We all saw it coming, and now the wait is over. The headline says it all: Singapore turns heavy artillery on spammers.
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UP's licensing plan was previously discussed here"

JG: Many of the trademarks that Union Pacific is so upset about are from railroads that no longer exist, because Union Pacific bought them out. These insignia haven't been used on trains in decades. Just another detail for the IP absurdity file.

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(comments? | Links)

Vircom's SpamBuster Team has found less than 15% compliance with the new regulations. Those that do comply were from the same few senders.

Seems pornographers don't like the SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT label (previously covered here) after all.

(comments? | Spam Laws Worldwide)

Comes now this article (news.com.com.com) on the development of DRM technology that will allow consumers to burn their own CDs, but prevent those CDs from being copied. The companies behind these brilliant can't-fail perpetual-motion pyramid-scheme con games are Macrovision and SunnComm, the folks who brought, respectively, you the fuzzy lines that infect your TV when your DVD player mistakes it for a VCR, and the threat to sue a college student for showing why their anti-CD-copying technology doesn't work.

An "uncopyable" CD burn has got, as I see it, just a few eensy problems:

• First of all, it won't actually be a CD, since I'm guessing it won't comply with the Red Book standard (here, technically, the Orange Book), a twist which raises the spectre of some gnarly lawsuits for false advertising and/or trademark infringement.
• Second, since this technology will basically have to be a home version of the technology already in use for making "unrippable" CDs professionally, it's going to suffer from every problem they do (e.g., you can ignore the copy protection by holding down the shift key as you insert the CD in your computer).
• And third, even a decade into the CD-R revolution, it's hard enough getting CD burning software to work reliably with every drive out there. Getting CD burning software to work reliably with every drive out there in recording discs that deviate from the audio recording standard sounds to me like a technical nightmare.

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In a piece that's been descibed as "creepy" (by Ed Felten) and "witty" (by Ernest Miller, blogging with a heavy dose of sarcasm), Slate's Steven Landsburg continues his quest to give economists an even worse name with a cost-benefit proposal to execute virus-writers. His reasoning: viruses do $50 billlion a year in damage. If we could deter a fifth of one percent of that with a well-chosen execution, that'd be worth as much as the ten statistical lives each death penalty execution currently probably saves.

Where, oh where, to begin? (Continues inside . . . )

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JG: Nice archive. And don't forget LawMeme's own spam archive, though our coverage tilts more to international spam laws than CAN-SPAM.

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The New York Times is running a great story about the electronic future of sheet music. A body of patents starting in 1998 covers all the ideas now, including patents for "music annotation system for performance and composition of musical scores" and "a system and method for coordinating music display among players in an orchestra." Looks like writing and displaying music are now owned. The patent office couldn't find any prior art for some sort of "music annotation system"? There has also been music composition software on computers for quite some time. (See the related EFF Patent Busting Project).

An interesting aspect to this debate is the players fighting for patents in this niche market: a patent lawyer, Harry Connick, Jr., and a small, renegade electronics manufacturer.

(comments? | Links)

With a potentially sweeping judicial ruling pending, new legislation has been introduced in Argentina, protecting data as a personal right in the tradition of habeas data. (See Colombia's Habeas Data ruling).

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CAN-SPAM allows spammers to continue spamming you if you (1) consent by not opting out or (2) provide subsequent affirmative consent after opting out. 15 U.S.C.A. § 7704(a)(4) (West Supp. 2003). So where does our Gmail spam lab map?

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Italy was the the first to implement anti-spam laws under the EC Directive on Privacy and Electric Communications, 2002/58/EC. It started strong, but its efforts seem to have fizzled.

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Aaron Pratt, a clever Gmail tester, is starting a project to study the strength of Gmail's spam filters and figure out how long it takes to fill a Gmailbox. His website proclaims:

Spam my shiny new G-mail account at prattboy@gmail.com Give my address to spammers, newsletters, annoying people, whatever...

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Google's response was swift: I notified Google of the cloaking infractions on Sunday, and WhenU's sites were removed from Google by Wednesday. Try a Google search for "whenu" and see for yourself: You'll get critics' sites and news coverage, but not www.whenu.com itself."

JG: The ironic thing here -- well, okay, one of many ironic things here -- is that Google and WhenU are on the same side in the enormous (and growing) legal battle over Internet intermediaries and trademark infringement. They're both in the business of showing you ads based on what you're looking at, and they've both been sued for it by various trademark holders. WhenU's pop-ups and Google's AdSense may ultimately wind up rising or falling on the same legal standard.

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The New York Times (and registration-free services) are reporting that voting machine manufacturing company Diebold's chair and CEO, Walden O'Dell, has commented about a letter sent last year that said, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." He called it a "huge mistake" and claims he and Diebold will have no involvement in politics as long as they are in the "voting business." He claims he only signed a "party invitation" and did not know who had written the message.

