Science and Technology

Seoul District Court dismisses case against Soribada, a P2P service: “The prosecution’s case did not state why the defendants’ acts qualify as an offence, thus the case is in violation of procedural regulations,” the court said in its ruling. “The prosecution stated that the defendants (brothers only known by their …

321 Studios in court challenging the Hollywood studios over its DVD-copying technology. As we have said here ad nauseum, all citizens have a right to make a back up copy of their own DVDs and music CDs. The DMCA denies citizens this right; ergo, the DMCA is crap. Lisa Bowman …

The Chronicle of Higher Education will host an online chat next Thursday, May 22, at 1 p.m. Eastern with Graham B. Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University: Colleges are under increasing political and legal pressure to block file sharing by their students, who use campus networks to obtain free music …

In Wired, our own legendary David Weinberger digs into the violations against our humanity that underlie digital rights management (apparently, the subject of the day): Digital rights management sounds unobjectionable on paper: Consumers purchase certain rights to use creative works and are prevented from violating those rights. Who could balk …

A puppy? Wearing a condom? The war in Iraq? NO! TurboTax’s anti-piracy feature: Intuit announced Wednesday that its top-selling TurboTax software will dump an unpopular anti-piracy feature that turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. The Mountain View company disclosed its change of heart with the release …

Lawrence Lessig and Rep. Zoe Lofgren are looking for digital bounty hunters to track down spammers: Perhaps it was only coincidence that Stanford law professor Larry Lessig chose last week, the opening week of hunting season on wild turkeys, to propose legislation that would pay a bounty to private citizens …

More stupid copyright butt-clenching inanity: millions of people around the world have wasted thousands of man-hours pondering over the exact wording of songs, probably ever since the invention of the record player. The good news is that the internet has come to the rescue: over the last few years dozens …

We keep bitching about the consumer-unfriendliness of copy-protection in CDs: consumers do not want restrictions on what they can do with their own CDs, DVDs, or MP3s and other digital codecs, either. Once it’s yours, it should be yours and screw their encryption. PW Newsline says the same thinking applies …

Michael Croft’s instincts were correct about Microsoft’s iLoo porta-potty snafu: it was a real project that withered in the light of day, not a hoax perpetuated by the entire British division of MS. Thanks also to our VisualSimplicity for news of the MS reversal. If you haven’t been following this …

Howard Carmack, of Buffalo NY, the “Buffalo Spammer” who has sent over 850 million spam emails, has been arrested under new NY identity theft statute enacted in November: “We believe Carmack is one of the largest (spammers) and believe there are a significant number of them,” [New York Attorney General …