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Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton has written in with a tale of media rippers and corporate giants "In 2001 RealNetworks sued and blocked Streambox from distributing the Ripper, a program that let users rip and save RealAudio and RealVideo streams even if the stream contained a proprietary "do not copy" flag. Then one year ago this month, RealNetworks caused a stir by releasing a beta of RealPlayer 11 that similarly let the user record and save streams from sites like YouTube and Pandora. YouTube rippers and the like had existed before, but this was the first time a major company had included a stream ripper in its media player. And while RealPlayer 11 didn't explicitly ignore any copy protection flags, the release still provoked legal rumblings: in a Variety article by Scott Kirsner, an anonymous network exec said accused RealNetworks of 'aiding and abetting piracy' and said that they would 'more likely than not' take action against RealNetworks. But now that the feature has stayed in RealPlayer for a year, its real impact will be not on piracy but on the perceived legitimacy of ripping programs. The corporate behemoth, raked over the coals in the past for privacy violations and nuisance-ware, strikes a blow for free-culture hackers." The rest of Bennett's essay is available by following that magical link right below these words.

First, the reasons I don't think that RealPlayer has much effect on actual piracy. Yes, if a pirate has uploaded your favorite song to YouTube, you can save a copy of the video file to hear the song over and over, but you can do the same thing on YouTube itself as long as you're connected to the Internet. The anonymous network exec in the Variety article points out that RealPlayer "allows you to own [content] forever on your hard drive, even if the Web site that distributed that content illegally has taken it down in because we've complained." But regardless of what complaints they've been sending, almost all popular songs are currently available for listening on YouTube so that anyone with a Net connection can get them on demand, and that's a separate issue, with or without RealPlayer.

So then it becomes a question of whether RealPlayer enables the user to do more interesting things with the song or video, like take it with them on an iPod. RealPlayer only lets you save YouTube videos as an FLV file. But as long as doing things like playing an FLV file on an iPod requires an outside hack, that option is only available to people who are resourceful enough to go out and find tools like that (admittedly not a very high bar, but too hard for many people). So, suppose you define a "resourceful" person as someone smart enough to figure out how to convert an FLV file into an iPod-viewable format. Then there are two possibilities: (a) either a person is not that "resourceful", in which case if they want content to take with them, they'll still have to get it through legitimate channels like the iTunes store, or (b) if the person is "resourceful", they would have known about tools for ripping YouTube videos to MP3, long before RealPlayer 11 came out (in fact, most sites that come up in a search for "flv to mp3 converter" are just rippers specifically for YouTube). In either case, RealPlayer's ability to save FLV files has no impact on the market for the song.

I haven't talked about some outlier cases where RealPlayer could perhaps help a novice user avoid paying for content (if a novice pirate didn't know enough to download a movie from a BitTorrent network, they could perhaps save up enough interesting videos from YouTube for a long plane ride where they won't have Internet access). But there's an easy way to get a verdict on RealPlayer's impact on piracy: How much have you heard teenagers talking about it? You heard teens through the years buzzing about Napster, KaZaA, and BitTorrent, but... RealPlayer? The cliche among teenagers today is to go "find something on YouTube", but "and then grab it with RealPlayer" has yet to prove useful enough to enter the vernacular.

Similarly, RealPlayer can be used to rip streams from Pandora, but it's just hard enough to do it that most people are likely to give up. Before going into details, I should say that I'm against anyone trying to circumvent paying for music. Most of the time when you read that on the Web, it carries this nudge-wink subtext right before the author launches into a detailed description about how, exactly, to circumvent paying for music. But I really do believe that there is a vast untapped potential of unwritten good music out there, and that it could be tapped if there were only lower barriers of entry for musicians, better channels to distribute music to users, and a guarantee that users would pay instead of stealing it -- all of which is helped by services like Pandora. On the other hand, I also believe that if a copying scheme can be circumvented, and especially if it can be circumvented in a way that's fairly easy to discover, there's no point in keeping it secret: We might as well push things forward by acknowledging that the scheme is beatable, and deciding what to do about it.

