This month, for the first time in a generation, America's public domain grew, as the 20-year freeze created by the 1998 changes to copyright law finally thawed.
In Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on
State-of-the-Art Face Recognition, researchers from Carnegie-Mellon and UNC showed how they could fool industrial-strength facial recognition systems (including Alibaba's "smile to pay" transaction system) by printing wide, flat glasses frames with elements of other peoples' faces with "up to 100% success."
The standard format for a New York Times lead obit headline goes NAME, AGE, Dies; STATEMENT OF ACCOMPLISHMENT (e.g. "Suzanne Mitchell, 73, Dies; Made Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders a Global Brand.
When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, they acquired Java, Sun's popular programming language, pitched from its inception as an open standard for the networked computer.
It's the International Day Against DRM, and in honor of the day, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Parker Higgins has written an excellent post explaining why we can't live with DRM, even on media that you "rent" rather than buying (streaming services like Spotify, Netflix, etc).
Trains Botting/@choochoobot is a new twitterbot from prolific botmaster and EFF staffer Parker Higgins.
The World Wide Web Consortium, the decades old champion of the open Web, let down many of its biggest supporters when it decided to cater to Hollywood by standardizing DRM as part of the spec for HTML5.
What's at stake in the fight between the FBI and Apple over those iPhones? Oh, no big deal, just the legal green light for "virtually limitless" surveillance under the Internet of Things. That's what a federal judge has ruled in an order rejecting a government request in a New York drug case. — Read the rest
We've all heard that there's a federal judge in California who ordered Apple to make a tool to help the FBI decrypt a phone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters — but despite the FBI's insistence that this is a special circumstance, San Bernardino is just one of a dozen-odd cases where the FBI is making similar demands on Apple.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is preparing its comments to the US Copyright Office on the notoriously abuse-prone DMCA takedown process, which is widely used to commit Internet censorship with perfect impunity.
The US government has tried to apply its arms export control rules to 3D model files that describe firearms, and declare that publishing those files is the same thing as exporting guns, and is therefore prohibited. Whatever you think about 3D printed guns, love 'em or loathe 'em, that's a terrible way to deal with them.
Every three years, the Librarian of Congress allows the public to request exemptions to a law that makes it a felony to break a digital lock, even on on a device that you own, and which you are breaking for a lawful purpose. For the past year, public interest groups have been spending their scarce money and resources writing petitions to the Copyright Office, arguing that people who own devices with computers in them should have the same property rights as they do in their non-computerized devices: the right to open, change, and improve the things they own in lawful ways.
"Because the Wikimedia Foundation uses HTTPS-encrypted connections for all of its sites," reports Parker Higgins, "the government was left with only the option of ordering the entire site blocked, or leaving the offending page accessible."
EFF's annual crossword puzzle is a roundup of news stories from the world of digital civil liberties from 2014. Can you get 'em all without googling?
A federal judge in New York has ruled that telling people where to get DRM-removal software isn't against the law — it's a huge shift in the case-law around DRM, and it's an important step in the right direction.
Elliot from Creative Commons writes, "Your readers might remember the Public Domain Game Jam from a few months ago — next Tues, Sep 9 people in San Francisco will be able to play the games from it and discuss them with jam organizer Nicky Case and then Parker Higgins from the Electronic Frontier Foundation will be talking about why the public domain is under attack, and what you can do to defend it." — Read the rest
It's a timely update to their 2011 edition, incorporating new Supreme Court precedents that give additional protection to protesters who face arrest while video-recording or otherwise documenting protests — required reading in a world of #Ferguson.
In Enclosing the public domain: The restriction of public domain books in a digital environment, a paper in First Monday, researchers from the Victoria University of Wellington document the widespread proactice of putting restrictions on scanned copies of public domain books online. — Read the rest
The Hathi Trust has won another important victory in its court battles against the Authors Guild over the right of academic libraries to scan books under the banner of fair use. Hathi creates full-text indexes of books from academic institutional libraries that were scanned by Google, so that academic libraries can access full-text indexes of the books, as well as offering the books in assistive formats used by people with visual disabilities, and providing long-term archives of rare texts that are still under copyright. — Read the rest
The National Security Agency is using a new argument for not retaining the data it gathers about users' online activity: The NSA is just too complex. — Read the rest
