Due cheap amikacin price dangers to the difficulties in diagnosing atypical CF, experts have had toradol online stores trouble finding a specific answer to this question. For some buy pamoate overnight delivery individuals, depression, anxiety, stress, relationship problems, and other mental health sale discount ventolin concerns can also interfere with intimate feelings. Headaches were one cheap xalatan of the most common side effects that people getting the buy generic viagra alternative liquid Shingrix vaccine reported in clinical trials. Animal studies of Cymbalta cephalexin for order didn't show dependence in rats, although animal studies don't always purchase cheapest nasonex delivery predict what will happen in humans. Psychotherapy may also help cheap amoxicillin reduce the amount of pain a person experiences during a canada cialis migraine attack. There are a few reasons behind the change, clonidine without rx but it is mainly to make the terminology clearer and buy discount ampicillin without prescription info easier to understand. A doctor can help a person learn airway.

There is a lovely story in the New York Times today about a low-power radio station in northwest Montana: ¬†Creston Journal – From a Porch in Montana, Low-Power Radio’s Voice …. There are only 800 of these licenses, though Congress may increase the number. This particular station has a very short broadcast range but is piped through the Internet to listeners as far away as Florida. It’s an excellent example of the kind of radio diffusion we discuss in Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits. Why shouldn’t the broadcaster in Montana be able to cut a deal with the listener in Florida to rebroadcast to a local Florida audience?

Full disclosure: I know exactly where this transmitter is; I drive through Creston, MT several times each summer, as it is on the road between my summer home the airport we fly into. It’s beautiful, but as the pictures in the story indicate, it is beautifully isolated.

I have blogged several times about the Google Book Settlement (type “settlement” into the search window to bring up the posts). To be brief: Google started scanning books, including copyrighted works; organizations representing authors and publishers of copyrighted books sued Google for copyright infringement; the three parties have worked out their differences behind closed doors, producing a very long settlement agreement, which is now public; the matter now sits on the desk of a federal judge, Denny Chin, who must either approve or disapprove the settlement document (he cannot edit it). Because it is a class action lawsuit, members of the class are invited to tell Judge Chin what they think. The deadline for that is today. A number of objections have been filed; it appears that a group of distinguished authors and academics, including Jacques Barzun, Harold Bloom, and Harvard colleagues Steven Ozment, Mary Ann Glendon, and Ruth Wisse is also planning to file (pdf of notice here).

(There are other legal strategies for opposing the settlement. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon are all lobbying the Department of Justice to oppose the Settlement, on anti-trust grounds. Amusing as it is to see Microsoft warning about the possibility of another company becoming a monopoly, it is quite correct in that fear.)

I am grateful to Lewis Hyde for permission to reproduce his eloquent objection immediately below. I have filed a brief objection myself, which I include below Lewis’s.

The Honorable Denny Chin
% Office of J. Michael McMahon, Clerk
U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York
500 Pearl Street
New York, NY  10007

August 31, 2009

Dear Judge Chin:

I write to object to some of the terms of the settlement that has been proposed by the litigants in Case No. 05 CV 8136, The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc.

I am a member of the Author Sub-Class in this lawsuit.  The University of Michigan library lists eight books of mine that we may assume were digitized by Google in the course of their creation of Google Book Search.  These include The Gift (Random House, 1983), This Error is the Sign of Love (Milkweed Editions, 1988), and Trickster Makes this World (Farrar, Straus, 1998).

As an author I am also a reader, a user of libraries, and a beneficiary of the public domain.  I say this because I believe that the settlement in question amounts to a major intervention in our national cultural policy, one that will affect the U.S. knowledge ecology for generations to come.  It therefore should not be adjudicated upon the assumption that we authors (and our publishers) are rights holders only.  We are cultural citizens as well; our copyrights matter to us, but so do larger questions of how literature and knowledge circulate among us.

It is my understanding that courts hold fairness hearings in class action law suits in order to determine whether all members of the class find the proposed settlement fair, adequate and reasonable.  While I applaud many of the elements of the settlement in question, I am nonetheless troubled by several others.  To be specific:

*¬† I object to the settlement’s proposed capture of income from orphan works.¬† I can think of nothing in the history of copyright law, or in the law as currently written, that would countenance such a taking.¬† As a 1988 House of Representatives Report stated clearly:

Under the U.S. Constitution, the primary objective of copyright law is not to reward the author, but rather to secure for the public the benefits derived from the author’s labors.¬† By giving authors an incentive to create, the public benefits in two ways:¬† when the original expression is created and…when the limited term… expires and the creation is added to the public domain. [H.R. Rep. No. 100-609 at 17]

In no instance are third parties meant to benefit, as the settlement would allow.¬† The primary beneficiary of a copyright grant is the author and, as copyright expert Melville Nimmer once wrote, “the ultimate beneficiary is the public domain.” [Nimmer on Copyright III at 13]¬† To allow other parties to intervene between the author and the public would be like allowing an executor to drain an estate before distributing it to the rightful heirs.