Um, Walden, I can't even say that you apologized. So was the mistake the fund-raising party? Or was it getting the invitation published? Or was it that you didn't mean what you a sly mystery writer wrote?

And, uh, Walden, why did it take NINE MONTHS from when it hit the national news to figure this out?

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Microsoft has changed its mind about who it will protect this time around from worm and virus outbreaks, which have recently burdened networks and affected legitimate and pirated versions of Windows. Presumably because of these systems' role in spreading worms and viruses, the upcoming Service Pack 2 (SP2) was originally said to also support pirated versions of Windows. Microsoft earlier claimed it made this "tough choice" since "it is more important to keep [the user of pirated software] safe than it is to be concerned about the revenue issue."

Well... turns out "revenue issue" is more important than previously thought. SP2 will scan Windows for authenticity.

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Yesterday, LawMeme noted that Senate was rather foolishly banning its members from acquiring the "SECRET/NOFORN" Taguba report on torture at Abu Ghraib prison from NPR (Office of Senate Security Doesn't Understand Computers). Apparently, the Senators and their staffs should wait to read the report until the Pentagon decides to provide them with copies.

Today Time Magazine has published an email from the Pentagon basically ordering Pentagon staff not to download the report from Fox News (Military Personnel: Don't Read This!). Downloading it from NPR is apparently okay. A copy of the email, which was sent last Thursday, is here: Pentagon Email Warning:

THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS REPORT IS CLASSIFIED. ALL ISD CUSTOMERS SHOULD:

1) NOT GO TO FOX NEWS TO READ OR OBTAIN A COPY
2) NOT comment on this to anyone, friends, family etc.
3) NOT delete the file if you receive it via e-mail, but
4) CALL THE ISD HELPDESK AT 602-2627 IMMEDIATELY

(comments? | Links)

World cybercrime enforcement has been watching a rise in phishing lately. Australian intelligence worked with banks and other agencies to gather information when Russian phishers hacked a Florida ISP, sending a deluge of spam to Australian users. This week, a large amount of international intelligence, including information from the FBI and the Secret Service, resulted in twelve arrests in the UK of individuals from the Baltics, Urkaine, and Russia.

Reports from around the world confirm that phishing is getting worse. A US consulting firm claims eleven million Americans have directly clicked on a link from a phishing e-mail. Of course, the best phishing scheme in Internet lore is a claim that your bank account had been used in violation of the Patriot Act. Violate the Patriot Act? Over-drauwn Citibank_account? Moi? Better provide "proper identity."

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The April 2004 issue of THE YALE LAW JOURNAL is now out, and available at law libraries across the country. Here's what legal scholars will be reading this month:

• James Q. Whitman, The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity Versus Liberty, 113 YALE L.J. 1153 (2004). abstract

• Peter Siegelman, Adverse Selection in Insurance Markets: An Exaggerated Threat, 113 YALE L.J. 1223 (2004). abstract

• David S. Gamage, Taxing Political Donations: The Case for Corrective Taxes in Campaign Finance, 113 YALE L.J. 1283 (2004). abstract

• Rashad Hussain, Policy Comment: Security with Transparency: Judicial Review in “Special Interest” Immigration Proceedings, 113 YALE L.J. 1333 (2004). abstract

Click on any of the links to read abstracts of the articles. If you read the full text in the Journal, we'd love to hear your comments!

(comments? | New Yale Scholarship)

James Q. Whitman, The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity Versus Liberty, 113 YALE L.J. 1153 (2004).

(Article Abstract prepared by Yale Law Journal.)

Privacy advocates often like to claim that all modern societies feel the same intuitive need to protect privacy. Yet it is clear that intuitive sensibilities about privacy differ from society to society, even as between the closely kindred societies of the United States and continental Europe. Some of the differences involve questions of everyday behavior, such as whether or not one may appear nude in public. But many involve the law. In fact, we are in the midst of major legal conflicts between the countries on either side of the Atlantic—conflicts over questions like the protection of consumer data, the use of discovery in civil procedure, the public exposure of criminal offenders, and more. Clearly the idea that there are universal human sensibilities about privacy, which ought to serve as the basis of a universal law of privacy, cannot be right.

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Peter Siegelman, Adverse Selection in Insurance Markets: An Exaggerated Threat, 113 YALE L.J. 1223 (2004).

The theory of adverse selection in insurance markets predicts that individuals can use private information about their own risk to purchase insurance below its true value, by declining to purchase when their individual risk is less than or equal to assessed risk, and purchasing insurance when their risk is in fact high, due to factors the insurance market is unable to measure. Although economists, policy-makers, legal scholars, and courts routinely discuss the danger that this behavior may dramatically distort the insurance market and raise costs for all, this Essay argues that, while theoretically possible, adverse selection is not nearly so serious a threat in practice as has been supposed by the dominant economic models.

(comments? | New Yale Scholarship)

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