though it might well inconvenience the bank.

The judge asked this lawyer too the hard question about less restrictive means to accomplish the same goal and serial copy management. The MPAA's tactic was similar but slightly different than the U.S. Attorney's; the AHRA is inapplicable, he said, because Congress didn't take the Internet into consideration when drafting it. He also argued something that will make him no friends with the RIAA -- that motion pictures deserved more and better protection than music (so the AHRA serial copying wasn't appropriate for movies). After all, he said, motion pictures have never been subject to the sort of fair uses that music has, the copying and so forth. I suppose he doesn't own a VCR. This argument about motion pictures being more deserving than music seemed strangely surreal -- for the first several decades of motion pictures, they had much, much weaker First Amendment protection than other forms of speech because the courts considered them to be solely entertainment, and only an assortment of free-speech challenges to laws restricting them earned them the privilege to stand on a par with other forms of speech in the protection of the First Amendment. Now, the motion picture people are not only arguing that their form of speech is more privileged than others, but they're arguing that still another form of speech, computer programs, ought to be considered in that inferior, functional category that motion pictures worked so hard to escape from. It's a strange world we live in.

The judge asked whether the DMCA created a "permanent" copyright, or an effective extension of copyright. The lawyer smoothly dodged the questions by saying that movie studios could (not "would," but "could") publish works in unencrypted form when (if) their copyright on the work ever expires, or perhaps someone could use a decryption device then, since it would no longer be illegal under the DMCA to do so. The judge asked where those encryption devices would be, after all, they've been banned by the DMCA. The lawyer had faith that they would appear. So apparently: the fact that the studios haven't gotten encrypted content working in an impenetrable fashion yet means that they aren't screwing you out of your access to works when copyright expires.

In closing, the MPAA lawyer compared CSS to one putting a painting in one's living room or charging admission to a movie theater to see a movie. But the right to exclude people from your living room or a movie isn't created by copyright law, it's created by property law -- your home is your home, and you can exclude people from it to your heart's content. The MPAA's conception of property law was that the movies they release are essentially their home, and they have an absolute right to do anything they want with this property until copyright expires. It is a nice sleight of hand to conflate one's right to one's home, perhaps one of the most powerful rights a citizen has, with one's right to control how a movie is viewed is someone else's home. He seemed to be hoping that the one would rub off on the other.

In closing, Sullivan had a brief rebuttal period. Not worth going into; she tried to call the other two lawyers where she thought they went too far astray and she could zap them.

The judges took the case. They also requested one last brief from both sides, due by May 10th, to cover anything that came up at the hearing and the parties think needs to be explained further. I would suggest that it's likely that the people who draft the brief will read this article; and that insightful comments could be of assistance. I think there are a couple of key areas which people may be able to answer:

1. Why and how is a computer program expressive speech? What does it express? 2600's lawyers are entirely familiar with Touretzky's Gallery, so forget about those. Assume you have some C or perl staring at you, any random block of code in any random print-out. What does it express? Why should that code be protected expression?

2. What examples of fair uses absolutely require access to the work in its most modern, digital, uncorrupted, un-macrovisioned form? The only one that jumped out at me is making a backup copy in case the original is destroyed. But perhaps there are others.

Reader Trinition also points to this brief a ZDNews article on the hearing; the case was well-attended by the press and by people like the members of LXNY, New York's Free-software organization, so there are quite a few personal and press accounts around the Net.

Porfiry writes "For the first time, astronomers believe they have proof black holes of all sizes once ruled the universe. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory provided the deepest X-ray images ever recorded (a million-second exposure), and those pictures deliver a novel look at the past 12 billion years of black holes. Combining infrared and X-ray observations, the Penn State team found veils of dust and gas are common around young black holes. 'The discovery of this object, some 12 billion light years away, is key to understanding how dense clouds of gas form galaxies, with massive black holes at their centers,' said Colin Norman of Johns Hopkins University."

Porfiry writes "For the first time, astronomers believe they have proof black holes of all sizes once ruled the universe. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory provided the deepest X-ray images ever recorded (a million-second exposure), and those pictures deliver a novel look at the past 12 billion years of black holes. Combining infrared and X-ray observations, the Penn State team found veils of dust and gas are common around young black holes. 'The discovery of this object, some 12 billion light years away, is key to understanding how dense clouds of gas form galaxies, with massive black holes at their centers,' said Colin Norman of Johns Hopkins University."

ackthpt writes "The Chandra X-ray telescope has captured images of HCG 62 (at Harvard's Chandra Page), a compact group of galaxies. (see the related CNN article). Too bright for optical telescopes, but right up Chandra's resume, the formation is described as an early stage of galactic development. The Milky Way, Andromeda and the Magellanic Clouds, known as the Local Group are an older formation."

Wendy writes "Oral arguments in the Microsoft Case appeal are scheduled Monday and Tuesday before the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In a first, the court is offering live audio streaming through ABC News and C-SPAN. Arguments begin at 9:30 a.m. -- monopoly maintenance and tying Monday; attempted monopolization, relief, and Judge Jackson's conduct of the trial Tuesday. Microsoft is, of course, appealing Jackson's breakup order and final judgment."