The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is delayed in Congress, but it is definitely not dead. The media company lobbyists and their Congressmen (hello, Lamar Smith!) are simply regrouping. Some of the more controversial aspects of the bill include transferring liability for copyright infringement to sites that host user-generated content and blocking that content via DNS servers.

To highlight the chilling effect this legislation could have on free speech on the Internet, today document-sharing site Scribd is protesting SOPA by making every document disappear word-by-word when you visit the site. All in all, there are a billion pages of documents on the Scribd. “With this legislation in place, entire domains like Scribd could simply vanish from the web,” warns Jared Friedman, CTO and co-founder, Scribd.

You can see the effect by checking out this Lawrence Tribe legal memo on the constitutionality of SOPA (embedded below, but the disappearing act only works on Scribd’s site). After the words disappear, a message comes up urging readers to call their Congress person to stop SOPA. It also provides a few links where people can learn more, including to a our video interview with Brad Burnham on the subject (also embedded below)

The Advocate General of the European Union Court of Justice, Cruz Villalón, says [PDF] that national courts there should not have the ability to tell Internet Service Providers to filter their connections in order to prevent copyright infringement because such a move would conflict with the Charter of Fundamental Rights. That was a mouthful, yes. It should be noted that the Advocate General’s opinion isn’t binding in the least, so this shouldn’t be read as EUROPE BANS INTERNET FILTERING. Hardly. It’s more for the Court of Justice to consider as it goes forward than any sort of official, or even unofficial, ban.

This all stems from a case in mighty Belgium where an artists’ rights group, the Société belge des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs, or Sabam, took issue with copyright infringement occurring via a local ISP, Scarlet Extended SA. After a series of court actions, the ISP was eventually told to install filtering software on its network in order to prevent the continued infringement of copyright.

Today we learn that, in the opinion of the Advocate General, this should never have happened in the first place.

Get ready for a wall of text!

…the Advocate General proposes that the Court of Justice should declare that EU law precludes a national court from making an order, on the basis of the Belgian statutory provision, requiring an internet service provider to install, in respect of all its customers, in abstracto and as a preventive measure, entirely at the expense of the internet service provider and for an unlimited period, a system for filtering all electronic communications passing via its services (in particular, those involving the use of peer-to- peer software) in order to identify on its network the sharing of electronic files containing a musical, cinematographic or audio-visual work in respect of which a third party claims rights, and subsequently to block the transfer of such files, either at the point at which they are requested or at the point at which they are sent.

Stripping that down a bit, the Advocate General is saying that EU law should have prevented the filtering system from being installed, or ordered to be installed, in the first place. Such a filtering system would amount to “a restriction on the rights and freedoms of internet users” and that it could only be legal if it “were adopted on a national legal basis which was accessible, clear and predictable.”

So the idea of a filtering system isn’t 100 percent verboten, just that it’d have to be done in such a way that would happily co-exist with the laws on the books.

Again, none of this particularly means anything particularly here in the U.S., but it does show the evolution of courtroom understanding of some of the technologies involved in our lives.

How many of you have played “violent video games” since you were a wee pup? I certainly have, and you don’t see me stealing cars or robbing banks, do you? Exactly. The most violent I get is when I boo the TV when stupid Manchester United improbably comes back against the most entertaining team in England, Blackpool. I bring this up because a congressman from California has proposed a new warning label for video games rated Teen or higher that would say: “WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior.” Sure it has.

It’s all part of the “Video Game Health Labeling Act of 2011,” the goal of which is to inform American families about “the truth about these potentially dangerous products.”

Other potentially dangerous things include hammers, thumb tacks, pointy boots, and eating too many cookies in one sitting.

The congressmen, Joe Baca, a Democrat from Rialto, California, points us in the direction of several studies from various universities that point to a “neurological link” between violent video games and violent behavior. Again, my silly friends and I played all the violent hits if the 1990s and early 2000s and none of us, to my knowledge, have attempted to re-enact scenes from Grand Theft Auto. Maybe we’re just great like that.

Then again, you can just as easily point to other studies that say there’s no link between violent video games and violent behavior.

Knowing nothing about this congressman, my assumption is that his heart is in the right place, but perhaps he recognizes that it’s easy to get heat (“brownie points”) railing against the destructive effects of violent video games.

Don’t let this ruin your day.

