Archive for the ‘legal’ Category

Don’t trust US companies with your data

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

We all know the USA badly needs some sane data protection legislation, and this is a good illustration of why:

Yesterday, in the Viacom v. Google litigation, the federal court for the Southern District of New York ordered Google to produce to Viacom (over Google’s objections):
all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website

The court’s order grants Viacom’s request and erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users. The VPPA passed after a newspaper disclosed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental records. As Congress recognized, your selection of videos to watch is deeply personal and deserves the strongest protection.

(Fortunately this ruling appears to be illegal, but you can easily imagine that less-rich companies couldn’t afford to appeal.) Time to log out of YouTube and start using Tor.

Posted in legal, news, rant | 2 Comments »

QOTD V

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Debian Etch will include a browser called “IceWeasel,” which is simply Firefox rebranded with open source artwork, whereas Ubuntu Feisty will include a browser called “Firefox” which is a little bit pregnant.

— Mark Pilgrim again. “A little bit pregnant” here is code for “a little bit non-free”. (Apparently Firefox isn’t free software because it contains non-free artwork; you can distribute it without the non-free artwork, but then you’re not allowed to call it Firefox. That’s what Debian is doing.)

Posted in computing, legal, QOTD | No Comments »

Oh, the irony

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

Mark Pilgrim’s recent rants about Creative Commons noncommercial licenses inspired me to read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, which is linked from said rant.

I found an HTML e-book version of it, which is apparently more or less identical to the version published in book form. Right down to the copyright notices. Yup, it even says “Copyright © Lawrence Lessig, 2004. All rights reserved.” It is of course his copyright, but the second part is incorrect, because the book is licensed under CC-BY-NC, which allows noncommercial distribution provided you give the author credit. So his right to restrict distribution is not entirely reserved. It gives the other boilerplate copyright messages as well: “no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored … or transmitted … without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book” (of course the CC license constitutes permission, so this clause has little effect and is rather misleading) and most laughable:


The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.


I’ve not read the book yet, but I gather it criticises the lack of creativity caused by the current draconian copyright regime and talks about alternatives, including CC. So the fact that it has a copyright notice of this sort strikes me as very, very bizarre.

Posted in confused, legal | No Comments »

The Broadcast Flag on steroids

Saturday, July 29th, 2006

Ugh. I take it all back.

France has just passed a new copyright law which essentially makes it impossible for anyone to safely develop open source software there.

Someone needs to smack the pro-DRM lobby upside the head and make them realise that their approach is totally short-sighted and counterproductive. Or just forcibly disestablish it.

P.S. I swear, the next thing I post about will have nothing to do with politics.

Posted in legal, politics, rant | No Comments »

On the Microsoft fine

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

From Groklaw, an extract from the Free Software Foundation Europe’s statement on Microsoft’s recent fine:


“If we are to believe Microsoft’s numbers, it appears that 120.000 person days are not enough to document its own software. ... For users, this should be a shock: Microsoft apparently does not know the software that controls 95% of all desktop computers on this planet. Imagine General Motors releasing a press statement to the extent that even though they had 300 of their best engineers work on this for two years, they cannot provide specifications for the cars they built.”


It’s long been my opinion that closed “standards” (including protocols and file formats) are an unmitigated loss for many reasons, though most especially because they lock the user into the first vendor’s solution. It’s gratifying that the European Commission has the intelligence to realise this, though given the trend in European (and other) governments towards open standards, perhaps not too surprising.

Posted in legal, politics | 1 Comment »

Don’t give me any of that juris-my-diction crap!

Friday, June 9th, 2006

Argh, don’t you just hate it when you spend ages writing a long rant, and then your session expires and you lose it. Anyway.

I’ve been hearing lots about Half-Life 2: Episode 1. It looks pretty shiny, so I decided to buy it through Steam. Just after I fired up Steam I remembered that my debit card expired just over a week ago, and I received a replacement on the 7th. The bank said it had been posted on 3 May. Not only has it taken over a month to arrive, the envelope was sealed with sellotape. Very likely it’s been intercepted and opened and the card cloned. So I sent the bank a message rejecting the thing. Sigh.

I clicked on ‘purchase’ anyway, to see how much it would cost. It gave me a price in dollars… “plus tax”. It didn’t say what tax. So do I pay US sales tax, VAT, import duty, all three? What exactly am I paying here?

(more…)

Posted in legal, rant | 1 Comment »