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The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Complaint Dismissed as "Boilerplate"

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The decision many lawyers had been expecting — that the RIAA's "boilerplate" complaint fails to state a claim for relief under the Copyright Act — has indeed come down, but from an unlikely source. While the legal community has been looking towards a Manhattan case, Elektra v. Barker, for guidance, a case in which amicus briefs had been submitted by various industry groups and the US Department of Justice (see case file, and from Warner v. Cassin, a similar motion in the same Court's Westchester division, the decision instead came from Senior District Court Judge Rudi M. Brewster of the US District Court for the Southern District of California, in a decision denying a default judgment (i.e. the defendant had not even appeared in the action). Judge Brewster not only denied the default judgment motion but dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim. Echoing the words of Judge Karas at the oral argument in Barker , Judge Brewster held (pdf) that "Plaintiff here must present at least some facts to show the plausibility of their allegations of copyright infringement against the Defendant. However, other than the bare conclusory statement that on "information and belief" Defendant has downloaded, distributed and/or made available for distribution to the public copyrighted works, Plaintiffs have presented no facts that would indicate that this allegation is anything more than speculation. The complaint is simply a boilerplate listing of the elements of copyright infringement without any facts pertaining specifically to the instant Defendant. The Court therefore finds that the complaint fails to sufficiently state a claim upon which relief can be granted and entry of default judgment is not warranted.""
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - You can not reverse-engineer our GPL-violations... 6

Submitted by
phorm
phorm writes: "If appears that Monsoon Technology, the makers of the Hava media-transmission systems, don't quite understand the GPL. As some users pointed out in their forums, their systems appear to be based on Linux and various GPL'ed software, with the output of "strings" and other tests showing signs of running busybox and others. A monsoon spokesperson on the forum has indicated that they are aware it uses GPL'ed software, and are "working" on making source available, but at the same time are dropping various threats against supposed reverse-engineering of the software by those that determined the GPL violations.

A few snippets from the Monsoon rep include: I have a little secret to let you in on — HAVA runs Linux! Yes, much of the source is GPL and we should publish those sections which we have modified per the terms of GPL. A project is underway to pull this together. A couple of observations — some of you appear to be violating the terms of the End User License Agreement

You recognize and agree that the HAVA Software including its structure, source code and the design and structure of modules or programs, constitute valuable trade secrets owned by Snappymultimedia or its licensors. You will not copy or use the HAVA Software except as expressly permitted by this EULA and, specifically, you will not ...

(b) yourself or through any third party modify, reverse engineer, disassemble or decompile the HAVA Software in whole or part, except to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law, and then only after you have notified Snappymultimedia in writing of your intended activities; Seems to me that some of you have just come out blatantly admitting you are reverse engineering the firmware — or trying to. How should we handle this? As responses have indicated, the methods used to determine the violation do not seem to constitute reverse-engineering. Moreover, the initial friendliness of the rep is severely marred by the apparent hostility of the later message, as forum members have indicated. The overall message seems to be "we have not lived up to our obligations under the license of the software which we are using, but we'll get to it... sometime. Meanwhile, do not attempt to poke around our code yourself or things will get ugly."

The owners of BusyBox have been notified of this violation, however the response is still troubling. Is this the response we should come to expect as more and more commercial software uses and misuses GPL'ed components?"

The Internet

Facebook Exposes Advertisers To Hate Speech 806

Posted by kdawson from the just-take-it-down dept.
NewsCloud writes "Does Facebook believe that no publicity is bad publicity? Why else would they leave a group called, "F**k Islam" open since July 21, 2007 despite more than 53,482 members joining an opposing group called petition: if "f**k Islam" is not shut down..we r quitting facebook group? Furthermore, advertisers such as Sprint, Verizon, T Mobile, Target, and Qwest wouldn't be too happy to learn that they are paying for ads on the 'F**k Islam' group pages. Shouldn't a startup like Facebook, reportedly worth more than a billion dollars and with over a hundred employees, be expected to enforce its own Terms of Use in less than six weeks?"
News

Man Arrested for Refusing to Show Drivers License 1972

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the living-your-life-with-principles dept.
NMerriam writes "Michael Righi was arrested in Ohio over the weekend after refusing to show his receipt when leaving Circuit City. When the manger and 'loss prevention' employee physically prevented the vehicle he was a passenger in from leaving the parking lot, he called the police, who arrived, searched his bag and found he hadn't stolen anything. The officer then asked for Michael's driver's license, which he declined to provide since he wasn't operating a motor vehicle. The officer then arrested him, and upon finding out Michael was legally right about not having to provide a license, went ahead and charged him with 'obstructing official business' anyways."
Security

Submission + - The Stamp of Incompetence (heise-security.co.uk)