Good news: the state of California can now seize and search your cellphone without a warrant. The new regime will only affect people who have already been arrested, so it’s not as if police officers will be able to search your cellphone at routine traffic stops. But still: yeah, it’s sorta lame. In 2011, even more of your rights will be chipped away.

The California court that ruled in favor of this new way of being referred to an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling that basically says anytime you’ve been arrested you automatically forfeit any right to privacy to “anything of importance they find on the arrestee’s body.”

Clearly the California court has deemed that cellphones and the like are “of importance,’ so they’re now subject to police seizure, presumably as they’re looking to find evidence of a crime. Back in the day, you would have expected to be served with a warrant to allow police to look for evidence, but not more.

Spy Report: A man has just accused of being “an Apple convention” at CES because John, Matt, and I are sitting on a bench writing with MacBooks. It’s slightly embarrassing. I’m not an Apple fanboy, sir, it just so happens that I bought a MacBook three years ago.

Amazon and other holders of business method patents can breathe easy for now. (One of the most famous business method patents is Amazon’s One-Click shopping cart patent).

In a ruling today, the Supreme Court basically punted on whether or not business method patents, in general, should be upheld. Instead, it ruled narrowly on the business method patent in question in the case, Bilski v. Kappos . That patent was thrown out. In that sense, it affirmed an earlier U.S. Federal Appeals Court ruling.

But the Court also warned people not to read to much into its decision. As Mike Masnik at TechDirt explains:

Basically, the court just said it would rule on this particular patent and not make any real statements on the overall patentability of business methods or software. So, in effect, it’s no real change on how the patent system works.

The debate around business method patents revolves around whether or not business models or features of business models can be considered to be a “process,” and thus patentable. (Most software patents are also described as a “process” or “method” because originally patents were described in terms of mechanical inventions so they all get shoehorned into that language). At least one Justice, retiring Justice Stevens, concludes in a concurring (but not the majority) opinion that a “business method is not a ‘process.’” Most sane people would tend to agree.

The other Justices in the majority, however, didn’t go so far. It looks like we are stuck with business method patents for now. Sigh.

Photo credit: Flickr/Jon Oropeza

Part of me wishes President Obama would flip that so-called “Internet kill switch.” Imagine: a world without the Internet! That would be grand, indeed. But let’s not indulge in fantasies: there is no such kill switch. Well, there is, but it’s not as if the president is going to say, “I disagree with Nicholas’ opinion of anti-virus protection, I’m going to shut down CrunchGear.”

The deal is that Sen. Joe Liebermann, of Connecticut, has put forward a bill called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010. You can read the whole thing if you wan, but life is entirely too short for that kind of thing. All you need to knows is that the law would replace a law that dates back to the 1930s. That law already gives the president the ability to kill any form of telecommunication! Granted, it has to be in the interest of national security, so we’d have to be staring down the barrel of a Red Dawn (or its lame re-imagining, Modern Warfare 2) scenario for that to happen.

The new law, as it’s currently written, would actually prevent the president and his peeps from directing much of anything. He (and the director of National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications) would have to work with the owners of critical infrastructure to decide on any plan of action in the event of a national security situation.

So if you want to be mad at anything, be made at an 80-year-old law that was developed decades before the Internet was even around.

In closing, if you’d like to see limits placed upon whoever happens to occupy the Oval Office, then you really should have no problem with Liebermann’s bill.

Or, you can take my attitude: whatever happens, happens. Time to pour a nice glass of lemonade on this warm summer day.

Flickr’d

So this is either great or dumb, and I’ll leave it to you to make up your own mind. The Supreme Court is currently hearing a sexting case, in which police officers have sued their sergeant for reading sexually explicit messages that were supposed to be privately read amongst themselves. The question is, did the sergeant violate the officers’ privacy by reading the messages?

It got weird when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court asked what’s the difference between a text message and pager.

Now, there’s two schools of thought here. One is to say, “Oh My God! These old people have no idea what they’re talking about, they shouldn’t even be sitting on the bench!” And if they truly don’t know the difference between a text message and a pager, or anything along those lines, then we’re pretty much doomed. Is it too much to ask to have the country’s highest court to understand the everything things people have to deal with?

The other is that the justices do, in fact, know the difference in a practical sense, but are asking simply to make sure they’re on solid legal footing.

I’ll only address the first point because it’s the most pertinent here. For all the work of people like the Electronic Frontier Foundation trying to educate the public on law and technology, it’s a complete waste of time if the judges on the bench don’t know the difference between iPod and iPad, between uploading and downloading, between Internet Protocol and Intellectual Property.

