(entry last updated: 2002-07-23 18:23:15)

Today’s news is another round of depressing repression; intense defence of a mistaken notion of intellectual property - two groups, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Policy Innovation are cited as arguing “that intellectual property rights should be defended as fiercely as traditional property rights.” *Sigh*

Two excellent links from Donna: a background article on the broadcast flag and a Perspectives piece from Jonathan Zittrain. And The Reg says that ISO is getting ready to kill the JPEG standard.

(7 items listed below)

• Declan McCullagh reports that the MPAA is revving up major legislative initiatives to push for broadcast flags and unfettered ability to disrupt P2P networks for the fall. Wired also reports on their efforts to get ISPs to help them to shut down P2P users on their networks. And The New York Times reports on the Hollings and Tauzin letters to the FCC asking for regulatory imposition of copy protection. Slashdot has started a discussion of this set of events - some of the comments are actually worth reading, this time around.
• Real’s announcement of their Helix server has gotten a lot of ink. The Register has another article today to go with yesterday’s Perens article. ZDNet News also discusses the strategy at length
• Palladium gets a thumbs down from Russell Pavlicek at Inforworld.
• The Forgent JPEG patent claim gets a look at ZDNet, arguing that there may very well be a basis for their claims.
• Newsweek takes a look at the reception DVRs are getting
• Jonathan Zittrain gets to talk about the implications of some of his research into Internet zoning at CNet.
• I’ll believe it when I see it, but it will be interesting to see what the fallout of the ISO threat to withdraw the JPEG standard (because of Forgent’s software patent) will be. Slashdot discusses