J.K. Rowling didn't make enough money on Harry Potter, so she had to make sure that the 'Harry Potter Lexicon' was shut down. After a trial in Manhattan in Warner Bros. v. RDR Books, she won, getting the judge to agree with her (and her friends at Warner Bros. Entertainment) that the 'Lexicon' did not qualify for fair use protection. In a 68-page decision (PDF) the judge concluded that the Lexicon did a little too much 'verbatim copying', competed with Ms. Rowling's planned encyclopedia, and might compete with her exploitation of songs and poems from the Harry Potter books, although she never made any such claim in presenting her evidence. The judge awarded her $6750, and granted her an injunction that would prevent the 'Lexicon' from seeing the light of day.

An anonymous University of Michigan student targeted by the RIAA as a 'John Doe', is asking for the RIAA's investigator, Safenet (formerly MediaSentry), to be prosecuted criminally for a pattern of felonies in Michigan. Known to Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Growth -- the agency regulating private investigators in that state -- only as 'Case Number 162983070', the student has pointed out that the law has been clear in Michigan for years that computer forensics activities of the type practiced by Safenet require an investigator's license. This follows the submissions by other 'John Does' establishing that Safenet's changing and inconsistent excuses fail to justify its conduct, and that Michigan's legislature and governor have backed the agency's position that an investigator's license was required.

I noticed a while ago that my spam filter was 100% accurate on all plain-text emails. Spammers are now forced to use obfuscation techniques like embedded images and HTML. It seems to me that this provides an easy way of totally eliminating spam:

1. Bounce anything that is not from a whitelisted sender and contains an non-plain-text MIME section.
2. Auto-whitelist anyone I send a mail to.

This means that anyone I email is free to send me whatever they want. Anyone can still contact me, but they are restricted to sending me plain text for the first email, until I reply to them.

Of course, spammers could start sending out messages saying 'I tried to send you some spam but your filter blocked it, please email me.' These will be caught in grey-traps for 8 hours, and by the end of the 8 hours there's a very good chance that the email will have been caught and the sender added to an RBL.

I'll probably try implementing this when I have time, but if anyone has time before me then please do and let me know how well it works.

My current contract at the university expires a week on Monday. It's been fun. I've been employed to set up a History of Computing Collection - a chance to indulge one of my hobbies for a bit after finishing my PhD and relaxing after the immense stress of writing a book and a thesis (in more or less unrelated areas) at the same time.

Now I'm back to freelance writing and spare-time hacking. If anyone wants to employ me for a bit, let me know...

Well, I was afforded the opportunity to write for a slightly different audience -- the judges who belong to the Judicial Division of the American Bar Association. I was invited by the The Judges' Journal, their quarterly publication, to do a piece on the RIAA litigations for the ABA's Summer, 2008, 'Equal Access to Justice' issue. What I came up with was 'Large Recording Companies vs. The Defenseless : Some Common Sense Solutions to the Challenges of the RIAA Litigations', in which I describe the unfairness of these cases and make 15 suggestions as to how the courts could make it a more level playing field. I'm hoping the judges mod my article '+5 Insightful', but I'd settle for '+3 Informative'. For the actual article go here (PDF). (If anyone out there can send me a decent HTML version of it, I'll run that one up the flagpole as well.)

A couple of weeks ago, one of the hard drives in a FreeBSD box of mine died. This was mildly inconvenient, but since it was one of a RAID-1 array, not totally catastrophic. It seems to be the season for drives dying, because the disk in my MacBook Pro just died this evening.

The machine had been being a bit slow and randomly pausing for a while for no apparent reason. I now realise that the random pauses were caused by I/O errors causing userspace processes to block waiting for kernel locks to be released. Ho hum.

Over the last month, I've been becoming progressively more concerned about how long it had been since my last backup (October 2007!) and last weekend I finally got around to running a full backup of my home directory. As such, I haven't lost very much. Most of the work I did in the last week is in svn and the grant proposal I've been working on was rescued just before the drive died completely. I lost a paper I was working on and some emails and chat logs, but nothing particularly important.

