Copyright Raid at Video Game Stores
"Federal authorities raided three Washington, D.C.-area video game stores and arrested two people for modifying video game consoles to play pirated video games, a video game industry group said on Wednesday.
"The Entertainment Software Association said the Dec. 1 raids at three Pandora’s Cube stores in Maryland and Virginia were a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Justice’s computer crimes unit, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Maryland and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"Authorities arrested two store employees on charges of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and conspiracy to traffic in a device that circumvents technological protection measures, the ESA said."
Ben Berkowitz. U.S. Officials Raid Stores, Arrest 2 in Game Piracy. Reuters. Dec. 8, 2004.
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Reflections on the 108th Congress
At the Chicago Association of Law Libraries November meeting, Mary Alice Baish, American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Associate Washington Affairs Representative, spoke on "The 108th Congress Draws to an End: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."
"I’d like to give you an overview of our core issues during the past two years – from the perspective of what was good, what was bad, and what was really ugly.
"I’m going to cover them under four broad categories: First, appropriations. Second, copyright and digital rights management. Third, the USA Patriot Act. And fourth, access to government information."
Mary Alice Baish. The 108th Congress: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. (.pdf) American Association of Law Libraries. Nov. 17, 2004.
Attribution: SNTReport.com first discovered news of Mary Alice Baish’s presentation through a posting in LibraryLaw Blog, edited by Mary Minow.
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World’s Largest Free Full-Text Science Archives
"While government agencies, academics, and publishers debate over whether or not publicly funded research results should be freely available, Stanford University’s HighWire Press has been doing its part in taking responsibility for the Open Archive.
"Participating HighWire-hosted publishers have been steadily growing the world’s largest collection of open access, high-impact scholarly research online.
"Today, more than 780,000 free peer-reviewed, full-text articles are available at www.highwire.org. This open archive covers a wide range of not-for-profit titles. Over 90% of the articles in the government repository are already available for free in their complete context (the entire online journal, not just individual articles), with advanced full-text searching and toll-free reference linking, through HighWire."
No author. Free eJournal Archive Passes 3/4 Million Mark. Managing Information. Dec. 1, 2004.
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China’s Tenuous Relationship With the Internet
"As the number of people online in China has quintupled over the last four years, the government has shown itself to be committed to two concrete, and sometimes competing, goals: strategically deploying the Internet to economic advantage, while clamping down – with surveillance, filters and prison sentences – on undesirable content and use.
"Both trends, experts say, are likely to continue.
"China is already the largest mobile communications subscriber market in the world, with more than 320 million subscribers. Internet users – who numbered fewer than 17 million in 2000 – are now estimated to be somewhere near 90 million, according to the China Internet Network Information Center, the government’s clearinghouse for Internet statistics. China is second only to the United States in the number of people online, and the 90 percent of its total population around 1.3 billion who are not online still represents a vast, untapped market. "
Tom Zeller Jr. Beijing Loves the Web Until the Web Talks Back. The New York Times. Dec. 6, 2004.
(Editor�s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper�s fee-based Archive.)
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Pew Survey Addresses File-Sharing
"The battle over digital copyrights and illegal file sharing is often portrayed as a struggle between Internet scofflaws and greedy corporations. Online music junkies with no sense of the marketplace, the argument goes, want to download, copy and share copyrighted materials without restriction. The recording industry, on the other hand, wants to squeeze dollars – by lawsuit and legislation, if necessary – from its property.
"A survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an arm of the Pew Research Center in Washington, aims to change that. The report, ‘Artists, Musicians and the Internet,’ combines and compares the opinions of three groups: the general public, those who identify themselves as artists of various stripes (including filmmakers, writers and digital artists) and a somewhat more self-selecting category of musicians.
"Most notably, it is the first large-scale snapshot of what the people who actually produce the goods that downloaders seek (and that the industry jealously guards) think about the Internet and file-sharing."
Tom Zeller Jr. Pew File-Sharing Survey Gives a Voice to Artists. The New York Times. Dec. 6, 2004.
Mary Madden. Artists, Musicians and the Internet (.pdf) Pew Internet and American Life Project. Dec. 5, 2004.
(Editor�s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper�s fee-based Archive.)
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High Court to Hear Broadband Case
"The nation’s highest court will determine whether the controversial ‘Brand X’ ruling of a U.S. appeals court should stand. The case involves whether the government should regulate cable companies in the same way as phone companies. Phone companies are required to allow third-party providers to offer broadband service over their networks, but cable companies are not.
"The difference arises from the Federal Communications Commission’s classification of cable as an information service rather than a telecommunications service.
"The government can regulate telecommunications services, but cannot touch information services. In October 2003, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FCC was incorrect in making that distinction."
Jim Hu. Supreme Court to Hear Broadband Case. ZD Net. Dec. 3, 2004.
See also:
Charles Lane. Small Wineries Find Ally On Interstate Shipping. WashingtonPost.com. Dec. 5, 2004.
(Editor’s Note: The Post allows free access to their stories on the Web for 14 days before sending the stories to the paper’s fee-based Archives.)
SNTReport.com™ Covering the Intersection of Collaboration and Technology. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Google’s Copyright Issues
"Google has been brought to court for its use of thumbnails images in its image search engine. Pandia takes a look at Google’s use of thumbnails and cached versions of webpages. Google is a search engine. In return for your search query it gives you a list of web pages that contain content that hopefully is of relevance to your needs — it does not give you the webpage itself.
"Most website owners are very happy with this arrangement. They get visitors in return for letting Google index their pages.
"But what if Google decided to copy the pages and present them on their own server? Wouldn’t that be like hijacking pages? Wouldn’t that be in violation of international copyright law?"
No author. Google’s Copyright Problems. Pandia. Nov. 29, 2004.
See also:
Chris Gaither. Porn Publisher Sues Google Over Images. DetNews.com. Nov. 22, 2004. (Perfect 10 sues Google for infringement related to image caching.)
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