Monthly Archives: March 2009
The Role of Digital Surveillance in Stopping the Past’s Rebirth
Most of the music that I listen to clearly borrows from the past, takes technologies of the present, and creates the music of the future again. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the electronic beats that I listen to … Continue reading
Demonstration: Another Awesome Mashup + Constituent Part
Depending on the copyright regime that you live in, the mere act of viewing a mashup like the one in this post could constitute infringement. The audio mashup linked in the image at the head of this post most definitely would constitute infringement in some jurisdictions, but in both cases aren’t citizens just taking up the cultural artifacts surrounding around them and making something new? Amateur creativity like in these mashups is categorically different from professional mashups; shouldn’t we really have different categories and legal expectations depending on what category you sit in? Continue reading
Three-Strikes to Banish Europeans and Americans from the ‘net?
America: this problem is now officially on your shores, and while neither AT&T or Comcast are admitting to having cut people off from the telco networks because of a three-strikes rule, it has been noted that this is likely only because three notices haven’t been sent to any one household. … To group (b), I would want to maintain there there is real symbolic value in the parliament denouncing a three-strikes rule, though I would tend to agree that if this issue is placed on the third pillar that the parliament (as I understand it) will be relatively impotent. … Three-strikes laws are the tip of a particularly nasty iceberg that we’ve been cruising towards for the past few years, and like the one that ‘met’ the Titanic, we won’t realize the magnitude of the catastrophe unless we get serious about copyright and IP law before it’s too late. Continue reading
Note: EDLs in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia?
(I lack anything that would substantiate or disprove the claim that New Brunswick’s interest has waned; I also don’t know what the report stated and so can’t know if it would influence the government’s position.) … In particular, the author fails to identify what data is contained within, or emitted from, the EDL (i.e. the proxy identifier), fails to accurately identify the privacy risks that advocates have noted, and implies that EDLs will speed up border crossing times (to date, it looks like it only shaves about .8 seconds off each border cross). My problem is that while the author makes it seem like EDLs are particularly risky from a privacy point of view (which they are), what he is actually talking about are ePassports (and similar smart cards). Continue reading
