USC's Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy is hosting audio from last week's speech by Jason Schultz, the EFF lawyer who runs the patent-busting project. Jason gave a great talk on Internet Freedom (his slides are online, too) — the ways in which we've benefitted from an open Internet, and the ways that openness is threatened on all fronts, by legislators, greed, and censors. — Read the rest

I'm running a public speaker series on copyright, culture and technology in conjunction with my Fulbright Chair at USC's Annenberg Center on Public Diplomacy, and next Tuesday we'll have our first speaker: Jason Schultz. Regular Boing Boing readers will recognize Jason as a frequent commentator on legal issues. — Read the rest

Jason Schultz of the EFF attended NextFest this weekend, and photoblogged these observations.
Link

A company called American Blind (which makes window-coverings) is suing Google because other organizations, like the American Council for the Blind, its competitors have bought the Google AdWord "blind" and so American Blind claims that its trademark is being infringed-upon, and that Google is secondarily liable for the infringement. — Read the rest

"Predictive policing" is the idea that you can feed crime stats to a machine-learning system and it will produce a model that can predict crime. It is garbage.

Every year, NYU's nonprofit, critical activist group AI Now releases a report on the state of AI, with ten recommendations for making machine learning systems equitable, transparent and fail-safe (2016, 2017); this year's report just published, written by a fantastic panel, including Meredith Whittaker (previously — one of the leaders of the successful googler uprising over the company's contract to supply AI tools to the Pentagon's drone project); Kate Crawford (previously — one of the most incisive critics of AI); Jason Schultz (previously — a former EFF attorney now at NYU) and many others.

As part of yesterday's International Day Against DRM, Public Knowledge's John Bergmayer published It's Always DRM's Fault, which uses this month's viral story about an Apple user named Anders G da Silva whose movie was deleted from his Itunes because he moved from one country to another.

Washington and Lee law professor Joshua Fairfield is the author of a recent book called Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom, which takes up the argument that DRM and license agreements mean that we have no real property rights anymore, just a kind of feudal tenancy in which distant aristocrats (corporations) dictate how we may and may not use the things we "buy," backed by the power of the state to fine or jail us if we fail to arrange our affairs to the company's shareholders.

An excellent excerpt from Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz's The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy on Motherboard explains how Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act — which bans tampering with or bypassing DRM, even for legal reasons — has allowed corporations to design their products so that using them in unapproved ways is an actual felony.

Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz's must-read new book The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (read an excerpt) is not for sale in the Apple ebook store, and won't be until they agree to change their text to refer to Apple's ebooks as "iBooks" rather than "iBook."

An excerpt from The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy, by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, coming this Friday from MIT Press.

One year ago today

US vs. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning: defense rests, Manning won't testify, Wikileaks gets respect: Xen traveled to Ft. Meade, Maryland to observe the trial of Army PFC. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. The 25-year-old Oklahoma native has admitted to providing Wikileaks with more than 700,000 leaked documents, which included battle reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, State Department diplomatic cables, and military videos from combat zones. — Read the rest

Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban and Minecraft creator Markus Persson have donated $500,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to endow the "Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents," which will be occupied by an attorney tasked with hunting down and destroying crappy patents that have been recklessly granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office to unscrupulous "inventors" who claim to have invented things that were obvious and/or already extant; and to pay for activists to fight for substantive patent reform:

Cuban's $250,000 donation also funds the hire of a new attorney experienced in patent reform and high profile patent litigation: Daniel Nazer, who will join EFF in January as a Staff Attorney.

Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin has an in-depth look at the "Defensive Patent License," a kind of judo for the patent system created by my former EFF colleague Jason Schultz (who started EFF's Patent Busting Project) and my former USC colleague Jen Urban (who co-created the ChillingEffects clearinghouse). — Read the rest

Danah boyd writes, "I'm really excited to share a new study that Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz, John Palfrey and I have been working on for the last six months that has serious implications for parenting, education, free speech, and children's rights. — Read the rest

From the very funny (and provocative!) blog "Overheard In The Newsroom." (Thanks, Jason Schultz via Jess Hemerly!)

Regarding the ongoing internet fun-poking at Miss Teen South Carolina and her love of maps, Jason Schultz says,

In response to the recent call to action by Miss Teen South Carolina, Maps For
Us started a blog of important maps: Link.

In this photo shot by EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz, EFF legal intern Ruben models the "AT&T Deathstar banner" on a handsome new Apple iPhone "to remind people that AT&T is still evil… Turns out it's a perfect fit for the screen!" — Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation today announced that it is suing Viacom on behalf of MoveOn.org and Brave New Films, over YouTube's takedown of Colbert parody. Here's a snip from the EFF's statement:

The video, called "Stop the Falsiness," was created by MoveOn and Brave New Films as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on Colbert's portrayal of the right-wing media and parodying MoveOn's own reputation for earnest political activism.

Former DMCA abuser Michael Crook today apologizes to the entire internet for his takedown campaign and his attacks on free speech. BoingBoing was one of his targets.

We accept his apology, we applaud his change of heart, and we welcome him back from the dark side. — Read the rest