Saturday, January 11, 2003

The EFF's Report on the DMCA "Since they were enacted in 1998, the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright pirates from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works, and to ban “black box” devices intended for that purpose.[1] In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright piracy. As a result, the DMCA has developed into a serious threat to three important public policy priorities:" [EFF Report] 6:40:35 PM    comment []

Here's a little light (!) weekend entertainment: video lectures of MIT's classic introductory computer science course, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", are now on the web. This is the course that goes with the Wizard book. Very interesting, though fairly dense. A colleague also pointed me at a related course: Berkeley's "Introduction to Symbolic Programming" which is also up in video format. [Peter Drayton's Weblog] This is great stuff! Maybe now I can finally learn how to program ;-). 1:11:43 PM    comment []