The settling parties must therefore find some better way to dispose of the unclaimed funds that accrue from orphan works.¬† My own suggestion would be for the court to appoint a guardian or trustee charged not just with the task of representing absent owners but with a mandate to do so in the light of copyright’s traditional double focus:¬† rights holders must be given their due and, where no rights holder can be found, the public domain must be the beneficiary.

*  I object to the monopoly powers that Google and the Books Rights Registry will acquire, should the court approve the orphan works elements of the settlement.  Approving the settlement as it stands will in essence grant the settling parties a compulsory license enabling them to exploit the commercial value of orphan works.  Because of the unique nature of class action litigation it will be virtually impossible for any other digital library or search service to receive such an exemption.  Google will thus be in a position to monopolize this important part of our emerging knowledge economy.

Again, history makes it clear we should be wary of such broad powers in regard to the circulation of knowledge.¬† Copyright has long been classified as a monopoly privilege and in the context of expression, as Lord Macaulay famously said, “…monopoly is an evil.¬† For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.” [Misc. Works (1880) at 233]

In our own tradition, as you may know, Thomas Jefferson believed that the Constitution ought to have prohibited monopolies in general and, if an exception were to be made for copyright, believed that it should be strictly limited.¬† In a letter to James Madison dated 28 August 1789 Jefferson suggested the following addition to the Bill of Rights:¬† “Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature…, for a term not exceeding ‚Äì‚Äì years, but for no longer term, and no other purpose.”¬† (As for the term, Jefferson’s usual suggestion was 19 years.)

In short, monopoly privileges in the world of public expression have been viewed with extreme skepticism ever since the first appearance of a public sphere in the eighteenth century.  It would be dangerous indeed to grant them now to the private parties who propose this settlement.

*¬† Finally, I object to the fact that no representative of libraries or of the public interest will be a voting member of the board of directors of the Books Rights Registry.¬† The Registry promises to be an important player in the nation’s cultural environment; if it is called into existence, its directors must represent the users as well as the owners of proprietary content.

In sum, while I support many elements of the settlement as currently drafted, in regard to the items I have here listed I do not consider it to be fair and reasonable.  I urge you to take these issues into account as you approach the difficult task of deciding whether or not to approve the settlement.

Yours sincerely,

Lewis Hyde

And here is my own letter to the judge.

The Honorable Denny Chin
% Office of J. Michael McMahon, Clerk
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
500 Pearl Street
New York, NY  10007

September 4, 2009

Dear Judge Chin,

I write to object to some of the terms of the settlement that has been proposed by the litigants in Case No. 05 CV 8136, The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc.

I am a member of the Author Sub-Class in this lawsuit.  At least four books of mine have pesumably been digitized by Google in the course of the creation of Google Book Search: Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (PublicAffairs, 2006), Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion (co-authored by Hal Abelson and Ken Ledeen, Addison-Wesley, 2008), Data Structures and their Algorithms (co-authored by Larry Denenberg, HarperCollins, 1991), and Elements of the Theory of Computation, 2^nd Edition (co-authored by Christos Papadimitriou, Prentice Hall, 1998).

I am Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. As a scholar, I am not only a writer of books but a reader, researcher, and teacher who uses books daily.

While I support many aspects of the proposed settlement, I object to the proposed settlement because it threatens to create an unregulated digital book monopoly. Specifically, it would grant to Google and the Books Rights Registry legal license to profit from orphan works (copyrighted works whose rights holders are unknown, and who therefore cannot set what the proposed settlement refers to as a “Specified Price”). It is unfair for these parties to profit from works they had no role in creating. Moreover, the proposed Settlement would grant Google the authority to set the price of orphan works without any outside review or regulation. In other commercial domains where monopolies have arisen (electric power and telecommunications, for example), some public body has overseen the pricing structure. It would be unfair for the Court to sanction the creation of a private information monopoly, in which Google could, without fear of competition or regulation, fix prices for works to which it does not hold rights.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely yours,

Harry R. Lewis

Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia has introduced legislation that would give the President the authority to declare a “cybersecurity emergency” and take control of certain private, non-governmental networks during such an emergency. The bill is full of vague language and describes powers that can be exercised without any judicial or other review, if necessary for U.S. “national defense and security.”