The outing commences: if you save a stream from Pandora, RealPlayer will give you an error if you try to play the stream back from your RealPlayer library. But if you find the "mp4" file in your RealPlayer downloads, you can play it in WinAmp. However, the file as saved will not play in Windows Media Player, iTunes, or RealPlayer itself. Plus, since Pandora does not let you pick which song you want to listen to on demand, your stream might contain all the songs that you had to skip past to get the one you wanted, and you'd have to find a utility to edit the mp4 file to get rid of that cruft at the beginnig. At some point, the effort probably exceeds the dollar you'd have to pay to get the song on iTunes (or, if you're a pirate, the effort to find it on a p2p network).

Again, the "teenager buzz test" is instructive. You do hear kids these days talking about listening to songs on Pandora, but not about ripping them with RealPlayer.

Where I think RealPlayer will make the most difference in the long run is in its political and legal impact, by legitimizing stream-ripping as something that "real" companies, so to speak, are allowed to do. In 2006, Google sent a cease-and-desist letter to TechCrunch for hosting a tool that lets users save YouTube videos to their hard drives. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch blogged at the time, "I am likely to remove the tool to preserve my relationship with the company [Google/YouTube]", but the tool is still up, and I don't know whether it was ever taken down at all (TechCrunch did not respond to an inquiry). Today, there are more YouTube rippers than ever, several of them even running AdSense ads. (I'm not sure if that's within Google's rules, but I mentioned those sites while e-mailing back and forth with Google for this article, and they're all still running AdSense ads a week later.) Certainly Google would look pretty silly trying to force TechCrunch to take their ripper down today, now that Google itself is distributing RealPlayer as part of the Google Pack.

RealNetworks could argue that the main difference between RealPlayer 11, and the Streambox Ripper that they sued to have outlawed in 2001, was that the Streambox Ripper ignored the "do not copy" flag present in some RealAudio and RealVideo streams, and thus violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. RealNetworks says the do-not-copy flag is no longer used, having been supplanted by more sophisticated Digital Rights Management, and RealPlayer 11 will honor any DRM-protected streams and refuse to save them. But how much difference is there between "ignoring" the do-not-copy flag and "ignoring" the Terms of Service for sites like YouTube (which the program may not be aware of, but which its makers certainly are)?

We've all heard about the First Amendment implications of DeCSS code, the code for decrypting the copy-protection scheme on DVDs, being outlawed in the U.S. But the Streambox case set the bar for "violating the DMCA" considerably lower -- the Streambox Ripper didn't actively decrypt anything, it just ignored a flag set in the streaming media. What are the implications if "ignoring" a flag counts as "breaking" copy protection? Suppose Behemoth Corp releases Version 1 of some media format, and I release a third-party player that plays Version 1. Then Behemoth Corp releases the specs for Version 2 of the format, which is similar enough that it works in Version 1 players, except Version 2 now contains a "do-not-copy" flag, which my player doesn't know about. Is my player now illegal? (Well, in this case Behemoth Corp would just make sure that Version 2 doesn't play in Version 1 players. But what about general-purpose programs like Total Recorder that can record any sound playing through your computer to an MP3 file? Does that program become illegal if a company releases a new sound file format that they don't want to be copyable?) So I think the acceptance of RealPlayer has nudged us closer to legal acceptance of software that can interact with third-party sites and programs in a way that their makers don't like. That's good. It should not be against the law to make a program that interacts with third-party web sites in a way that they haven't given permission for, something I literally grew up saying.

It's brave of Google especially to be distributing RealPlayer along with the Google Pack, at the same time that YouTube is constantly attacked for enabling copyright violations. A content owner mounting a lawsuit against Google, would be foolish not to say something like, "Your Honor, not only does YouTube host thousands of videos violating the intellectual property rights of my clients, they even distribute a tool called RealPlayer that lets people violate YouTube's own Terms of Service by saving the videos to their hard drive!" Logically, of course, it's a weak argument -- RealPlayer is universally available whether Google distributes it or not -- but rhetorically the argument is golden.

