Bush against airline emissions cuts (AP).

AP - The White House opposes plans by European nations to require airlines to curb greenhouse gases, saying it would unfairly disadvantage U.S. carriers.

1:58:51 PM    comment []

MPAA wants the right to commit fraud. Cory Doctorow: The MPAA has killed a California law that would have outlawed "pretexting" -- fraudulently misrepresenting yourself to gain unlawful access to someone's private information ("Hi, this is Fred Frederickson, I'm at the office and need to look at my phone records for last month, can you fax them to me?").

Pretexting was used in Hewlett-Packard's crooked investigation into boardroom leaks, in which board-members, journalists and others had their privacy invaded by HP's investigators.

The MPAA opposes the bill because they want to have a broad arsenal of tools available to them as they attack movie-lovers who share films online.

Ira Rothken, a prominent technology lawyer defending download search engine TorrentSpy against a movie industry copyright suit, says he didn't know about the lobbying, but can guess why the MPAA got involved. Rothken is suing (.pdf) the MPAA for allegedly paying a hacker $15,000 to hack into TorrentSpy's e-mail accounts.

"It doesn't surprise me that the MPAA would be against bills that protect privacy, and the MPAA has shown that they are willing to pay lots of money to intrude on privacy," Rothken said. "I do think there needs to be better laws in place that would deter such conduct and think that it would probably be useful if our elected officials would not be intimidated by the MPAA when trying to pass laws to protect privacy."

Link

1:48:19 PM    comment []

MPAA: it's OK to copy movies if you keep them in a vault. Cory Doctorow: During the Q&A at last night's screening of Kirby Dick's "This Film is Not Yet Rated," Dick recounted the story of how his film was unlawfully duplicated by the MPAA's ratings board. He submitted one copy of his movie to the MPAA, extracting a promise that no more copies would be made -- the MPAA's own anti-piracy materials describe making a single unauthorized duplication as an act of piracy.

Once it got out that the MPAA had made its "pirated" copy of Dick's movie, one of the MPAA's lawyers called Dick up to admit that the cartel had indeed made an infringing copy, but not to worry, "The copy is safe in my vault."

At this point, I raised my hand and asked if Dick thought anyone caught downloading movies from the Internet could get off the hook by saying, "Don't worry, I keep my copies safe in my vault?"

Link

1:47:35 PM    comment []

Most of SCO's case chucked out. OVER 187 of SCO's 294 claims against Big Blue in its anti-Linux law-suit against IBM have been thrown out. [the INQUIRER]
1:39:03 PM    comment []