August 14th 2008
Kevin Gosper, chairman of the IOC’s press commission, disclosed that Olympic officials negotiated with their Chinese hosts and agreed that certain sensitive Web sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games-related. This would include Chinese language versions of the BBC, Voice of America and Amnesty International. Chinese officials noted that this […]
August 13th 2008
Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has overtured a lower court’s decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer, stating that “Copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted material.” From Professor Lawrence Lessig’s blog In non-technical terms, the Court has held […]
August 13th 2008
An update on yesterday’s post, MBTA Makes MIT Subway Hack Guide Famous. The MBTA issued a statement to CNET which tells their view of how MIT students approached shared information with the organization about flaws in its fare card system. Now Dan Grabauskas, the general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, has told the […]
August 12th 2008
My local transit agency, the MBTA, gained a restraining order to keep a group of MIT students from presenting their discovery of just how easy it is to forge credits on the subway’s fare cards. But since the MBTA filed the students’ paper as part of their complaint, the full text of what they sought […]
August 11th 2008
Remember this oldie? “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to […]
August 8th 2008
My interest in JC Penney’s Breakfast Club ad grew from a question one of our readers, Eli, emailed in. He wanted to know if Penney’s had licensed the use of the Breakfast Club scenes they re-enacted in the advertisement. There certainly seemed to be a copyright issue in play. Kate Parkhouse, who manages the brand’s […]
August 7th 2008
Both Joe Camel and JC Penney have tried to reverse their fortunes by attempting to look like other brands that have seen greater success in recent years. But there’s a gossamer-thin line between imitation, homage and infringement. Few cartoon mascots are more hated than Joe Camel, who Reason online named the “most vilified cartoon character in history.” (This […]
August 6th 2008
Search pundit Danny Sullivan often jokes that he remembers when “Google used to be a search engine.” They’ve become an advertising business, a cell-phone operating system maker, a blog platform, and now a venture capital firm. But at their core, Google is about search. And Knol, their “answer to Wikipedia,” creates a screaming conflict of […]
August 5th 2008
A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google on the grounds that their privacy was invaded by the dilettante search company during the capturing of street images to be incorporated in Google’s Street View software.The filed complaint can be seen here at The Smoking Gun. At issue is whether or not the “Google gander van” was in […]
August 4th 2008
If you manufactured automobiles, you’d also likely need to make keys so that your customers could start their engines. Ubisoft, publishers of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2, recently missed the equivalent of that second step when they released their game for sale as a downloadable file on the Internet. Unfortunately, the security program surrounding […]
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