Stanford Center for Internet and Society

In a press release from today the IFPI hails a Belgium court decision, which reportedly imposes a duty on an Internet Service Provider to use filtering technology for stopping illegal file sharing activities running through its network. From the press release:

Apple has announced it would offer DRM-free music through iTunes. The offer is limited to the music catalog of one of the Major Labels, EMI.

Customers still can get the DRM-protected songs at the old price. The DRM-free songs are available for an extra price of 30%. In exchange, the consumer (also) gets better file quality.

Steve Jobs published on Tuesday this article on Apple’s website. It definitely deserves a comment.

This morning I came across Stacy Cowley's article GPL 3: An Open Source Earthquake?. As a member of OGC Consortium, the group responsible for developing geospatial interoperability standards, I've suggested review of their standards' ownership, branding and licensing.

The German American Lawyers Association held last Wednesday in Berlin a panel discussion titled The Current of Ideas in Cyber Society. Patrick Strauch, the German Managing Director of Sony/ATV Music Publishing (sitting rather uncomfortably in his chair as the industry's advocate vs. Prof. Larry Lessig) offered his views about some of the topics that are usually discussed in these forums. Presumably still under the impact of the rootkit disaster, Mr. Strauch expressed disillusionments about DRMs and their capacity to fulfill the promise of content control in the cyber-environment. (As if to add insult to injury, the Librarian of Congress, upon recommendations of the Register of Copyrights, declared in its recent 2006 DMCA Rulemaking - pp. 53-64 in the Register’s report of Nov. 17, 2006 - a new “rootkit exemption” allowing circumvention of such mechanisms for purpose of finding security vulnerabilities.)