Submitted by
juct
juct writes: "The electronic stamp service of the German Deutsche Post is a text-book example of how not to implement digital rights management. According to heise Security the PDF keeps you from printing the electronic stamp multiple times by phoning home. Bad luck if your printer had a paper jam the first time you tried to print. Circumventing this "copy protection" is as easy as printing into a file or making a regular photocopy. The copy protection mainly has been implemented to create some kind of barrier — regardless how feeble — to provide a legal basis for the pursuit of fraud analogous to the circumvention provisions of the US DMCA."
Programming

Comparing Visual Studio and Eclipse 294

Posted by kdawson from the path-of-totality dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Getting started with Eclipse can be confusing. New concepts, such as plug-in architecture, workspace-centric project structure, and automatic build can seem counterintuitive at first. Without waxing too philosophical about IDE design, this article presents the main differences between Visual Studio and the Eclipse IDE."
Networking

Submission + - Last-Minute Senate Amendment to appease RIAA

Submitted by Rodrigo
Rodrigo writes: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has found the time to forget about fighting that pesty Iraq War and focus on the issues that really matter: making the influence of the RIAA and MPAA a mainstay in our college campuses. The EFF has put a call to arms against the proposed Senate amendment to the Higher Education Act. The amendment aims to force certain schools to police their network or risk losing federal funding for student aid. Naturally, this policing will come at the school's expense and through "technology-based deterrents," which raise privacy concerns. Please call your representatives and make sure they know what they're voting for under Senate Amendment 2314.
Privacy

Web-based Anonymizer Discontinued 159

Posted by CowboyNeal from the end-of-the-road dept.
RobertB-DC writes "With no fanfare, and apparently no outcry from the privacy community, Anonymizer Inc. discontinued its web-based Private Surfing service effective June 20, 2007. No reason was given, either on the Anonymizer web site or on founder Lance Cottrell's privacy blog. Private Surfing customers are now required to download a anonymizing client that handles all TCP traffic, but the program is Windows-only (with Vista support still a work-in-progress). And of course it's closed-source, which means it has few advantages over several other alternatives."
The Courts

Re-Vote Likely After E-Vote Data Mishandling 172

Posted by samzenpus from the technology-makes-life-easier dept.
davecb writes "A California judge is likely to order a Berkeley city initiative back on the ballot because of local officials' mishandling of electronic voting machine data. A recount was not possible because the city failed to share necessary voting records, a violation of election laws. In a preliminary ruling Thursday, Judge Winifred Smith of the Alameda County Superior Court indicated she would nullify the defeat of a medical marijuana proposal in Berkeley in 2004 and order the measure put back on the ballot in a later election."
The Courts

Second Life Lawsuit Heads to Federal Court 201

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the rubbed-the-wrong-way dept.
Conlaw writes "A former plumbing contractor who has made a new career selling virtual cyber sex toys in the virtual world of Second Life, has now brought suit against another player who is allegedly copying and selling a device called the Sex Gen. The plaintiff, whose avatar is known as 'Stroker Serpentine,' is seeking the real name of the copycat entrepreneur. The reporter describing the lawsuit included commentary from a cyber law professor whose university maintains a virtual Supreme Court in the Second Life world."

Perpetual Energy Machine Getting Lots of Attention 965

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the swimming-in-snake-oil dept.
Many users have written to tell us about a magnetic machine promising "infinite clean energy". Engadget has the first picture of the device and is reporting that the announcement (along with a short video) of this supposed device will be released later tonight. "CEO Sean McCarthy tells SilconRepublic how it works. Namely, the time variance in magnetic fields allows the Orbo platform to 'consistently produce power, going against the law of conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.' He goes on to say 'It's too good to be true but it is true. It will have such an impact on everything we do. The only analogy I can give is if you had absolute proof that God wasn't real.'" In my experience if something seems too good to be true it generally is. I wouldn't get your hopes up.
The Courts

Granny Sues RIAA Over Unlicensed Investigator 206

Posted by kdawson from the more-ways-to-hit-them-back dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "An elderly, non-file-sharing grandmother from East Texas, who had been sued by the RIAA after being displaced by Hurricane Rita, has sought leave to file counterclaims against the RIAA record companies for using unlicensed investigators. In her counterclaims (PDF) Ms. Crain claims that the record companies 'entered into an agreement with a private investigations company to provide investigative services which led to the production of evidence to be used in court against counterclaim plaintiff, including the identification of an IP address on the basis of which counterclaim defendants filed their suit... [They] were at the time of this agreement aware that the aforementioned private investigations company was unlicensed to conduct investigations in the State of Texas specifically, and in other states as well... [T]hey agreed between themselves and understood that unlicensed and unlawful investigations would take place in order to provide evidence for this lawsuit, as well as thousands of others as part of a mass litigation campaign... [T]he private investigations company hired by plaintiffs engaged in one or more overt acts of unlawful private investigation... Such actions constitute civil conspiracy under Texas common law.'"

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