Category Archives: Law

Student Loan Regulatorium

This is a kind of thing that can happen when the regulators aren’t really interested in regulating:

When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.
Jon Oberg, a former Department of Education researcher, warned that student loan companies were abusing a subsidy program and collecting millions in federal payments to which they were not entitled.
The department “does not have an intramural program of research on postsecondary education finance,” the supervisor, Grover Whitehurst, a political appointee, wrote in a November 2003 e-mail message to Mr. Oberg, a civil servant who was soon to retire. “In the 18 months you have remaining, I will expect your time and talents to be directed primarily to our business of conceptualizing, competing and monitoring research grants.”
For three more years, the vast overpayments continued.
— Whistle-Blower on Student Aid Is Vindicated, By Sam Dillon, The New York Times, May 7, 2007

It wasn’t so much turning a blind eye, as claiming there was no eye.

Could this happen in the U.S. telecom/ISP regulatorium?

-jsq

Content-Delivery Supply-Chain Usefulness

Susan Crawford hits the broadband nail on the head:

What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?
—For, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, 9 May 2007

That’s the question you get if you’re in a corporate strategy meeting trying to decide where this broadband thing fits in with your core competences. That plus they’ll be thinking purely in terms of broadband, because that’s their product, not the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when there are only a couple of first-mile ISPs deciding the answer for all their users. And the answer in such cases tends to be “video on demand” or “IPTV” or “our search engine”. Corporations are designed to maximize their own profits, not to think in terms of a supply chain that delivers participation, innovation, and prosperity for the general welfare. Continue reading →

Has YOUR Free Speech Been Infringed?

As the law firm for an English soccer league puts it in a letter about their lawsuit against google:

“HAS YOUR COPYRIGHT BEEN INFRINGED BY YOUTUBE?”
— YouTube class action lawsuit: Has YOUR copyright been infringed?, by Donna Bogatin, Digital Markets, zdnet blogs, May 5th, 2007

Well, I write books, so I should be concerned about copyright.

What else do they say?

The Defendants (Google, YouTube) have willfully violated the intellectual property rights that were created and made valuable by the investment – sometimes the life-long investment – of creativity, time, talent, energy, and resources of content producers other than the Defendants. The complaint asserts several legal claims against the Defendants, including direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and vicarious copyright infringement.

Well, who could argue with that? Continue reading →

The Other Regulatorium

I may have mentioned that the telcos and cablecos seem to like to game legal and regulatory systems in their favor. There’s another group of companies doing the same thing:

If there was ever an example of why the DMCA needs to die, this is it. The idea that a sixteen-digit number is illegal to possess, to discuss in class, or to post on a news site is offensive to a country where free speech is the first order of the Constitution. The MPAA and RIAA are conspiring to unmake America, to turn this into a country where free expression, due process, and the rule of law take a back-seat to a perpetual set of governmental handouts intended to guarantee the long-term profitability of a small handful of corrupt companies.
—EFF explains the law on AACS keys, Cory Doctorow, boingboing, Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Why would the activities of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America be worth such a polemic by Cory, who after all lives partly by copyright in his hat as a science fiction writer? Continue reading →

Home for Cryptome

I wasn’t going to comment on the disconnection of Cryptome by Verio, because I’m not sure I’m in favor of everything Cryptome does. However, the timing of the shutdown just after Cryptome published information on Coast Guard not meeting TEMPEST security standards got my attention. But what really prompted me was this text of a letter from Justin Aldridge of Verio to John Young of Cryptome:

Please refer to our Acceptable Use Policy. Unfortunately, at the technical support level, we cannot provide you with any further information about the termination.
— Cryptome Shutdown by Verio, Cryptome, May 2007

Ok, surely that’s just tech support refering to legal. Continue reading →

Early Termination Fees?

Does your cable Internet provider charge an early termination fee?

Several providers — including cable giant Comcast — assured us that they did not impose early termination fees, which we reported as part of our blog item.
So imagine our surprise when someone sent us a copy of a recent Comcast memo to a county official in Virginia about a looming rate increase, which, way down at the end, in a footnote, contained the following:
“Two year term agreement required. $150 early termination fee applies if any service is cancelled or downgraded during the 2 year period.”
Now That You Mention It, We Do Charge Early Termination Penalties… by Bob, hearusnow.org, at 04/18/07 01:15 PM

How could that be? Continue reading →

Copa, Pew, and Parents

The 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) has bounced back and forth between lower courts and the Supreme Court ever since it was passed, until a permanent injunction was ruled by Judge Lowell Reed of the U.S. District Court for Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on 22 March. This case had already been through the Supreme Court, in 2004:

The big split in the most recent Supreme Court COPA decision is between Kennedy and Breyer, with Kennedy saying that there are plenty of choices of relatively-effective (and certainly less-restrictive) filtering tools out there for parents to use, and Breyer essentially saying that parents are helpless so mandated shields of various kinds should be put in place to protect kids. It turns out that, in fact, parents are knowledgeable and are giving advice to their children about what to do online.
— Pew on teenage online social networking practices, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, Thu 19 Apr 2007 06:43 PM EDT

It turns out because the Pew Internet and American Life Project did a study on Teens, Privacy, & Online Social Networks, in which they asked things like whether teens hold back information from their online profiles and how much their parents know about what they’re doing. That, plus what Judge Reed had already determined, which is that there are pretty effective software screening products available that parents can use if they want to.

Yes, even children benefit from open participation through the Internet. Perhaps parents could learn from their children, too.