I actually had a conversation with an EFF lawyer back during CES, and he pretty much said just that: you could walk into a courtroom with a rock-solid case, but if the judge doesn’t understand the technological details of your argument you might as well be speaking Aramaic.

We’re probably a few years away from having people who grew up with technology (as we know it today) sitting on the bench. And even that doesn’t solve the problem: I should hope that when I’m 50 years old I don’t understand a damn thing what the kids are doing technologically. I’ll be all, “I remember when the iPhone was leaked…” and some punk kid will be all, “What’s a phone?”

Technology will always outpace law. What are you gonna do?

At what point do you stop trying to track and prosecute cyber-criminals? Obviously, you can’t let criminals run around willy-nilly, but when you look at the resources involved in bringing those guys to justice—and are you really nabbing the right guys in the first place?—it’s worth at least talking about. Is fighting cyber-crime about as futile as fighting the war on drugs?

The deal is that authorities last week arrested the ringleaders of a Spain-based botnet. Botnets, of course, are hordes of computers that have been “taken over” by evildoers to do their bidding. The issue is that, sure, you can catch three guys who run a botnet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re catching the people most responsible. As someone from Symantec told CNN, it “takes no more skill than it takes to run Microsoft Office” to start a botnet.

Script kiddies, in other words. You can arrest all the script kiddies you want, but they’re not the ones actually creating the destructive software in the first place.

And then you figure that many of the programmers responsible for all this madness are outside the reach of American authorities, who are the ones who are most gung-ho, let’s go get ‘em, well, what are you gonna do?

It’s sorta fascinating, if something can be “sorta” fascinating. You have criminals running amok, they’re essentially untraceable, and they’re distributing tools that any kid with a free hour can figure out how to use.

So that’s the debate: how best to go after the bad guys when they’re impossible to catch, and they’re spreading around the tools of their trade all over the place, tools that any ol’ person can put to use?

Man, all this talk about cyber-crime has me hankering to see a good sci-fi movie à la Blade Runner. Any other recommendations in that vein? Something cyberpunk-y, if you will.

It’s the start of yet another lazy Saturday, so let’s make things a little more interesting with a side dish of outrage. A 15-year-old student in Pennsylvania has accused his high school of spying on him using a school-supplied MacBook. The school had accused the boy “inappropriate behavior” that it found him engaged in via the built-in Webcam. Lawsuits are flying, as you might imagine.

The school didn’t say what activity the boy was engaged in, and it doesn’t really matter. He could have been gacked out of his mind, but the school has no right to spy on him in his own home. If you think it does, then let’s get you a time machine so you can live under the thumb of the Stasi.

The school-issued MacBook has a sort of security feature that allows an administrator to remotely activate the built-in Webcam without the user knowing. It’s ostensibly a security feature, but, should the boy’s allegations pan out, then I think we can say the school acted way out of bounds.

Now, the MacBook is 100 percent owned by the school, so it’s well within its rights to set the rules. “No Torrents, no LimeWire, no YouTube,” etc. (Who uses LimeWire, by the way? It’s always in the top 10 downloads of the likes of versiontracker and whatnot.) The school also reserved the right to search the MacBook’s hard drive, so if it found a whole bunch of DVD rips on there, well, that’s not allowed.

Remotely activating the Webcam to snap photos without the student knowing? That’s clearly an egregious violation of all sorts of privacy rights, and may well be on the wrong side of wiretapping laws, too. So it’s nonsense left, right, and center.

Not that emotions should have any place in deciding matters of law, but imagine your child, or you yourself if you’re a student, coming home and finding out that that laptop your school have him was spying on him. You’d be pretty ticked off, I imagine.

The school has denied any wrongdoing, and has since disabled that remote control feature.

My initial reaction was, what a wealthy school district, buying MacBooks for its kids! Surely a less expensive netbook is all a high school student would need?

Flickr

At what point do you consider something “unreasonable”? Let’s say you’re pulled over while speeding—do the police have the right to search your mobile phone? And let’s say they do, and they find other verboten material on the phone? Should you also be on the hook for that, on top of your speeding ticket? It’s a pretty important debate, and it’s one that going on right now.