I think my next laptop is going to be solid state. Mechanical storage is more trouble than it's worth.

Tiffany's has lost its bid to hold eBay liable for trademark infringement of Tiffany's brands taking place on eBay. After a lengthy bench trial (i.e. a trial where the judge, rather than the jury, decides the factual questions), Judge Richard J. Sullivan has issued a 66-page decision (PDF) carefully analyzing the facts and legal principles, ultimately concluding that 'it is the trademark owner's burden to police its mark, and companies like eBay cannot be held liable for trademark infringement based solely on their generalized knowledge that trademark infringement might be occurring on their websites'.

I'm not a huge fan of the GPL. While I agree with the FSF on most things, I can't help feeling that the GPL shows a certain lack of faith in the whole idea - if the open source development model is so much more efficient, and Free Software is so much more valuable, then why do they need such a mass of legalese to protect them?

From a more pragmatic standpoint, the GPL is about the most incompatible Free Software license around. If you write GPL code, you can't use it in a BSD, Apache, X11, MIT, or Mozilla licensed project.

I was fairly happy with the LGPL until recently, however. It is a bit more restrictive than I'd have liked, but as long as you dynamically link to it it doesn't taint your own code. This is a story about the pain caused when lawyers get in the way of writing code.

It turns out that the LGPL, as it stood, wasn't restrictive enough for the FSF's ideology. You can't have freedom without a lot of restrictions (apparently) and so they added a load more to the venerable LGPL 2.1, and created the new, improved, twice as restrictive, LGPL 3.0, and encouraged all GNU projects to upgrade.

One such project, which I'm directly involved with, GNUstep, did so. Then we started having problems. It turns out there's this other license that has a clause stating that it may not be used with any conditions that are not in the license itself. This is the (GNU) GPL. Version 2 of the GNU GPL is incompatible with version 3 of the GNU LGPL, and since it's viral you can't even link code under the two licenses.

That's okay though, right? The FSF has been telling everyone that they should use the 'or later versions' clause when they use the GPL, just in case they want to make it more restrictive in the future. And everyone's done that, right? Well, it turns out, xpdf didn't. And the xpdf code was extracted to form the Poppler library. And the Poppler library, in turn, was wrapped in PopplerKit, an Objective-C framework for rendering PDFs. And so, by the transitive property, all of these GNUstep apps were GPL 2. Which is incompatible with LGPL 3. Which meant that suddenly they couldn't use the latest GNUstep. By the way, PopplerKit isn't the only GPL2-only library used by GNUstep apps.

This is a bit of a problem. So big, in fact, that Debian decided not to carry the latest GNUstep, because it would have meant dropping a load of GNUstep applications from the next release. The eventual outcome? GNUstep has reverted to LGPL2.

This isn't an unusual situation, by the way. A number of big libraries, such as GNU libc (an abomination that needs to die, but for technical, not legal reasons) is having the same problem - the FSF wants to 'upgrade' it to LGPL version 3, but that will mean any Linux distro that ships the new glibc will not be able to ship any GPL 2 apps.

And people wonder why I prefer the BSD license family.

According to commentator Therese Polletti at Dow Jones MarketWatch, "the RIAA's tactics are nearly as bad as the actions of mobsters, real or fictional. The analogy comes up easily and frequently in any discussion of the RIAA's maneuvers." Among other things she cites the extortionate nature of their 'settlement negotiations' pointed out by Prof. Bob Talbot of the University of San Francisco School of Law IP Law Clinic, whose student attorneys are helping private practitioners fight the RIAA, the illegality of the RIAA's use of unlicensed investigators, the flawed evidence it uses, and the fact that the RIAA thinks nothing of jeopardizing a student's college education in order to make their point, as support for the MAFIAA/Mafia analogy.

