Colette Vogele has a great posting on her blog about the ongoing situation regarding the RSS hijacking of the podcast of Erik Marcus. This is also the subject of an article at eWeek. Briefly, a third party has created a URL that links to the official RSS feed from Erik’s podcast. This URL has been…
Category: Musings
Blawg Review #33 is up at Overlawyered
Blawg Review #33 has been posted over at Overlawyered. While I didn’t submit anything this week, I have been following one of the controversies posted about, namely the name change by Pajamas Media to Open Source Media. In relevant part, the quote is as follows: Taking second place in interblog buzz is the IP sticky…
Victory declared: But is it really?
Mark Russinovich, over at Sysinternals, has declared victory over the rootkit embedded in the CD’s Sony has distributed. And, as Bruce Schneier points out in his excellent analysis, Mark has reason to be happy. It’s David v. Goliath. However, it’s not a total victory. There are untold numbers of machines still infected with the Sony…
Back from BlawgThink 2005
It’s taken several days for the ideas expressed at BlawgThink to percolate through enough to have me post about it. For a great summary of some of the presentations, Dave Gulbransen was blogging throughout, here is a link to the first post. And, to boot, he’s a great guy. Many thanks to Matt Homann and…
Attention – Part Two
Since the first post, I found an excellent summary of Attention from a practical point of view by Dare Obasanjo. Nick Bradbury has another good post. From an IP attorney’s point of view, Attention is interesting because it is an attempt to create a new property right in the aggregate of data. It’s different from…
Attention – Part One
My Attention was drawn by the recent Gillmor Gang on Attention, forcing me to listen to the whole thing three times in order to get a handle on where the Gang was coming from. Steve Gillmor is now the president of Attention Trust, a new non-profit group interested in advocating for the “basic rights of…
The Legality of Fan Fiction on the Net
Fan fiction is prevalent on the Internet, but is it legal? It turns out that’s a really interesting question. For the great majority of what is available, the answer is no. ISP’s that distribute these files and the authors of unauthorized works can both be liable for copyright infringement. What is fan fiction? Well, fan…
Musings on DMCA Takedown Provisions
Ernie the Attorney started the recent brouhaha over the notice and takedown provisions in the DMCA. You can read Ernie’s take here, with Denise Howell’s original take here. There are some really interesting comments in the discussion to Ernie’s post. So what do these provisions do? If you know that someone is using your copyrighted…
Musings on backwards compatability for Windows
An interesting conversation with Joel Spolsky has been featured this week at IT Conversations. It’s from September 2004, but still relevant. The idea that remained with me is the fact that in order for Microsoft to have backwards compatability for users whenever it came out with a new version of Windows, Microsoft had to include…
Musings on Convergence: A Buzzword ahead of its time?
The discussion I heard recently on “Maximizing your digital lifestyle” made me reflect on the convergence of digital media and its impact on our modern lifestyle. (Convergence is usually defined as the ‘coming together’ of formerly distinct technologies, industries or activities.) The speakers on the podcast discussed their desire for the capability to experience their…