A judge in San Mateo county, in California, is in the midst of a just such a case. A man there went to buy 30 BlackBerry phones, something that piqued the curiosity of the store clerk. The clerk called the police, and he was arrested on charges of felony identity fraud. His iPhone was confiscated, too,

There’s a case going on right now in California where a man was arrested at a store for felony identity fraud. His phone was later confiscated and searched by police without a warrant. There’s really no law on the books that says police can or cannot search your phone during an arrest. Some people make the case, “Well, if the police can search you wallet, then why shouldn’t they be able to search your phone?” What if you password protect the phone—do the police have the right to crack the password?

I think the overall issue when you deal with the intersection of high technology (let’s just consider your mobile phone to be “high technology”) and law is that law simply hasn’t evolved to the point where it adequately takes technology into account. Let’s say there’s a law that covers wire taps on phone lines—does that cover mobile phones? What about Skype, or instant messages? IRC? Message boards? Can a police officer sit outside a café while running something ettercap, capture you planning some sort of bank heist, then arrest you on the spot?

I actually had this conversation with an Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney at CES. The gist is, yeah, law simply doesn’t take into account of all the complexities of today’s technology. Let’s say you’re brought to court by the one of the record labels, and you try to argue your case in front of a 70-year-old judge who wouldn’t know the difference between “upload” and “download” if his life were on the line. It’s going to take quite a while before people with more than a basic understanding of technology are sitting on courtroom benches.

Yesterday, August 11, wasn’t just Joe Rogan’s birthday. Nope, it was also the date when a judge in San Francisco ruled that RealDVD was illegal, and reiterated that it was illegal to manufacture or traffic software that makes it possible to copy DVDs. So, every time you fire up DVD Copier on your PC, make a copy of a DVD that you bought, well, you’re breaking the law. The DMCA just keeps on giving, doesn’t it?

Who can forget RealDVD? For a split second last fall, Real, a company generally loathed online as a result of its rubbish software history, found support on so many message boards for releasing RealDVD. It enabled people to make copies of DVDs to their PC. Fair Use, etc. The resulting copy was only playable on that particular PC, so it wasn’t like you’d be able to load up the ISO into your BearShare shared folder. (Man, who else remembers the days when you had to manually add servers to the various Windows Gnutella programs?) In any event, you won’t be able to do that now, since the judge ruled that RealDVD conflicts with the DMCA, the awesome Federal law that has been ruining our lives since 1998.

(Incidentally, if I were entertaining the idea of going to law school, what’s one with a fine copyright law/IP department? That’s the only type of law that would personally interest me.)

But here’s where it gets interesting. Said U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel:

So while it may well be fair use for an individual consumer to store a backup copy of a personally owned DVD on that individual’s computer, a federal law has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or tool that permits a consumer to make such copies.

Soooo, we have the right to make Fair Use copies of our DVDs, but the DMCA makes it illegal for someone to produce such software. And I’m going to assume that the word “manufacture” means it’s also illegal to sit there and program your own copying software. Something to do with Federal Law (DMCA) trumping Common Law (Fair Use).

Meanwhile, I just watched this video again, by Carl Sagan, and realized that none of this matters in the grand scheme of things.

Another day, another twist in that proposed French anti-piracy law. While the French upper house, the Senate, approved the bill as it was presented earlier today, the lower house, the National Assembly, rejected it. Oh don’t worry, since the Government said it will present a revised edition of the bill that would remove the main clause that upset the National Assembly.

To recap, the proposed bill would boot illegal file-sharers off the Internet after being caught three times—the three strikes rule (is baseball popular enough in France for that dumb metaphor to be appropriate?). What the National Assembly didn’t like, specifically, was that the bill would have required pirates to continue to pay their ISP subscription fee. It’s that provision that upset the a few members of the right; the left thought the bill was dumb from the get-go.

But again, President Sarkozy’s right-hand man in the Parliament, one Roger Karoutchi, said the Government will present a new bill without that pesky you-still-need-to-pay provision.

France 24 should be interesting today.

Have any of you guys been following this anti-video game/movie bill that’s currently bouncing around Utah’s legislature? It’s gotten attention for a few reasons, one of which is because the original version of the bill—it has since been amended—was either written by or conceived by (depending on to whom you talk) famous video game hater (and disbarred lawyer) Jack Thompson. Legislatively speaking, it’s a pretty exciting progression.

