Cardozo Law professor Susan Crawford dissects the recently introduced bill entitled the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act offered by Senator John Ensign (R-NV) and finds that as constructed, broadband providers have the ability to decide which devices (modems, set-top boxes, game players, PCs and so forth) are “lawful.”
So here’s how the logic runs: if the terms of service of a broadband service provider say “your access device must be authorized by us,” that’s fine. The device can be required to run only authorized applications. A device that’s capable of running unauthorized applications would not be “lawful” under those terms of service (or those applications would not be “lawful”), and so the language [elsewhere in the bill] saying “you can’t prevent someone from using devices in connection with lawful applications” won’t apply.
It could just be faulty statutory construction at this point, but if the proposed law were to work this way, broadband providers would definitely be in the driver’s seat in deciding the fate of a host of consumer electronics devices. Not to mention that with device approval, broadband providers could quickly work to weed out services that they view as competition.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:42 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The FBI announced today that it arrested eight individuals in Charlotte, NC yesterday and charged them with criminal copyright infringement. The indictments were the first under the FBI’s Operations FastLink and Site Down efforts.
The FBI believes it has arrested some top instigators in what are known as “warez” schemes, organized groups of file-sharers who are responsible for putting unauthorized films on the web, typically with no other motive that the thrill of it all. However, in its announcement, the FBI said that “these warez groups also supply the for-profit criminal distribution networks that cost the copyright industry billions of dollars each year.”
The FBI said the indicted individuals were serving as “leaders, crackers, suppliers, distribution site hosts or site administrators” in a major warez scheme. Despite a lengthy recitation of the indicted individuals wrong-doing, the FBI’s press release concluded with the following funny comment: “The charges contained in the indictments and informations are allegations only and the defendants are presumed innocent until convicted at trial.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:10 AM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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