This past Thursday, EFF hosted a Pub Quiz event where teams were asked 8 rounds of questions related to cyberlaw. Our team, from the Berkeley Clinic, was called Notice and TAKEDOWN.
We tied for third place with the Stanford CIS/Fair Use Project Team. Team Google, with Derek Slater, Tim Wu and Harlan Yu, scored second and Keker & Van Nest made first place -- with heavyweights Joe Gratz and Mark Lemley. More pictures here:
Link: http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/Richard_Stallman_at_UC_Berkeley_12_Sep_2007.ogg
Richard Stallman gave the first UC Berkeley School of Information distinguished lecture of the year today on "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks". Here's the abstract:
Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright power while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--then we must make changes in the other direction.
Here is the audio in Ogg format (courtesy of Don Marti, editor of LinuxWorld.com).
I was privileged to introduce RMS... here's what I said:
In meatspace, you might know our speaker as Richard Matthew Stallman; in the world of bits and bandwidth, where we spend an increasing amount of our time, he's known simply as RMS. He was raising hell and championing software freedom before I was born, and I'm almost 30. His accomplishments are vast in terms of numbers and magnitude. Stallman has received numerous awards, four honorary doctorates and was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. He has long championed the notion of copyleft; a concept which promotes freedom by requiring modified works to be distributed under the same generous license under which the work was originally licensed. In 1989, the Free Software Foundation, which he founded, embodied this notion of copyleft in a general-purpose software license called The GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL has gone through three revisions since and remains the most widely used license for free and open source software. Richard Stallman stands out for consistenly arguing that, besides the oft-cited pragmatic reasons for free software, there exits a moral imperative that software should be free. So, to tell us more about all of this... without further ado, here's Richard Stallman to speak about "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks".
Join me in a hearty blogosphere welcome to Aaron Perzanowski... god forbid if they give this kid any realy power. ::)
Richard Stallman came to speak at UC Berkeley's Department of Computer Science this past Wednesday about copyright reform. I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed. I've heard a lot of what he said before and I had skipped another very interesting lecture (Brian Cantwell Smith on "Pilot Project for a Future University") to attend his lecture. Despite my disappointment, one central idea was definitely new to me. That is, Stallman made a concrete proposal for reforming copyright in the U.S.
Read on for more...
Deirdre Mulligan (my mentor and grant supervisor) is leading a reading group here at the School of Information concerning the embedding of values in policy and policy-sensitive design. Feel free to follow the discussions we have on the blog: "Coding for Policy, Regulating Design".
Here's a description of the course:
This course is intended to acquaint Berkeley graduate students with literature from a range of disciplines that considers whether, when and how to embed policy in technical systems. The course will draw on theoretical literature about embodying values in technology design, consider the various entry points available for influencing technological design in the direction of policy or social values, and through case studies identify and imagine mechanisms for determining when technology should be viewed as “policy-making” and how various actors — technologists, policymakers, endusers — can participate in decisions about what policies the technology enables.
The course welcomes students with a variety of backgrounds, including technical computer science and engineering students and law and social science students interested in understanding the opportunities and challenges present in embedding policy in technical systems.
The EFF turns 16 today... if you appreciate the work that they have done and continue to do in the realm of digital rights, please consider making a recurring donation (donate a small amount each month so that they know they can count on your support) to EFF.
Ryan got me turned on to lala which is a start-up that facilitates trading of audio CDs once you've become bored with them. It is one of a few new services that are trying to make money through sending entertainment-related physical media through postal mail. Essentially, they leverage the first sale doctrine in US law and provide a Netflix-like, peer-to-peer system where you ship CDs (with or without liner notes and art) to other lala users for one dollar. It's pretty neat, although still obviously in the beta phase, as Ryan points out. It's actually in private beta mode; they're about two or so months from launching publicly. Let me know if you'd want an invite when I get a few.
Ed Felten has been doing a great job of tracking the unfoling Sony BMG DRM/rootkit fiasco... and there's now some evidence that this rootkit can seriously comprmise system security. Prof. Felten pointed out that the company has claimed that their product is safe:
No doubt they’ll ask us to just trust them. I wouldn’t. The companies still assert — falsely — that the original rootkit-like software “does not compromise security” and “[t]here should be no concern” about it.
However, it turns out that this rootkit can be used to completely cloak the presence of programs. For example, World of Warcraft hackers are already using it to make cheating programs completely undetectable.
(And I thought "fight fire with fire" was just the name of a song from when Metallica was cool.)
And, so it seems, you too can cloak the presence of files and data by adding $sys$ to the front of any file's name. In the World of Warcraft example, at least it's being used positively to escape the prying eyes of Blizzard Entertainment. However, I wonder how long it will take for a malicious virus or worm to take advantage of this. Predictions, anyone?
Prof. Felten's posts:
Link: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050823/tc_afp/uscompanyinternet_050823152526
Google to launch instant messaging program: report
Google reportedly plans to launch an instant messaging program as early as this week, in a challenge to America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft.
"Google Talk" will allow computer users to chat with their keyboards and allow users with headsets to have voice conversations with other computer users with headsets, according to the Los Angeles Times, citing unnamed sources.
We'll have to see how much of their protocol is open... for all of us GAIM or GAIM-derivative users (Adium X for Mac OS X), this will be yet another IM account to give to people. I still don't know how to answer, "Which account do you prefer?". Jeez, as long as we can talk, that's what I prefer!
UPDATE [2005-08-23 19:01:39]: Well, I'm on Google Talk (talk.google.com) right now! I followed the directions on this guys page ("I'm on Google Talk right now.") and it works... here's what I did in the Mac OS X GAIM-derivitave Adium X:
+) sign and select "Jabber".talk.google.com;5222 (make sure your firewall in the "Sharing" tab of System Preferences lets traffic on 5222 happen); and,You should be good to go... I've seen reports that there are some strange behaviors between GMail and Google Talk (like adding a GMail account to Google Talk means that person's GMail address now shows up automagically in GMail)... we'll have to see what happens.
Everyone I know who knows stuff about this can't talk about it!
Looks like we're seeing some interdiction of BitTorrent networks: "Difficult time for EZTV".
Apparently, the interdictors are trying to sap the bandwidth of seeding sites and downloaders (whose resources are considerably limited). While this is no problem for the large seeding sites, it's a considerable problem for the downloaders.
"But wait", you say, "I thought the bittorrent protocol involved banning nodes that served up bad data." And it does... however, the interdictors are using way too many IP addresses for this to be effective (essentially, they have a new IP address ready for each downloader). Wow... the war continues.
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