This Thursday Ohio Free Culture will be co-sponsoring "Privacy Rights in the 21st Century," a roundtable discussion. We will be discussing the current debate over the NSA's domestic eavesdropping as well as privacy rights on the net.


























The discussion will take place in Ohio University's Baker Center, room 304 . Members of OU ACLU, OU Libertarians, and Positive Action will also be present.

This could be true in the not to distant future

RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs

The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. "We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material," a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read. "We will aggressively prosecute those individuals who attempt to pirate our property by generating 'buzz' about any proprietary music, movies, or software, or enjoy same in the company of anyone other than themselves." RIAA attorneys said they were also looking into the legality of word-of-mouth "favorites-sharing" sites, such as coffee shops, universities, and living rooms.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Released

On Tuesday, the newest stable version of Firefox, the highly popular, free and open source web browser, was released. Along with enhanced security, stability, and tons of cool features, you also get the chance to use software that contributes to our freedom and community.

So go out and download it already.

Amazon gets patent for consumer reviews

(Overheard in Amazon.com boardroom)

"Hey, I have an idea-- let's enourage consumers to review products for one another so they can make well-informed decisions."

"Brilliant! Surely no one could come up with an idea this ingenious, this unique, this Amazon! What say we file a patent?"

(The boardroom erupts in hearty laughter...)

OK, so this seems like a farce, right, a gross caricature of unrestrained corporate greed? Well, not really. Recently, Amazon.com received three new patents for its business methods. And one of them is for their system of consumer reviews.

Once again, the valuable social networking the Internet provides has been bought up by corporate interests.

But look on the bright side: at least they don't own "one-click" shopping anymore.

Sony Gone Wild

At last week's Ohio Free Culture meeting, we spoke about the use of a "root-kit" as advanced digital rights magagment (more accurately known as digital restrictions management) in certain Sony CDs (see additional coverage from Harvard Free Culture).
A root-kit is

a set of tools frequently used by an intruder after cracking a computer system. These tools are intended to conceal running processes and files or system data, which helps an intruder maintain access to a system for malicious purposes.

In the past week a large numbers of things have occurred. First, the mainstream news media picked up the story on Thursday, November 4. The next day, Sony has released a "fix" for it. This fix requires the insecure program active X, which in turn requires insecure program Internet explorer. Additionally, as the orginal discoverer, Mark Russinovich found

I dug a little deeper and it appears the Player is automatically checking to see if there are updates for the album art and lyrics for the album it’s displaying. This behavior would be welcome under most circumstances, but is not mentioned in the EULA, is refuted by Sony, and is not configurable in any way. I doubt Sony is doing anything with the data, but with this type of connection their servers could record each time a copy-protected CD is played and the IP address of the computer playing it.

As we predicted, Sony has left itself open to lawsuits. An Italian organization, Association for the Freedom in Communication Electronic Interactive, has gotten involved with legal authorities about possible legal actions.

Additional Info on DRM:
EFF: Writings and documents related to DRM
EPIC: Digital Rights Management and Privacy
Public Knowledge: DRM

Requiem for a P2P

I've written this before, but now it's official: Grokster is dead. Today, Grokster entered a settlement ending its operations as a peer-to-peer network. A new fee-based iteration of Grokster is expected to come out within 60 days, but for all intents and purposes, Grokster is gone.

Here's MPAA President Dan Glickman playing the triumphant cop after the bust:

"We hope the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling and an aggressive education effort will dissuade companies and individuals from engaging in these types of unlawful activities in the future," said the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, former Rep. Dan Glickman. "But when necessary, we will pursue all avenues — including legal means — to protect our product from theft."

So why am I upset? I mean, there is still BitTorrent, eDonkey, and a host of other filesharing networks, right?

The loss of Grokster is troubling mostly because the Supreme Court decision that called for its end is a decision that could haunt us for years. The Court's decision this past summer in MGM v. Grokster set up a dangerous new legal standard. Before Grokster, all one had to prove in order to proctect their technology or service was that it had the "capability for substantial noninfringing uses." This doctrine came out of the landmark 1984 Sony decision. What this would mean for a P2P is this: if you have anything on your network-- Shakespeare, the Bible-- that is not copyrighted, you can't be sued. After Grokster, however, P2P's and developers of foreseeably any new technology can be dragged into court even if they had no intent to violate copyright.

With everyone fair game for the entertainment industry and their army of lawyers, innovators are bound to be scared. Who knows what technological development we'll miss out on with Grokster as the new law of the land.

Cell Phone Tracking

We talked about the use of cell phones for tracking proposes in Wednesday's meeting. This week two separate judges ruled against government requests for "real time" tracking ability of cell phones. Using elements of the Patriot Act, government officials have in the past only need to say the information obtained through tracking was need for it to be allowed.

However, Judge Orenstein of New York in one of the rulings wrote

When the government seeks to turn a mobile telephone into a means for contemporaneously tracking the movements of its user, the delicately balanced compromise that Congress has forged between effective law enforcement and individual privacy requires a showing of probable cause

The EFF was one of the groups that fought on the side of privacy in this case.

Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a friend of the court brief (.pdf) in the New York case, says the Justice Department may have been using cell phones to track people for a long time, since judges typically don't publish opinions on such orders.

"This is a true victory for privacy in the digital age, where nearly any mobile communications device you use might be converted into a tracking device," Bankston said in a statement. "Judges are starting to realize that when it comes to surveillance issues, the DOJ has been pulling the wool over their eyes for far too long."

Bankston noted in an interview that the Justice Department attempted to convince Orenstein he had the authority, under another federal law called the All Writs Act, to order the cell phone tracking by revealing that other judges had used that statute to authorize real time tracking of credit-card purchases, which the government referred to as a "Hotwatch Order."

More Information:
EFF: USA v. Pen Register
EPIC: Wiretapping