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(Nice neologism by the Times of London.)

President Obama is going to have a handheld, but it won’t actually be a Blackberry. It will be special military equipment, capable of entering a super-secure mode in which it can communicate only with identical equipment (presumably in the hands of military and intelligence personnel).

The Times story, as well as some others, state that it won’t be possible to forward presidential emails. I don’t know what that means. If Sasha gets an email on her home computer from her daddy, what would prevent her from taking a screen shot, or cutting and pasting the body of the message? It’s possible to restrict the President’s computer so that its functionality is limited, by I just don’t know how you could stop the recipient of one of his emails from using ordinary office software to manipulate it.

IANAL (I am not a lawyer) and I have no idea if Professor Charles Nesson is going to prevail in his defense of Joel Tenenbaum and his counterclaims that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is unconstitutional. But the recording industry sure is taking him seriously. When Nesson asked for a hearing in the case to be webcast, the RIAA reacted with horror — rather oddly, as the judge noted in granting Nesson’s request, given that the RIAA claims that it wants publicity of its anti-piracy campaign. Now the judge has delayed the hearing so the RIAA can appeal to a higher court her ruling about webcasting the proceedings.

Meanwhile, the RIAA sent Nesson a letter (pdf) demanding that he drop a request for a deposition by one of the RIAA’s former lawyers, stating that it would ask the court to sanction him if he didn’t comply. Nesson’s classic reply, quoted verbatim:

our motion stands

we welcome your opposition

And the next day the RIAA went ahead and filed court papers stating that “Defendant‚Äôs Motion has no factual or legal basis whatsoever” and asking Nesson to pay for their costs in opposing it (as apparently the law provides in the case of certain patently gratuitous motions).

There are serious and important issues at stake here, as we discuss in Chapter 6 of Blown to Bits. But on top of that, the lawyers’ duel makes good theatre.

I’ll be speaking Thursday night, January 22, at Back Pages Books in Waltham, at 7:30. Do come — it’s a friendly local bookstore and you’ll enjoy the conversation.

The Supreme Court has let stand a lower court’s ruling that the Child Online Protection Act is unconstitutional. This act was passed hastily in 1998 after the display provisions of the Communications Decency Act were overturned. On p. 248 of Blown to Bits we rather prematurely declared COPA dead after the lower court ruling, but the government appealed to the Supreme Court. In refusing to take up the case, the Supreme Court finally killed COPA. The main problem is that COPA required age verification, effectively requiring adults to register in order to see content they have every right to see.

Unrelated bonus post: Barak Obama re-took the oath of office in the White House today, thus eliminating any risk of a challenge to his legitimacy on the basis that he never said the words that Article II of the Constitution says he must.

Some time during President Obama’s speech, a copyright notice went up on the White House web site, noting that government-produced materials are not copyrighted, and any third-party content is (unless otherwise specified) for use by all under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license: “a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world.”

A new style to be sure.

How far is it fair to go to put the spotlight on those opposing you by making public information about them readily accessible? Supporters of gay marriange in California have taken public information — the addresses of those supporters of the gay marriage ban who gave more than $100 — and put it on an easy-to-access map. You can look at the map and see who in your neighborhood gave money to help get the ban passed. Or, who in my neighborhood.

The use of the Internet for public shaming — or is it intimidation? — is not new. The Nuremberg Files was the most troubling example of the genre — listing the addresses of doctors who performed abortions, and graying out their names if they were murdered. The site also listed where their children went to school.

The gay marriage advocates haven’t gone that far, but they have gone far enough to cause some real discomfort. The New York Times reports that to fight back, an attempt will be made to change the law so that the addresses of donors of as little as $100 are no longer public information.

Who has the better of the free speech argument here — those who feel intimidated, and hence feel their speech is being chilled; or those who just want to publish on the Web in a convenient form information that has long been considered public anyway?

FT reports that new trading systems will be driven by news feeds, as well as historical data. Systems would pick out places where a company is mentioned, and predict what might happen to the stock price as a result, and use that information as the basis for buy-or-sell decisions. The hope would be to avoid some of the volatility that recent events have shown are caused by automatic trading systems (at least half of stock trades are now generated algorithmically, not by human decisions on the spot).

Unfortunately, as the article notes, events such as the precipitous drop in United Airlines stock price last fall were caused by reactions to incorrect news items. So we had better hope that the news analysis algorithms will be smarter than human judgment at figuring out which news items should be regarded as trustworthy. (Or perhaps, in the UAL case, how long after selling on the basis of a false rumor to wait before buying back in again, just before everyone else figures out the rumor was false.)

In a precedent-breaking ruling, Federal Judge Nancy Gertner will allow next week’s hearing in the case of Joel Tenebaum to be webcast. You’ll be able to view it via the website of the Berkman Center. This is the case (previously blogged here) in which Harvard Professor Charles Nesson is arguing that the copyright statute is unconstitutional because it is excessively punitive, — essentially a criminal statute in the garb of civil law. The decision includes some perspectives not usually penned by federal judges:

In many ways, this case is about the so-called Internet Generation — the generation that has grown up with computer technology in general, and the Internet in particular, as commonplace. It is reportedly a generation that does not read newspapers or watch the evening news, but gets its information largely, if almost exclusively, over the Internet.

The recording industry was not amused by Nesson’s request, stating that he made it “to influence the proceedings themselves and to increase the Defendant’s and his counsel’s notoriety.” Judge Gertner takes up the RIAA’s objections:

While the Plaintiffs object to the narrowcasting of this proceeding, … their objections are curious. At previous hearings and status conferences, the Plaintiffs have represented that they initiated these lawsuits not because they believe they will identify every person illegally downloading copyrighted material.  Rather, they believe that the lawsuits will deter the Defendants and the wider public from engaging in illegal file-sharing activities.  Their strategy effectively relies on the publicity resulting from this litigation.

This case is going to be interesting to watch — the stakes are very high for the industry, and rulings like this will be scrutinized for patterns in the tea leaves.

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force released its important report yesterday. The bottom line is well summarized by the New York Times: “Report Finds Online Threats to Children Overblown.” Vulnerable children are vulnerable independent of technology, and technology doesn’t seem to have made matters any worse than they were before.

Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Attorney General who commissioned the report, immediately attacked it, claiming it relies on outdated research. I very much doubt it — it’s a remarkably thorough document. Mr. Blumenthal, show your evidence.

Reportedly, Barak Obama’s pick to head the FCC is Julius Genachowski, a classmate at both Columbia College ¬†and Harvard Law School, and a close advisor. Genachowski was a key figure in drafting Obama’s technology policies during the campaign.

This is good news for the open-Internet movement, both because of the positions Genachowski has advocated, and because he is close enough to the president-elect to weigh in on the larger issues beyond the FCC’s specific remit, including economic growth and intellectual property issues.