Digital Rights Network

I was impressed by the radical design principles espoused in this article about fuel-cell vehicles, and heartened when I reached the end to see it was an example of open-source principles being harnessed to power the green revolution. And all reported in the Daily Telegraph...

The American content industry is feeling a bit chipper at the moment. With the recent judgements of Grokster and Kazaa having gone, to a significant extent, their way the MPAA and RIAA clearly hope that the demon spectre of unpaid file sharing can be brought under control, if not exactly *their* control. The Grokster case laid a potential for liability on a technology innovators. The Kazaa judgement in turn mandated that judicially enforceable anti-infringment technology be incorporated into Kazaa. They will hope that this sets a trend for any technology with a potential for infringement. Perhaps all these will, in time, become well controlled distribution channels, forcing consumers to pay their monopoly prices for a diet of the usual high quality boy bands and highly original Hollywood plots with Tom Cruise.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a Guide to Music DRM including links to some sites selling MP3s without DRM.

Interesting article about a new generation of no-frills laptops, includes stuff about building wifi networks in developing countries.

Please feel free to add any resources you find to the list below:

1. BitLaw: A Resource on Technology Law. Highly recommended.
2. GrokLaw. Primarily dedicated to the SCO case but includes large amounts of useful legal information.
3. GrokLine. Originally dedicated to tracing the history of Linux and the other 'Unices' it is now focusing on patents and prior art research.

On July 19th another Sony mod-chipping case was decided by the UK courts, on the basis of the UK implementation of the European Copyright Directive. The defendant was sued for distributing devices which circumvented copyright protection systems, and lost.

The facts of this case were basically the same as an earlier Sony mod-chipping case in the UK, and similar to a case which took place in Australia. Similar defences about backups and imports failed.

• BBC story about the case
• analysis by Martin Keegan of earlier UK and Australian mod-chipping cases (the Australian decision was reversed on appeal).
• analysis by Norton Rose of the new mod-chipping case.
• Text of the judgment (2004-07-19)