Assorted Reading

Privacy and Anonymity
Kevin F. Berry, Law.com: How to Unmask an Anonymous Blogger: “When does it make sense to spend the time and expense necessary to determine the identity of an anonymous blogger who is damaging the company?”
New York Times: The Theater of the Street, the Subject of the Photograph: “The suit was dismissed last month by a New York State Supreme Court judge who said that the photographer’s right to artistic expression trumped the subject’s privacy rights. But to many artists, the fact that the case went so far is significant.”
Digital Music and Movies
At Last, Movies to Keep Arrive on the Internet – New York Times: “Six major studios plan to begin selling movies over the Internet today that buyers can download and keep for watching at any time.…New movies will cost about $20 to $30 to download”
John Gruber, Daring Fireball: The iPod Juggernaut: “In short, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, Apple’s iPod competitors are totally fucked.”
MP3 Insider: The truth about your battery life. It takes more processing power to play tracks with DRM. That processing power shortens the battery life of portable digital music players. “The Archos Gmini 402 Camcorder maxed out at 11 hours, but with DRM tracks, it played for less than 9 hours. The iRiver U10, with an astounding life of about 32 hours, came in at about 27 hours playing subscription tracks. Even the iPod, playing back only FairPlay AAC tracks, underperformed MP3s by about 8 percent.”
British Court Hears Apple v. Apple and ‘Le Freak’: “In a clash of cultural icons, the Beatles’ record company, Apple Corps, wants Apple Computer to stop using its familiar logo, in the shape of an apple with a bite out of it, on the iTunes Music Store. Apple Corps contends that the use of the logo infringes on a 1991 agreement, which it says barred Apple Computer from using the logo in connection with the sale of music.”
Copyright
Creative Commons Canada: Dutch Court upholds Creative Commons licence: “Photographs made available on flickr.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license may not be reproduced in a weekly magazine without the author’s permission.”
Raymond Nimmer: Can I download it to try out the music?: “No, not unless the copyright owner permitted or invited that. The idea that downloading a file is permitted because it is so easy on Internet is simply wrong. Downloading is copying and infringement. Indeed, it can have massive adverse effects on copyright owners.”
Slate: The Dan Brown Code: “Dan Brown, author of the mega-selling The Da Vinci Code, has brought forth his most thrilling piece of writing to date: a court document. Brown, who is being sued for copyright infringement in London by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, filed a 69-page witness statement with the British courts back in December.… In its textures—it is at turns snotty, contemplative, and disarmingly personal—it is clear Brown intended the brief less as a legal defense than as a literary memoir.”
DRM
Silicon Valley Media Law Blog: Materials from talk on DRM: law and technology
Mark Cuban: Digital Rights Management – The coming collateral damage: “Unfortunately for content owners, digital rights/copy protection schemes have always proven crackable. No matter how smart the good guys think their programmers are, the bad guys have programmers that are just as smart. More importantly, the good guys have to build the perfect protection scheme, impenatrable by any of infinite number of possible attacks.”