There are all kinds of problems here, as the Declan McCullagh report enumerates. First, the government has shown itself not be be very good at cybersecurity. For another, the Obama administration invoked national security as the reason not to share a draft intellectual property treaty with the public. (See Say It Ain’t So, Barak, March 14, 2009.) By that standard, the government could take over the Internet on a whim or a scare.

This legislation is seriously flawed.

A year ago we blogged about the guidelines issued by Department of Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff about laptop searches at the border. As I wrote at the time,

The Department of Homeland Security may take your laptop at the U.S. border and remove it to an off-site location for as long as it wants. Doesn’t matter if you are a U.S. citizen. There it may examine its contents and have any text it contains translated.

WITHOUT HAVING ANY REASON TO THINK YOU HAVE DONE ANYTHING WRONG.

I was far from the only person perturbed by this policy. It was rational in its way — they can search your suitcase, so why not your laptop? — and yet it was disturbing. Only in recent years have people routinely walked around with their entire life histories in readable format. Why should the government not be required to show probable cause before reading your love letters and personal photos from a decade ago? And then there was the fact that laptops of doctors and lawyers have lots of information about other people on them. Aren’t they entitled to some protection from the curiosity of border guards?

Now Janet Napolitano has issued new guidelines that tighten things up a bit. Here is the CNN story; here is the DHS press release, and here are the rules themselves (pdf, 10 pages).

In essence, DHS has put limits on how long the laptops can be held (5 days) and has guaranteed the person whose laptop is being inspected the right to be in the room at the time agents are inspecting the laptop (though not necessarily the privilege of watching what they are doing).  But left in place is the basic right of DHS to look at any laptop it wishes without having to provide any reason for doing so.

The release says only a tiny fraction of laptops have been inspected while the earlier policy was in place, which is nice, but no guarantee that an individual agent may not adopt a different standard.

Whole disk encryption, which is increasingly standard for business laptops, should be standard for private citizens taking their laptops on international trips. The policy document addresses this possibility too:

Officers may sometimes have technical difficulties in conducting the search of electronic devices such that technical assistance is needed to continue the border search. Also, in some cases Offtcers may encounter information in electronic devices that requires technical assistance to determine the meaning of such information, such as, for example, information that is in a foreign language andlor encrypted (including information that is password protected or otherwise not readily reviewable). In such situations, Officers may transmit electronic devices or copies of information contained therein to seek technical assistance from other federal agencies. Officers may seek such assistance with or without individualized suspicion.

So make your encryption key long enough so it can’t be cracked in five days. (My understanding of US court precedents is that the government can’t compel you to disclose your encryption key — though it may be able to obtain a warrant to search your home and your leather appointment book for the place you wrote it down.)

Altogether this new policy seems to me to leave too much to the discretion of the border officials. I recognize that we’d love to catch terrorists carrying blueprints of their targets, but I suspect that some of those searches are for bad pictures. If the number of laptops they want to search is so small, it should not be a big problem for them to get judicial approval before searching them.

Harvard Magazine has a general-interest story about the erosion of privacy, featuring various Harvard colleagues and myself. It was fun to work with Jonathan Shaw, who wrote the article, but the most interesting part of working with the Magazine was the set-up for the photo shoot!

Google Books has launched a special collection of digitized books which are available for free download under Creative Commons licenses — including Blown to Bits, in particular. It’s a slick interface, nicely searchable, and the table of contents is hyperlinked, section by section, to the text. We’re in fine company here — other authors include Jonathan Zittrain, Carl Malmud, Cory Doctorow, and Lawrence Lessig.

That was the advice of a friend who forwarded to me a recommendation he had received from Amazon. These recommendation systems, drawing on vast databases of information about individuals’ purchase histories, are usually pretty reasonable in their suggestions. I would love to understand this one, though.

Dear Amazon.com Customer, We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased or rated¬†Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Hal Abelson have also purchased¬†Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head by W. Bill Czolgosz. For this reason, you might like to know that¬†Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head is now available.¬† You can order yours for just $12.99 by following the link below. Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head W. Bill Czolgosz Price: $12.99 Other Versions and Languages Kindle Edition (Kindle Book) Product Description The dead rise. The world dies. Mankind falls and enters Death’s halls. Over 90 poems of carnage, hopelessness and despair mixed with oodles of the living dead await you. Featuring poems by W. Bill Czolgosz, Paul A. Freeman, Keith Gouveia, J.H. Hobson, Rich Ristow, Lester Smith, Steve Vernon, Zed Zefram, Zombie Zak and many others, Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes will not only melt your brain . . . it’ll tear out your jugular!

