More and more these days, the alleged knockoff at issue in copyright litigation is a building. Under a little-known 1990 federal law, architectural works may be copyrighted -- not only the plans but also the structures themselves. Though the 11-year-old law has been slow to catch on, that's changing. Designers of copyrighted buildings are beginning to win big damages from copycats. [...]

Building a Case: Copyrights apply to buildings, and suits are growing

Brewster Kahle may be the last Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur in the waning days of 2001 who isn't embarrassed to boast about his Big Idea. Maybe that's because he's not trying to make any money with it. [...]"

Salon investigates whether legal barriers imposed by copyright holders will limit the utility of the Wayback Machine. (I'm assuming you already know about the Wayback Machine... right?)

Dumpster diving on the Web

A new mailing list devoted to DRM. Here's the review from The Scout Report:

This new mailing list stemmed from discussions on digital rights management (DRM) at the Managing Digital Video workshop held this past August in Atlanta, Georgia. The list is designed to provide a forum "to discuss possible cooperative development of a DRM implementation for R&E, and to enable workshop participants to communicate about work being conducted in this area." Some of the first discussions will center around proposed collaborations between the ViDe VideoAccess Working Group and the Internet2 Video Middleware (VidMid) Video-on-Demand group as part of the recently announced NSF Middleware Initiative."

RIGHTS-L | Digital Rights Management Discussion Forum

I mentioned this on Fadori a while ago ... it's now available at your favorite neighborhood bookseller. I picked it up on Thursday and have just started reading it. If you liked _Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace_, check this out.

The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. What was responsible for its birth? Who is responsible for its demise?

In The Future of Ideas , Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect. [...] The cultural dinosaurs of our recent past are moving to quickly remake cyberspace so that they can better protect their interests against the future. Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to "tame" the Internet, transforming it from an open forum for ideas into nothing more than cable television on speed. Innovation, once again, will be directed from the top down, increasingly controlled by owners of the networks, holders of the largest patent portfolios, and, most invidiously, hoarders of copyrights.

The choice Lawrence Lessig presents [...] is between progress and a new Dark Ages [...]

With an uncanny blend of knowledge, insight, and eloquence, Lawrence Lessig has written a profoundly important guide to the care and feeding of innovation in a connected world. Whether it proves to be a road map or an elegy is up to us.

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

Conference to be held in Philly early this November.

"This workshop will consider technical problems faced by rights holders (who seek to protect their intellectual property rights) and end consumers (who seek to protect their privacy and to preserve access they now enjoy in traditional media under existing copyright law)."

Papers of interest include:

On Crafty Pirates and Foxy Tracers
A Cryptanalysis of the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection System (Ian Goldberg and David Wagner)
Secure Open Systems Protecting Privacy and Digital Services
From Copyright to Information Law ? Implications of Digital Rights Management

Workshop on Security and Privacy in Digital Rights Management

"In this piece, we take up the case of the domain name system as an example of challenges and solutions for realspace sovereigns in cyberspace. First, we analyze the 'in rem' provision of the US Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), which purports to expand the scope of the ACPA to encompass disputes with little direct connection with the United States. In reality, there exist no cases of foreign cybersquatting as to which the 'in rem' provision will be both applicable and constitutional. Instead the ACPA 'in rem' provision is notable primarily for its aggressive assertion of jurisdiction, leading us to consider the (often overlooked) role of realspace sovereigns in the regulation of the domain names system. By mapping the logical control over the domain names system-the distributed hierarchy that is the basis of the system's design-onto realspace territory, the potential for sovereign regulation of the system becomes apparent. We argue that the regulatory significance of geography, and the essentially arbitrary nature of the present territorial locations of the key components of the domain name system implies the future segmentation of the domain name system, and the resulting dramatic decrease in its value. Accordingly, we argue that realspace sovereigns (and especially the United States) have strong interests in avoiding segmentation, and thus must seek to coordinate the regulation of the system."

Realspace Sovereigns in Cyberspace: The Case of Domain Names

Jessica Litman, a Wayne State University law professor who is an expert on copyright law, has prompted renewed debate among scholars about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with her book Digital Copyright (Prometheus Books, 2001). In the book, she argues that copyright holders and owners crafted the law, and that consumers' interests were ignored."

Q-and-A with a well-known lawyer addresses the ins and outs of the DMCA, including the Sklyarov and Felten cases.

Law Professor Sparks a New Debate Over Flaws in Digital-Copyright Act

From the introduction: "One of the more confusing paradoxes of this Internet Era is that even as more information is becoming readily available than ever before, various commercial forces are converging to make information more scarce, or at least more expensive and amenable to strict market control. More than an oddity, this paradox may be an augury about the fate of the free information ecology that has long distinguished our democratic culture.

Can The Information Commons Be Saved? [PDF]

Digital rights management firm Authentica last month obtained an important patent on the technology behind the company's key product. Here it is, in grep-ready HTML (with page images also available).

I just happened to notice that this patent was awarded on September 11, 2001. I also find it interesting that although Authentica is just down the road in nearby Waltham, the three inventors live in Pennsylvania and Delaware. They also know their lawyers; this patent was handled by Steptoe & Johnson LLP (www.steptoe.com).

Authentica's DRM Patent: US # 6,289,450

"We will continue to leverage this unique architecture in future product development efforts to address evolving business requirements and content types."

Authentica issued DRM-related patent