On the other hand, since that hasn't happened, and RealPlayer 11 is pretty well entrenched after being out for a year, the result has probably been an expansion of our rights. Anyone else who got sued or threatened for releasing a ripping program would be able to point to RealNetworks. "Look at them, Your Honor, their Web site even tells people, 'Grab videos from thousands of Web sites with just one click', something that those 'thousands of Web sites' would probably not be thrilled with. If it's legal for RealNetworks to tell people that, how can it be illegal for me just to have a ripping program on my site?"

If a small-time programmer had made themselves a legal test case before RealPlayer 11 came out, things might have gone differently; it is an unfortunate truth that courts are probably more likely to consider something legal when it is done by a large and legitimate-looking company like RealNetworks. Big companies do well in court partly because their lawyers are paid to make good arguments, but they almost certainly also get more benefit of the doubt just by virtue of being big companies. I think the time is long overdue for using controlled experiments to measure the bias and objectivity of judges -- for example, having different actors, one white and one black, go into different courtrooms for "mock trials" (which the judges think are real), where both actors are standing trial for exactly identical crimes and their lawyers say exactly identical things, and repeat this experiment enough times to see how differently black and white defendants are treated. (We already see this, for example, in the disparity of sentences for powder cocaine vs. crack, but skeptics may have a point when they say that's not a controlled experiment, because the effects of crack and cocaine are different.) Similarly, have mock trials where a small-time "activist" and a large company are sued for doing exactly the same thing. I would bet that the disparity in the outcomes of those cases would far exceed any bias due to race or gender.

But since it was RealNetworks, with their lawyers and their NASDAQ listing and their former exec in the U.S. Senate, that brought ripping to the masses, that probably makes it OK for you and me. It's not fair, but in this case, it's a good thing.

scubacuda writes "Could casinos be the next Gillette or Wal-Mart? New Scientist and others report that casinos could soon start using RFID tags to spot counterfeits and thefts, and also to monitor the behaviour of gamblers. Embedded RFID tags should make the chips much harder to counterfeit, and placing tag readers at staff exits could cut down on theft by employees. (With companies like Infosys helping clients identify and plan pilot RFID projects, we'll no doubt be seeing more and more companies dabbling in this area. Those interested in reading objections to RFID use should check out the position paper issued by CASPIAN, EPIC, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Junkbusters, ACLU, Meyda Online, EFF, and PrivacyActivism.)"

Chris Hoofnagle writes "CNN reports that companies who heavily use telemarketing are planning to counterattack consumers with a barrage of spam and junk mail in October, when the new do-not-call registry goes into effect. Slashdotters should be aware that, as well as anti-spam email software, there are tools to avoid junk snail-mail, such as Junkbusters' free Declare, Private Citizen's excellent service and the Postal Service's Prohibitory Order service, which is described at the EPIC privacy page."

jdedman4 writes "According to Junkbusters, various civil lawsuits against Spammers have used a number of theories, including the analogizing of junk email to junk faxes. As there have been a number of "IANAL, but . . ." discussions of late, I was curious as to which legal theories, if any, you all thought might work against spammers. Does the fact that a spammer deluges us all with automated commercial email subject him and his enterprise to personal jurisdiction in the courts of the fifty states? What torts do the spammers commit (intentional affliction of emotional distress, invasion of privacy, false light, nuisance, et cetera?) Might an unfair trade practices lawsuit be brought? Is state or federal law a better weapon? Why haven't the legislatures been more active in this area? It seems like this is a pure public relations winner for a media-conscious political figure - everyone hates spammers. If this is such a widespread and pernicious menace(which of course it is), why hasn't some enterprising young plaintiff's attorney filed a class action suit? Is it that the spammers are essentially judgment proof, or that they are difficult to find, or all of the law is analagous but not directly helpful?"

securitas writes: "CNET reports that Microsoft is defending Passport as safe and secure in a presentation to the Center for Democracy and Technology. Other organizations such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Junkbusters and even the U.S. government may be lobbied by MS this week to fend off a Federal Trade Commission complaint filed by 15 consumer and privacy groups that charges unfair and deceptive practices."

hamhocks writes "Tech Law Journal sent out an update on Congressional Hearings regarding the future of the WHOIS database. The update includes links to statements made by both Representatives and witnesses at the hearing. Some quotable quotes are below."