In New York, some clown started a blog called “Skanks in NYC” for the sole purpose of heaping verbal abuse on, well, whatever people he thought deserved that appellation. The blog was hosted by Blogger.com, a Google service. The site apparently was active for only a day, during which the clown posted five items, one of them referring to a model named Liskula Cohen as a “ho” and a few other things.

Ms Cohen wanted to know who was speaking ill of her, and asked Blogger to disclose that information so she could pursue a defamation suit. I pick up the story from CNN:

On Monday, New York Supreme Court Judge Joan Madden ruled that Google must hand over to Cohen any identifying information it possesses about the blog’s creator. ‚Ķ¬†”The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions,” the judge said ‚Ķ.

And Blogger did, under the court order, turn over to Cohen the IP and email addresses of the blogger. A Google attorney said the company was sensitive to both privacy and to cyberbullying, but a court order trumps any concerns of the company.

Now it turns out that the blogger clown is one Rosemary Port, a Fashion Institution of Technology student who, according to the Daily News, had been involved in some sort of personal quarrel with Cohen. Cohen has decided not to pursue the defamation suit. Port, however, says she will sue Google for $15 million for invasion of her privacy.

“Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my Web site: One from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it,” Port said. “That was before it became a spectacle. I feel my right to privacy has been violated.”

That’s an odd transition — she put it up on the Web where anybody in the world could see it. But only a couple of people did, so she claims a privacy invasion when so much attention got focused on it. Still, she didn’t think she was going to be unmasked. Port’s lawyer makes a knee-jerk appeal to the pseudonymously published Federalist Papers, which lobbied for adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

I doubt Port has a case. Google’s Privacy Policy states, “Google only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google in the following limited circumstances: ‚Ķ¬†We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request ‚Ķ.” Sounds like that covers it. Anyone who’s signed up for a Gmail account agreed to that. (Actually, just doing a Google search causes you to agree to these terms implicitly, but that’s another matter.)

Bloggers (and blog commenters) beware. You can use anonymity tools, such as Tor, if you are really worried about being discovered, but if you do something unlawful behind the veil of an anonymous blog, your cover may be blown.

(It’s a separate question whether calling someone a “ho” or a “skank” actually constitutes defamation. I have no opinion on that one.)

The state of Illinois has enacted a law prohibiting anyone classified as a sex offender from using any social networking site. The definition of the latter is quite complicated — it certainly covers more than Facebook and Myspace. Blogs may qualify as well. The language is hard to parse.

I understand the impulse, but this looks like another blunt instrument designed in a moment of panic, like the Child Online Protection Act we discuss in Chapter 7 of Blown to Bits.¬†¬†Andrew Moshirnia argues that it’s probably unconstitutional as other such laws have proved to be — it simply restricts too much speech that doesn’t need restriction in order to get at the subset that is actually objectionable. Moshirnia points out two other minor problems: it won’t work (it’s too easy to create a fake identity online) and sex offender registries are overbroad (read my other book, Excellence Without a Soul, if you’d like to see how one Harvard undergraduate earned his status on the list). Then there’s the fact, abundantly documented in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report, that the Internet is not the enabler of sex crimes that politicians love to pretend it is.

Go after the crimes, not the tools. The fact that some people can use their liberty for evil ends is no reason to restrict anyone’s liberty pointlessly.

More than a year ago, the FCC ordered Comcast to stop using its tactics for slowing peer-to-peer movie downloads. Customers hogging bandwidth by using BitTorrent, for example, would suddenly find their bit delivery slowed to a standstill. Comcast was inserting forged packets in the communication between the customer and the download site–packets essentially saying “something’s wrong, please start over.” Customers had no way of knowing what the problem was, but naturally assumed that it was either with them or with the site at the other edge of the network, not with the ISP they had hired to deliver bit packets to them.

The FCC ordered Comcast to cut it out, noting the anti-competitive implications of Comcast’s techniques–customers unable to get their movies from where they were trying to get them might buy them from Comcast instead. The problem to which the FCC responded is exactly the same as the 19th century problem of telegraphy, when Western Union cut an exclusive deal with one of the “wire services” so that the information carrier would restrict the content delivered to the customer.

Comcast complied with the FCC order, but expressed skepticism that the FCC really had the authority it claimed. The other shoe has finally dropped: Comcast is taking the FCC to court for exceeding its regulatory authority. Arstechnica has a good write-up: FCC enforcing imaginary laws in P2P ruling, says Comcast.

However the court finds (and it will probably take some time finding anything), Congress should act. There seems a reasonable likelihood that FCC authority, vested in it long before the Internet was invented, can’t be stretched to give it veto power over deep packet inspection. Obama ran on a platform favoring Net Neutrality; time for him to get Congress to work.