The bill, HB 353, would punish retailers who say they don’t sell violent video games to minors but actually do sell such games to minors. In other words, if you open a store—Ted’s Video Game Emporium, for example—and flatly say, “We sell all games to everyone, regardless of the ESRB rating, it’s not like that’s law or anything” then Utah would have no problem with you. Well, I’m sure it would have a problem with you, but not with respect to this bill.

As always, Video Game Politics has all the “Inside Baseball” coverage you could want.

One other thing: there’s one of those form letter petitions going around that, if you live in Utah, you may to want sign. I’m nominally against form letter campaigns—it makes it easy for people who don’t know too much about a subject to complain to The Man—but if you like to see your government in action! It’s like a real life civics class.

What I’ve always wanted to know is, why does Jack Thompson even give a damn about who buys what video game and whether or not they’re violent? Just retire and live on a beach already, sir.

Ars Technica is usually one of the better sites to read if you’re looking for a “serious” take on technology, but its profile of the Harvard Law students working on the RIAA v. Joel Tenenbaum case is in a league of its own. It’s a little on the long side, in this age of Twitter, but well worth the time invested if you’re interested in any of the following topics: the RIAA; music piracy; justice; or a good, old fashioned David v. Goliath story.

If you’re not aware, the RIAA is suing Joel Tenenbaum because, the cartel claims, he illegally downloaded a bunch of songs some time ago. Fair enough. What makes his case different from all the others is that his defense is the subject of a for-credit class at Harvard Law School, overseen by one Prof. Charles Nesson. The students in the class, the ones profiled by Ars Technica today, draw up legal arguments as to why the RIAA has gone overboard in its pursuit of damages, that the RIAA is clearly not acting here to “educate” would-be music pirates, and so on. The students are trying to clear Tenebaum’s good name, while drawing attention to the RIAA’s heavy handed tactics. To that end, the students are trying to convince the presiding judge to allow them to broadcast the trial online; the RIAA object to this.

(If there’s one thing in the profile that annoyed me, it’s this line: “While arguments may be the key issue in court, the students haven’t been content to make their case only to the judge. Harvard Law student Debbie Rosenbaum is heading up media relations, and she’s doing a shockingly effective job.” Then it goes on to describe how she’s set up a Twitter feed and a blog. My concern: what is so shocking about a Twitter feed and a blog? The Blitz, now that was shocking.)

You’ll note that the law students aren’t trying fight “The Man” or anything, but rather are trying to seek justice, which is sort of novel.

So, again, if you’ve got a few minutes today you’d do well to read the whole profile. It’s a better use of your time than, say, playing one of those silly Flash games that are so popular.

Kentucky-based CMI has come under fire on more than one occasion for not turning over the source code used in the breathalyzers that it sells to various law enforcement agencies, citing trade secrets as the reason for keeping the code under wraps. Well that hasn’t sat too well with people who have been pulled over and cited with DUIs, as some of them have claimed that the machines aren’t registering blood alcohol levels accurately.

Just this week, 100 cases were thrown out of a Bradenton, Florida court after defense attorneys demanded to have the source code for CMI’s Intoxilyzer 5000 examined by breathalyzer experts. Kentucky-based CMI refused to turn over the code and software used with its machines, despite threats of more than $2 million in fines.

Bradenton Judge Doug Henderson eventually ruled that “the refusal was a violation of due process,” saying that “The defendant’s right to a fair trial outweighed the manufacturer’s claim of a trade secret.” As such, breathalyzer evidence for the pending cases was deemed inadmissible – and some of those cases had dragged on for over three years.

A similar case involving CMI happened in Minnesota not too long ago when a defendant asked to see the source code for the same model of breathalyzer mentioned above. The Minnesota Supreme Court found that “under the contract between the state and CMI, the state owned the source code for the Intoxilyzer 5000EN.”

So is all this source code hoopla just a stalling tactic or are these legitimate claims?

“What’s frightening is that the 5000EN is apparently based on the ancient Z-80 processor, which powered the Radio Shack TRS-80 desktop computer … which went on sale in 1977. CMI has also been accused of making uncertified changes to the machines, and had to issue a recall due to faulty software.”

That, according to an article on Switched.com about the Minnesota case back in 2007. Also, please reference the above image for a look at the actual machine.

The bigger issue here, however, isn’t about faulty software, hardware, or source code, it’s that a publicly-funded entity like your local police department buys technology from the private sector and then has no access to information about how the technology works. When that technology is used as evidence in a trial, should it be open to scrutiny by the defense? Your thoughts?