• 'It seems eminently clear to me that websites conducting e-commerce have little "right to privacy". . .[however] isn't political speech worth protecting by redacting the personally identifiable contact information for the website owner?' -- Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)

• 'Given that the compilers of marketing lists have for years used Whois registration information as a source of personal information (in some cases scavenged free, in others bought from registrars), concerns over the data privacy are well justified. Most people avoid putting their home address on their web sites, and they should be able to register a domain name without effectively giving up this precaution. The public policy objective of privacy law is to preserve the individual's right to privacy, while still permitting societal participation.' -- Dr. Jason Catlett, President and CEO, Junkbusters Corp

• 'As it stands today an accredited domain name registrar is not required to allow domain name registrants to opt-out of having their personal information provided to third parties for marketing purposes. This type of an opt-out should be provided to all registrants.' -- Lori Fena, Chairman of the Board, TrustE

• 'In 2000, the IDSA used authority provided in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to achieve approximately 3000 "takedowns" of infringing material on the Internet. Over the last year we also filed 10 civil lawsuits against Internet pirates as enforcement actions on behalf of our members, assisted in additional actions brought by member companies, and made a number of criminal referrals to law enforcement. This is in addition to thousands more takedowns and numerous lawsuits initiated individually by our member companies. These accomplishments are reflective of similar successes reported by the other copyright-based industries. DMCA self-help allows us to reduce to a fraction the losses we would suffer if limited only to court-imposed process and remedies. These efforts are made much less effective without the unrestricted access we currently have to WHOIS data, including contact information regarding domain name registrants.' -- Stevan D. Mitchell Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy Interactive Digital Software Association

• 'In fact, if anything, the I[nternational]A[nti]C[ounterfeiting] C[oalition] believes that registrants should be required to improve their performance in insuring that domain name registrants provide correct and updated information. Because a person (legal or individual) voluntarily chooses to be present on the Internet, the identity and contact information of domain name registrants are entitled to no more privacy protection than are a business or home addresses in the physical world.' -- Timothy P. Trainer, President, International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC)

• 'The breadth of these issues indicates that Congress should not act too quickly. We are dealing simultaneously with intellectual property rights, privacy rights, and free speech rights and cannot simply play a legislative game of [rock, scissors, paper] to figure which one should win in the end.' -- Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI)

Additional information:
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/internetp rivacyhrgstmt71201.pdf"

2MuchC0ffeeMan asks: "Is there a way, in Windows or Linux, to kill ads? I saw a browser the other day for the Mac, and it could recognize and NOT load banner ads. Are there programs out there that take this a step further, and reject cookies from whoever is sending the ad? The thing is, I hate how the internet is becoming a huge database of user information. Surveys, user history, usernames, and preferences are becoming the buisness of tomorrow. With people like amazon.com now selling user info, I would like to take a stand against this kind of practice." By now, most readers have heard about Junkbuster, and a few of you may know about Guidescope but many new Internet users may not, and there are probably other cookie/ad blocking sites out there that others might find useful. What are the possibilities that future browsers may incorporate ad blocking technuqies and what is the best way (aside from a "cookie-domain kill file" to detect a banner ad?

Bart asks: "How can you shop online and protect your privacy? I have been trying without success for a few weeks to shop at the online site of the bigest supermarket chain here in England. My problem is that either I am not using Internet Explorer or Netscape or that I have set up Junkbuster to return a spurious user-agent. With this configuration I can visit my bank, transfer money and make payments, I can visit my two stockbrokers and make deals of up to 100,000 USD but I can't go to Tesco and buy cat food." It seems odd that certain places require a bit too much information from you before they will even do business. What information do you think is fair for Web sites to posess on an individual, and how far do current e-Commerce sites cross that line?

"Protracted e-correspondence with Tesco (apart from regular instructions on setting up Internet Explorer) revolves around bypassing the proxy and setting up a direct connection. As shopping online for mundane things like groceries gets more common and less the province of technically aware people, we can expect more and more intrusions like this into our privacy. Can anything be done about it?"

