The recent curbs on social networking websites in India demonstrate the unpredictability of the legal environment, both for businesses and the citizens. Whether its the Government of India’s (GoI) insistence on getting access to corporate emails and text messages sent via BlackBerry devices, or changing stances on “pre-screening” user generated content, the authorities seem to be doing a tap dance around legal issues. The implementation of rules seems surreptitious as they are bent conveniently in the name of “security”.
SFLC Blog![[RSS]](../../../img/feed-icon-14x14.png)
In yesterday’s New York Times, Ellen Ullman argued that we need artificial intelligence, not more testing, to prevent high-volume trading catastrophes like the one at Knight Capital. But artificially intelligent market watchers are an expensive and possibly unworkable solution. Instead, by collaborating on an open infrastructure for high-volume algorithmic trading, firms could reduce errors, improve stability, and possibly avoid expensive regulation.
At the beginning of December, we warned the Copyright Office that operating system vendors would use UEFI secure boot anticompetitively, by colluding with hardware partners to exclude alternative operating systems. As Glyn Moody points out, Microsoft has wasted no time in revising its Windows Hardware Certification Requirements to effectively ban most alternative operating systems on ARM-based devices that ship with Windows 8.
In his keynote from the 28th Chaos Communication Congress last week, Cory Doctorow outlines the primary threat to software freedom in the 21st century: that as our lives become more dependent upon general-purpose computers, the attempts of industry and government to control computing will fundamentally endanger our personal liberty. Using the now-familiar history of digital rights management—its rise, its failure, and legislative efforts to enforce it—Cory illustrates how those threatened by technology will inevitably seek to cripple it. But the so-called copyright wars waged by content owners, he says, were only “a skirmish.”
The Software Freedom Law Center is seeking legal, technology, and administrative interns for the summer of 2012.
OSCON is probably the single largest annual gathering of free software developers in the world, so it’s always a good opportunity for SFLC to catch up with the projects we work with and to make new friends in the community. I only got to spend two days at OSCON 2011, but in that time I met and talked shop (and microbrews and vegan donuts) with lots of folks who are making impressive contributions to free software. I also got to talk about Legal Basics for Developers with Karen Sandler to a fantastic and engaged audience.
Microsoft’s much hyped “cloud”-based replacement to its $20 billion-per-year Microsoft Office business comes with new features such as real-time multi-user collaborative editing, instant messaging, video conference, online meetings and more. What Microsoft does not tell you in their press release is that when you, your business, or your friends sign up, you may be getting an unadvertised feature as well: free spying.
SFLC is introducing our redesigned website today! We hope you like the new look. While the content is largely unaffected, we’ve made some improvements to the information design to make the content easier to access and understand. (Take a look at our new publications page for an example.) We also changed our default content license to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (formerly Attribution-NoDerivs).
We applaud the rejection by Judge Denny Chin of the Google Books class action settlement with authors and publishers regarding the digitization of books. SFLC filed a letter with the court on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and author Karl Fogel, urging the court to reject the settlement as it was last proposed and asking the court to consider the impact of the settlement upon members of the class who have distributed their works under Free licenses.