Sunday, March 2, 2003

Do we believe in freedom of speech because it is a good thing in and of itself or do we believe in free speech because it is most effective in getting us to socially usefuls outcomes? There's real controversy, especially after the Slammer worm, about whether to publish weaknesses in code. http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-982663.html More news: http://news.com.com/2100-1009-990879.html?tag=fd_top] Do we believe that government involvement in this process is a long-term solution? I don't think I do. 10:55:20 PM    comment []

http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/02-3/guadamuz.html Trouble with Prime Numbers: DeCSS, DVD and the Protection of Proprietary Encryption Tools Andrés Guadamuz González Law Lecturer University of Edinburgh a.guadamuz@ed.ac.uk Abstract The DVD video format has become one of the most important developments in the home entertainment market since the popularisation of the magnetic video recording. The film industry delivered this format with a built in security system which was supposed to avoid illegal copying of the discs, much as what is taking place with the music CD and the almost indiscriminate copying of music into MP3 format over the Internet. This was achieved by means of encryption technology. This essay deals with the cracking of DVD encryption and its further diffusion as a computer programme named DeCSS, which has been made available over the Internet in various formats, including t-shirts and a numerical representation of the code. There are three court cases based on the online posting of this programme, two in the United States and one in Norway. The article starts by describing the technology involved, as it is felt by the author that some of these technical issues are of importance to the legal implications of the case and should be understood properly. The article then deals with the developments in all of the three cases up to this date. The essay then finishes with a look at the legal issues involved, including hyper-linking, trade secrets, freedom of speech and the translation of DeCSS into numerical format. 10:50:52 PM    comment []

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,805816,00.asp 10:38:04 PM    comment []

Google's new patent for searching is interesting in light of the recent articles about how Google tries to foil companies that purport to boost the rankings of their clients by creating patterns of links with other clients. On the one hand, Google should keep control over its own resources. On the other hand, when the standards for ranking are secret, the rankings may be viewed with suspicion. Obviously, Google determines its own standards for the rankings. Google has become so powerful in the search engine area, that Google needs to take care to avoid antitrust liability from discriminating against those who would like to appear more prominently on the list. Google's determinations have a lot of power to direct revenue to some companies and away from others. That's thin ice. Of course, Google doesn't have to use the search ranking method described in the patent. Nothing requires a patentholder to exploit his or her patent. Google can do something different and still prevent others from practicing the invention described in the patent. Google's patent --- No. 6,526,440 --- was applied for in January 2001 and was issued February 25, 2003 : Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity The official abstract describes the patented method this way: A search engine for searching a corpus improves the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy score based on the interconnectivity of the initially returned set of documents. The search engine obtains an initial set of relevant documents by matching a user's search terms to an index of a corpus. A re-ranking component in the search engine then refines the initially returned document rankings so that documents that are frequently cited in the initial set of relevant documents are preferred over documents that are less frequently cited within the initial set. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=/netahtml/search-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=ptxt&S1=google.ASNM.&OS=an/google&RS=AN/google There's a discussion thread on Dave Farber's IP list (citation in the navigator links to the left) about the prior art and possible obviousness of the Google patent. Since the application was filed in 2001, I wonder why the invention is not barred by the rule that the application cannot come more than a year after the product is first offered in the marketplace. I would have thought that Google was available more than a year before January 2001. I wonder what is new about the patented method that distinguished the earlier product from the patented method. http://news.com.com/2100-1024-986204.html 10:15:36 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Noel D. Humphreys.