Law

For copyright activists, Christmas comes but once every three years: a chance to ask Santa for a new exemption to the much-hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act's prohibitions against hacking, reverse engineering, and evasion of digital rights management (DRM) schemes protecting all kinds of digital works and electronic items.

Judging from the list of 19 exemptions requested this year, some in the cyberlaw community are thinking big. (Disclosure: One of the DMCA exemption requests was submitted on behalf of this blogger by Harvard University's Cyberlaw Clinic.)The requests include the right to legally jailbreak iPhones to use third-party software, … Read more

The MySpace suicide case concluded last week, with the jury finding Lori Drew guilty of three misdemeanor counts of gaining unauthorized access to the popular social-networking site.

While most of the press attention has been focused on the specifics of the case, the more important issue is the potential impact this could have on the Internet in general.

Web site terms of service, which end users universally ignore, suddenly have teeth: violating them is a federal hacking offense, punishable with jail time. The days of being able to freely lie on the Web could be coming to an end. This … Read more

Updated Jan 27 2009 with a comment from the Turkish Government. See below

When criminals turn to disk encryption to hide the evidence of their crimes, law enforcement investigations can hit a brick wall. Where digital forensics software has failed to recover encryption passwords, one tried and true technique remains: violence. It is is this more aggressive form of good cop bad cop behavior which the Turkish government is alleged to have turned to, in order to learn the cryptographic keys of one of primary ringleaders in the TJ Maxx credit card theft investigation.

The 2005 theft of tens of … Read more

John McCain's presidential campaign has discovered the remix-unfriendly aspects of American copyright law, after several of the candidate's campaign videos were pulled from YouTube.

McCain has now discovered the rights holder friendly nature of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forces remixers to fight an uphill battle to prove that their work is a "fair use."

However, instead of calling for an overhaul of the much hated law, McCain is calling for VIP treatment for the remixes made by political campaigns.

McCain's proposal: complaints about videos uploaded by a political campaign would be manually reviewed … Read more

Updated:This post originally contained incorrect information about Sentinel's products. That has been corrected (see below).

Attorneys general from a number of states have given their support to a collection of weak and ineffective age verification technologies, all of which aim to protect children on the Internet. At a meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard University on Tuesday, the consensus seemed to be that while none of the technologies actually work, doing anything at all was better than nothing. Simply put, no one wants to be blamed for inaction against online child predators.

Kicking off … Read more

If you thought that the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping was limited to AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, think again.

While these household names of the telecom industry almost certainly helped the government to illegally snoop on their customers, statements by a number of legal experts suggest that collaboration with the NSA may run far deeper into the wireless phone industry. With over 3,000 wireless companies operating in the United States, the majority of industry-aided snooping likely occurs under the radar, with the dirty-work being handled by companies that most consumers have never heard of.

A recent … Read more

An internal review by University of Colorado officials has found that a controversial research project conducted by a team of computer scientists did not constitute research misconduct. University lawyers have also stated their belief that the team probably did not violate US wiretapping laws.

As I reported in a blog post yesterday, a team of researchers from both the University of Colorado and University of Washington recently presented a controversial study in which they recorded a limited portion of the communications of users of Tor -- a popular anonymizing proxy network.

According to a written statement posted by the research team, … Read more

A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network. Should federal prosecutors take interest in the project, the researchers could also face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act.

The team of two graduate students and three professors neither sought legal review of the project, nor ran it past the Human Subjects Committee at their university, putting them in a particularly dangerous position.

The academic paper, "Shining Light in Dark Places: Understanding the Tor Network&… Read more

The major national cable providers are all to sign a troubling yet major censorship deal with a private anti-child porn organization. The deal would give the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) carte blanche power to issue a takedown of any customer's content hosted on a cable provider's servers.

The group will provide each cable company with a list of Web site addresses that they believe contain child porn. The cable companies will then, per the agreement, scrub the content from their servers.

A press release describing the agreement states that: