Tuesday, July 16, 2002

You're probably on your own for a couple of days while I'm off playing in the city with a friend who's visiting from out of town. I don't think the hotel we're staying at has high-speed internet access (boo, hiss hiss), but it's "girl's 36-hours out" anyway, so expect few to no posts until Wednesday night.  :-) 9:10:21 AM  Permanent link here

Lorem Ipsum RSS An RSS feed in Latin? "The folks at the Finnish Broadcasting Company are keeping at least one dead language alive. That and they're even supplying an RSS feed of it. The Transcriptio Nuntiorum Hebdomadalis or News in Latin feed, is a transcription of the audio broadcast. That broadcast, heard around the world on various shortwave and satellite channels is a weekly review of World News, spoken in Classic Latin. Check out TNH at feed 13500 on Syndic8.com." [Syndication News from Bill Kearney] Dorothea and husband should love this one! 12:34:32 AM  Permanent link here

Larry Lessig Recognizes The Threat To Our Libraries Copyright in the Balance: LJ Talks with Lawrence Lessig "Now, in a more direct way than ever before, Lessig carries the hopes of the library community, and by extension a largely unknowing public, squarely on his shoulders. In a promising sign for libraries and the public, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in February 2001 to review whether Congress overstepped its bounds in 1998 when it passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extending copyright terms for another 20 years. Lessig will argue the case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, on behalf of a group of online publishers that offer digital editions of public domain books for free over the Internet. Two lower courts already ruled against the plaintiffs, but hopes are high in the library community that the third time could be the charm.... Much is as stake for the library community. Since 1960, copyright terms have been extended 11 times, from 28 to 95 years and applied retroactively. According to a brief filed by University of California–Berkeley law professor Mark Lemley, if allowed to stand, the latest copyright extension means that roughly 10,000 books published in 1930, of which fewer than 200 remain in print, could be kept from the public domain for an additional 20 years. If overturned all 10,000 works could be made available to the public in downloadable, digital editions.... LJ There is a diverse array of amicus briefs filed on behalf of Eldred, including 15 library groups. On the other side, there are but a few large, well-funded lobbies. Is this a statement about our democracy, how you can literally see the public lined up on one side and on the other side you see, well, money and lobbyists, which are often a lot more important to legislators? LL Of course, yes. And, well, I'm quite confident about what's more important to legislators. Not because they are corrupt, but because legislators just hear the view of those who are around them, and the people who can afford to be around them, in this case, that's the copyright interest. The Supreme Court is different. They are not surrounded by a bunch of lobbyists. They call it the way they see it.... Libraries buy works and make them available to other people in a way in which copyright owners may not always like. But with new technologies, copyright owners now can control the use of copyrighted works. Copyright owners now just need to wrap content in digital form, and if a library tries to simply facilitate what it's always done, the library is branded a thief. That is a massive expansion of the power copyright owners have over their content. There needs to be a much better debate because the thing that's at stake here is the concentration and control over the future of our culture. People need to recognize how copyright has changed in a relatively short time—50 years—and decide whether the values that marked the Constitution's framing are going to be valuable to us in the future." [Library Journal, via The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk] I wanted to quote more of Lessig's answers, but you should just go read the whole thing for yourself instead. If you're a librarian, make sure you show this to your colleagues. If you're not a librarian, make sure you talk about this issue with others because it really is an "us-against-them" situation. 12:28:30 AM  Permanent link here

And It's Not Even Out In The Wild Yet Elcomsoft Vs. Adobe, The Sequel Vulnerability Found: The Adobe eBook Library "The wacky gang at ElcomSoft is at it again. The Russian company faced criminal prosecution in the U.S. for distributing software to break security on Adobe digital rights management technology, which blocks users from making unauthorized copies of documents. ElcomSoft says it's providing tools to allow users to make backup copies of documents, and recover documents when the passwords have been lost. ElcomSoft staffer Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested when he came to the U.S. simply for describing security flaws in the Adobe document format. Now, ElcomSoft has released a description of the pathetically fragile and inadequate security in the Adobe eBook Library. The technology is supposed to allow libraries to loan out copies of e-books. Libraries would buy a master copy, with a license for a certain number of users, and each time a user checked out a copy, the number of copies out on loan is recorded. When the maximum is reached, no new copies can go out until an existing copy is 'returned.' There's also a timer mechanism to allow copies of the document to expire and become unreadable after a certain amount of time, making it possible for the library to loan out a copy again. The problem, according to ElcomSoft, is that it's easy for an end-user to fiddle with the settings, setting the expiration date into the indefinite future or making it impossible for the library to send out copies of the document. The technique, as described by ElcomSoft, isn't even particularly hard--it would take a couple of minutes, and an above-average 13-year-old could do it. I'm no lawyer, but I think this is the kind of thing that got ElcomSoft in trouble under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the first place, and it's an illustration of why the DMCA is an awful law. As I understand it, simply describing a computer security product's flaws is illegal under the DMCA, and ElcomSoft has provided a detailed description, more than sufficient to allow anyone to break into the Adobe technology.... When consumer publications like Consumer Reports test locks, the most important thing they do is try to break in. They send locksmiths to go to work on the locks, they get out the boltcutters on padlocks, and report which ones are broken into most easily and which ones do the best to stand up under attack. Nobody thinks there's anything sinister about that--everybody can see the practical value. And yet when you try to do the same thing for computer technology, you're a criminal. Indeed, this very Weblog entry may well be a felony under the DMCA. I'll let you know what day to watch out for me on "Cops." # "Bad boys bad boys, whatcha gonna do.... ?" # " [24-Hour Drive-Thru] How about the next round of Photoshop Tennis centers around the theme "Uh-oh." I still want to see this product succeed, though, so let's hope Adobe fixes these problems and quits picking on Elcomsoft. 12:09:51 AM  Permanent link here