Bart asks: "How can you shop online and protect your privacy? I have been trying without success for a few weeks to shop at the online site of the bigest supermarket chain here in England. My problem is that either I am not using Internet Explorer or Netscape or that I have set up Junkbuster to return a spurious user-agent. With this configuration I can visit my bank, transfer money and make payments, I can visit my two stockbrokers and make deals of up to 100,000 USD but I can't go to Tesco and buy cat food." It seems odd that certain places require a bit too much information from you before they will even do business. What information do you think is fair for Web sites to posess on an individual, and how far do current e-Commerce sites cross that line?

"Protracted e-correspondence with Tesco (apart from regular instructions on setting up Internet Explorer) revolves around bypassing the proxy and setting up a direct connection. As shopping online for mundane things like groceries gets more common and less the province of technically aware people, we can expect more and more intrusions like this into our privacy. Can anything be done about it?"

orpheus writes: "According to this article, The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has completed a review of Web site privacy policies, and voted 3-2 to seek Congressional legislation to improve user privacy on the Web. According to Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters Corp, the grading was "very easy", but most Web sites flunked anyway. "

The source code for this news story is the bugzilla report, so read the source if you really want to know what's going on. Mozilla's M15 build has a feature to block webpage images that come from another site: it blocks banner ads. The feature's a little buggy, but it could probably be worked out. Four weeks ago, the feature was removed: "it went the way of management decree" says a Netscape employee. It sounds like AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape didn't want an ad-unfriendly feature in the web browser they're financing. But Mozilla contributors say this has been misinterpreted. What's the real story?

"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.

Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.

The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.

Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.

(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)

One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.

My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.

I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.

But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."

This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.

As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)

One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:

"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]

"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."

I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?

I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:

"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."

But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.

Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:

"This has been blown way out of proportion.

"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.

"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.

"Please don't jump to conclusions."

OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.

The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.

Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.

But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.

jbork writes: "According to this article on Wired News, Intel has decided to remove the unique processor ID from its chips, starting with the 1.5 GHz Willamette chip. According to Jason Catlett of Junkbusters, 'We can finally call off the boycott.' " Gee, it only took them 1.25 years.

James Morris writes "Junkbusters in assocication with EPIC are planning a boycott in response to the proposed Intel Processor Serial Number (PSN). Junkbusters' assessment of the PSN scheme and a FAQ about the Boycott may be found here. "

James Morris writes "Junkbusters in assocication with EPIC are planning a boycott in response to the proposed Intel Processor Serial Number (PSN). Junkbusters' assessment of the PSN scheme and a FAQ about the Boycott may be found here. "

Trepidity informed us that the Senate unamimously passed a spending bill with the "CDA II" amendments attached to it. These would make allowing children to view "harmful" material a crime. The amendments would also require schools and libraries to install censorware on all computers accessible to minors. If the bill were to pass the House and be signed into law, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation have vowed to have it overturned like they did with the first CDA. Click below to read more... But the cool thing about this, is that it apparently contradicts WIPO. Now some of you may know that Einstein had great difficulties persuading his friend Goedel to swear that he would abide by the American constitution (necessary to become a US citizen) because it was logically inconsistent. If 2 contradictory laws are passed, are both invalidated? Or does it become a lawyer free-for-all?

All in all, both measures are quite amazing: WIPO can even render cookie managing software such as Junkbusters illegal, and CDA reduces the freedoms of those who cannot afford their own internet connection, instead of ensuring that children learn to think critically about what they encounter.

Trepidity informed us that the Senate unamimously passed a spending bill with the "CDA II" amendments attached to it. These would make allowing children to view "harmful" material a crime. The amendments would also require schools and libraries to install censorware on all computers accessible to minors. If the bill were to pass the House and be signed into law, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation have vowed to have it overturned like they did with the first CDA. Click below to read more... But the cool thing about this, is that it apparently contradicts WIPO. Now some of you may know that Einstein had great difficulties persuading his friend Goedel to swear that he would abide by the American constitution (necessary to become a US citizen) because it was logically inconsistent. If 2 contradictory laws are passed, are both invalidated? Or does it become a lawyer free-for-all?

All in all, both measures are quite amazing: WIPO can even render cookie managing software such as Junkbusters illegal, and CDA reduces the freedoms of those who cannot afford their own internet connection, instead of ensuring that children learn to think critically about what they encounter.