[via Slashdot]

The RIAA has decided to stop filing pointless lawsuits against John and Jane Doe for alleged copyright infringement. Rather, the bullying cartel will work with ISPs to get you kids to stop downloading Fallout Boy, the All American Rejects and other self-described popular music.

From now on it’ll work like this. The RIAA sees that you’re uploading (“seeding” in BitTorrent parlance) 808s and Heartbreak and will send a letter to your ISP. Your ISP, then, will notify you that you’re on the RIAA’s radar, and that you’re to knock it off, or else. Depending on the ISP, you’ll be given a number of warnings, which could be accompanied by bandwidth throttling, before having your connection terminated.

The RIAA won’t say which ISPs have agreed to its new scheme.

Meanwhile, decent, hard-working people are losing their jobs left and right as a result of Wall Street’s unfettered money orgy; good luck getting sympathy from these people. But go ahead, RIAA, keep pretending that some 9th grade girl seeding Brittney Spears’ Circus is putting the your industry in the pour house.

From the Department of Public Safety and General Preparedness comes this story of one man, a Cisco engineer, and his headline-making ordeal of having his possessions searched upon re-entry to the U.S. following an international flight. (It’s also the story of run-on sentences.) The man, Mohamed Shommo, told the Associated Press that border agents rifled through his digital camera’s photos, his Google searches and the files on his iPod. That’s all done in the name of Your Safety, mind.

No, we can’t have this, can we? No, says privacy advocates. They, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and various Muslim rights folks, say that such searches are unreasonable and very mean. The rookie officer at Customs doesn’t need to look at your Google history to protect the homeland, they argue. Certain members of Congress agree, and now there’s several bills milling about that may actually pass next year. One such bill would require customs officials to officially be suspicious of a traveler in order to search his electronic belongings. (Right now, those same officials merely have to be “awake” and “in a foul mood” to be able to search your stuff.)

Your best bet, I think, is to travel with an unreasonable number of gadgets. That way, the young gun at customs elects to wave you through rather than search 10 cellphones, three laptops, two camcorders, four digital cameras, etc. Be a nuisance, then.

“…No reasonable person in Plaintiff’s position could have reasonably relied on or misunderstood Apple’s statements as claims of fact.”

Ha! Well, you can be sure nobody will consider Apple’s statements “claims of fact” now!

Yeah, the lawsuit is questionable, but the response is classic.

Last week’s attacks in India have reminded us all of the keen danger that terrorism poses. But one tool that was to be employed at airports to combat terrorism, those body scanners that sometimes reveal a person’s, well, person, came under criticism. Fighting terror (inasmuch as you can fight it) is great and all, but should people literally be exposed in the process? The Germans say no, and are developing a body scanner that, while it does its job (detecting weapons and so forth), doesn’t show off your nude body to the leering airport screeners.

The new scanner will undergo proper laboratory tests this week.

The full-on “naked scanner” is already in use in other European countries such as the Netherlands.

Also, Germany-Netherlands make a fine football rivalry. Three cheers for random, tangentially related information!

Apple countered by encrypting the file, which encryption was cracked before two days were out. They’ve now re-encrypted it, and some folks at BluWiki have been discussing how to once again get at the information to allow third-party programs to be able to sync. At least, until Apple sent them a takedown notice citing DMCA laws.

Leaving aside the layman’s issue of “why didn’t they do this years ago if it’s so illegal,” anyone who knows the DMCA can immediately see that this notice is total bull. Fred Lohmann at the EFF appears to know somewhat more than myself, so I’ll let him explain in detail, but the gist is that:

• The posts discussing the iTunes hash do not fall under any of the categories of restriction by the DMCA in the first place
• Even if they did, the iTunesDB is not copyrighted material, it is created by iTunes much in the way a word processor might created a text document and as such is not subject to copyright concerns.
• Even if it were, the DMCA allows for reverse engineering in order to create interoperability among devices
• And even if it didn’t, the DMCA doesn’t outlaw dissemination of information that could lead to circumvention of DRM.

Perhaps it’s just an overzealous lawyer throwing Apple’s weight around, but really, how could they blow it so badly? What the people at BluWiki are doing is not only perfectly legal, but helpful for consumers who prefer a different setup for their media player. It looks to me like a rather spiteful move by Apple legal, and although I’m sure it didn’t come down from the Steve to letter-bomb some innocent wiki, I’m guessing this news will make it up to him — and his Steveness will certainly be displeased.


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