Thursday, May 15, 2003

Privacy International say that UK law enforcement authorities get one million customer records per year from communications providers, according to ZDNet UK.

There's some confusion surrounding a case of secondary copyright infringement which Amazon appear to have lost. The plaintiff, Robert Hendrikson, had previously lost a similar case invloving the same materials against eBay. eBay were able to claim the "safe harbour" protection (presumably section 236?) of the DMCA to avoid liability. Amazon lost on the same defence but there is no written opinion from the judge, so Amazon say they're going to seek clarification of the infringement order.

Intuit are removing DRM and product activation from their tax software.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) have sued a website CIRAWatch.com for libel over an article an article "alleging that CIRA’s validation process for domain name registrations discriminated against certain ethnic communities."

There's a lot of fairly high profile netlaw news around today, including 321 Studios facing the movie industry in court, a company called SCO threatening big linux users with infringing intellectual property rights. I suggest you have a look at Michael Geist's BNA Internet Law News for links to the breaking stories.

Corante point at an interesting International Herald Tribune story about Miscosoft memo suggesting a strategy in their continuing efforts to deal with linux. Basically it amounts to giving massive discounts to governments where Linux may be a competitor.

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