Recommended reading for all interested in the RIAA's litigation war against p2p file sharing is the amended class action complaint just filed in Oregon in Andersen v. Atlantic. This landmark 109-page document (pdf) tells both the general story of the RIAA's campaign against ordinary folks, and the specific story of its harassment of Tanya Andersen, and even of her young daughter. The complaint includes federal and state RICO claims, as well as other legal theories, and alleges that "The world's four major recording studios had devised an illegal enterprise intent on maintaining their virtually complete monopoly over the distribution of recorded music." The point has been made by one commentator that the RIAA won't be able to weasel its out of this one by simply withdrawing it; this one, they will have to answer for. If the relief requested in the complaint is granted, the RIAA's entire campaign will be shut down for good.

Although based in San Francisco, and only an amicus curiae in the Phoenix, Arizona, case of Atlantic v. Howell, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is sending its senior intellectual property lawyer Fred Von Lohmann to Phoenix to argue the Howell case, on behalf of the defendant, who is not represented by counsel. Due to the RIAA's attempt to take advantage of Mr. Howell's being undefended to try to convince the judge that merely 'making files available for distribution' -- i.e., just having them on one's computer in a manner that is accessible to sharing -- and that copying files from one's cd onto one's computer in mp3 format is itself "unlawful", EFF filed an amicus brief in January. Now it's taking the unusual step of actually sending someone to the courthouse to orally argue the motion.

A technology battle is raging in UMG v. Lindor in Brooklyn over whether the RIAA's investigator, SafeNet (formerly known as MediaSentry), which has produced certain *txt printouts, now needs to disclose its digital files, validation methodology, testing procedures, failure rates, software manuals, protocols, packet logs, source code, and other materials, so that the validity of its methods can be evaluated by the other side. SafeNet and the RIAA say no, the information is "proprietary and confidential". Ms. Lindor says yes, if you're going to testify in federal court the other side has a right to test your evidence. A list of what is being sought is here (pdf). MediaSentry has produced 'none of the above'. "Put up or shut up" says one commentator to MediaSentry. What do you say?

A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the RIAA's "making available" theory, which is the basis of all of the RIAA's peer to peer file sharing cases. In Atlantic v. Brennan, in a 9-page opinion (pdf), Judge Janet Bond Arterton held that the RIAA needs to prove "actual distribution of copies", and cannot rely -- as it was permitted to do in Capitol v. Thomas -- upon the mere fact that there are song files on the defendant's computer and that they were "available". This is the same issue that has been the subject of extensive briefing in two contested cases in New York, Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Judge Arterton also held that the defendant had other possible defenses, such as the unconstitutionality of the RIAA's damages theory and possible copyright misuse flowing from the record companies' anticompetitive behavior.

"A student law clinic is about to cause a revolution" says p2pnet. For the first time in the history of the RIAA's ex parte litigation campaign against college students, a university law school's legal aid clinic has taken up the fight against the RIAA in defense of the university's college students. Student attorneys at the University of Maine School of Law's Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic, under the supervision of law school prof Deirdre M. Smith, have moved to dismiss the RIAA's complaint in a Portland, Maine, case, Arista v. Does 1-27, on behalf of 2 University of Maine undergrads. Their recently filed reply brief (pdf) points to the US Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, and the subsequent California decision following Twombly, Interscope v. Rodriguez, which dismissed the RIAA's "making available" complaint as mere "conclusory", "boilerplate" "speculation". The 2 students represented by Cumberland join the 8 students represented by a prominent Portland law firm, bringing to 10 the number of University of Maine students fighting back in this case.

The RIAA is apparently having an allergic reaction to the request by the State Attorney General of Oregon for information about the RIAA's investigative tactics, in Arista v. Does 1-17, the Portland, Oregon, case targeting students at the University of Oregon. See The Oregonian, December 1, 2007 ("UO suspects music industry of spying") and p2pnet, November 29, 2007 ("RIAA may be spying on students: Oregon AG"). Not only are the record companies opposing the request (pdf), they're asking the Judge not to even read it. (pdf) Commentary: "RIAA scorns Oregon University request".