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Friday, February 13, 2009

iPhone Jailbreaking is Illegal. No It’s Not. Who Cares?

We hold these truths to be self evident:

That as long as Apple’s iPhone is locked, there will be those who wish it open. And that as long as this is the case, iPhones will be jailbroken and outfitted with third-party applications not vetted by Apple. And this will remain so regardless of whether or not Apple manages to convince the U.S. Copyright Office that jailbreaking an iPhone is copyright infringement.

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Monday, August 4, 2008

And for My Next Trick, I’ll Turn Myself Into a Complete Jackass

If you’re going to demand that YouTube remove a video to which you object under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s probably wise to make sure that you actually understand the DMCA. Wiser still to make sure that you actually hold the copyright to the video in question. Uri Geller, the purported spoon-bending psychic, apparently did neither when he sent a DMCA take-down notice to YouTube demanding that it remove a clip debunking his “supernatural” abilities.

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Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Senate Passes “Eye of Sauron” Act

What a remarkable display of political expediency. In a 69 to 28 vote, the U.S. Senate approved The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a sweeping new surveillance law that will effectively grant immunity to telecom companies for cooperating with the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program in the years after Sept. 11, 2001.

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Thursday, July 3, 2008

Seriously, You Have No Privacy. Get Over It.

So much for privacy on YouTube. The federal judge presiding over Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google and YouTube denied a motion for the pair to produce their source code Wednesday. “YouTube and Google should not be made to place this vital asset in hazard merely to allay speculation,” U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton wrote. Apparently he didn’t feel quite as strongly about the privacy of YouTube users, because he felt entirely comfortable turning that over to the media company.

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Thursday, March 13, 2008

Recording Industry Calls for “Monetization Without Representation”

The concept is simple: The music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to ‘get legit’ in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway–share the music they [...]

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Friday, November 9, 2007

Big Mother

Who better than AT&T to filter the Internet for widespread copyright infringement? After all, the company has a fair bit of experience with just this sort of thing, having aided and abetted the National Security Agency in its warrantless domestic-surveillance efforts.
Anyway, together with NBC and Disney, AT&T has invested a combined $10 million in Vobile, [...]

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About John

John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.

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Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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