From EFF: A coalition of authors and publishers—including best-sellers Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and technical author Bruce Schneier—is urging a federal judge to reject the proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google Book Search, arguing that the sweeping agreement to digitize millions of books ignores critical privacy rights for readers and writers. The group of…
Japan’s govt., private firms to tackle cell phone music piracy
The Yomiuri Shimbun reports: The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry and the telecom and music industries plan to jointly introduce a system to prevent cell phone users from downloading illegally distributed music files to their cell phones via the Internet, it has been learned. The system, which could be operational as early as fiscal 2010,…
Copyright law threatening
Kris Kotarski has an op-ed in the Calgary Herald on copyright enforcement threatening privacy. He writes, in part: It is increasingly apparent that modern copyright law is utterly and completely incompatible with the right to privacy. This is at the core of the Pirate movement in Europe which broke through to elect its first members…
“Anonymized” data really isn’t—and here’s why not
Nate Anderson writes: The Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission had a bright idea back in the mid-1990s—it decided to release “anonymized” data on state employees that showed every single hospital visit. The goal was to help researchers, and the state spent time removing all obvious identifiers such as name, address, and Social Security number. But a…