Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Government breach FOIA on ID cards?

Spy Blog is reporting that the UK government are technically now in breach of the new freedom of information act regulations, as they admit they have not complied with Spy Blog's request for "meeting diaries, agenda etc. of the Identity Cards Programme Team"

Open Access News says Stealth copyright impeding research in psychology

Slashdot on the MGM v Grokster briefs:

"MGM v. Grokster: Here's Why P2P is Valuable
The Courts
The Internet
Posted by jamie on Wednesday March 02, @11:55AM
from the spelling-it-out dept.
Briefs defending Grokster's right to exist were filed yesterday in MGM v. Grokster, from Intel, Creative Commons [PDF], and many others. Among them, 17 computer science professors laid out the case for P2P, beginning with principles: "First, the United States' description of the Internet's design is wrong. P2P networks are not new developments in network design, but rather the design on which the Internet itself is based.""

Moglen on same:

"At the heart of Petitioners’ argument is an arrogant and unreasonable claim—even if made to the legislature empowered to determine such a general issue of social policy—that the Internet must be designed for the convenience of their business model, and to the extent that its design reflects other concerns, the Internet should be illegal.

Petitioners’ view of what constitutes the foundation of copyright law in the digital age is as notable for its carefully-assumed air of technical naivete as for the audacity with which it identifies their financial interest with the purpose of the entire legal regime.

Despite petitioners’ apocalyptic rhetoric, this case follows a familiar pattern in the history of copyright: incumbent rights-holders have often objected to new technologies of distribution that force innovation on the understandably reluctant monopolist.

[Petitioners] have no statutory bases for their claims, and are arguing here, as they argued below, that they don’t need any. As though this degree of overreaching were insufficient evidence of their mettle, petitioners go on to identify as the technical features of respondents’ computer networking software that establish their entitlement to relief those features that are shared by the whole recent generation of Internet protocols, embodying the future of network design. In the teeth of this Court’s clear statements extending back almost a century, without the slightest statutory justification, petitioners claimed below that they had a right to veto the technological design that organizes the majority of contemporary traffic on the global Internet. Not surprisingly, they lost, and now resume their blustering before this Court. In referring to this as a very important case, petitioners characteristically mistake selfimportance for the real thing."

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