Digitivity » Digital Rights

Record the Police: Cop Recorder 2

Digitivity — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 04:07:40 +0000

Posted in Images

There’s been a lot of concern lately about police abuses lately. People want to protect their rights, but (many) police forces want to prevent citizens from recording them. In comes Cop Recorder 2: It’s an Android app that helps you record your interactions with the police. It’s suposed to be network enabled, though I haven’t [...] Related posts:

German Pirate Party Wins 15 Seats

Digitivity — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 02:25:00 +0000

The German Pirate Party won 8.9 percent of the vote in elections for the Berlin legislature. That netted them 15 seats. That’s a huge win for a party which was seen as mostly a quixotic effort. Their main plank is to move back to the unregulated Internet of the 1990s. They want to legalize non-commercial copying and abolish patent laws. Via

Your Right to Videotape the Police

Digitivity — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:39:43 +0000

There have been a number of disturbing cases of police arresting people for recording the police all over the US. HotAir approvingly mentions Glenn Reynolds’ takedown of the police in the Examiner.

The thing that always amused me about these arrests was the “wiretapping” charges. Funny like crazy. If you’re holding a cell phone recording someone across the street, where’s the wire that you’re tapping?

And at the same time, no one’s been arrested for the whole AT&T/NSA wiretapping thing?

A brief rundown of why you should be able to videotape the police:

Who says you can’t? You’re free to do what you want in the first instance, in the lack of a specific law to the contrary, right?
People have always had the right to photograph in public. The Supreme Court has held the police can observe and record things happening in “plain view“. So what’s the problem? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
The police are public servants doing their job. It would really be weird for you not to be able to record your employees. Companies do it all the time.
If you’re not in the wrong, you should have nothing to be afraid of. Isn’t that what we’re told by governments all the time? Payback time.

Anyway, HotAir agrees you have the right to record the police. What do you think?

UK Registrar Nominet to Let Police Close Down Websites

UK Registrar Nominet to Let Police Close Down Websites

Digitivity — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:59:32 +0000

Nominet, the domain registrar that handles .uk domains for the United Kingdom has proposed to allow police to shut down websites by mere request.

The policy would cover cases in which a site is involved in crimes covered under the Serious Crimes Act 2007, including fraud, prostitution, money laundering, blackmail and copyright infringement.

Also:

Suspension of a domain will not require a court order but should be limited to circumstances where necessary “to prevent serious and immediate consumer harm”, according to Nominet.

“Immediate consumer harm”? What could be so immediate that you can’t get a court order? If needed you can wake a judge up at 12 o’clock at night. This just stinks.

It’s more in a line of reasoning by law enforcement agencies, including the US Justice Department, which has been summarily shutting down websites for copyright infringement, that they can shut down a website by mere allegation.

What this misses is the the element determination of actual fault by the judiciary. What happened to due process? Compulsory process for summoning witnesses? The right to confront your accusers?

Finally, with what face is the UK going to tell China not to censor its version of the World Wide Web?

Is this necessary to protect the consumer, or just another power grab that has become altogether too familiar?

Via

WikiLeaks Sues The Guardian for Leak

Digitivity — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:02:33 +0000

This is getting weird. WikiLeaks, the organization devoted to transparency and publishing leaks, is suing the English newspaper The Guardian over … get this: a leak.

OK, I’m sure there may be extenuating circumstances, etc., but it certain looks weird to anyone giving it a cursory glance, which most people are probably going to.

By the way, WikiLeaks’ position is that it only publishes the portions of the leaks necessary to establish wrongdoing, not operational or password data, which is what they are saying The Guardian did: http://www.wikileaks.org/Guardian-journalist-negligently.html

Federal Court Rules Defendant Must Provide Decrypted Data

Digitivity — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:14:08 +0000

In case you thought you had a right to privacy in your papers and effects, a Federal court has ruled that a defendant must provide his data in decrypted format.

Here’s a discussion of the whole matter.

And here’s the ruling, along with commentary.

My take is that the Feds are basically forcing you to testify against yourself. If you have a digital file, that’s basically your thoughts recorded. So, a good question is, do you have the right to think without the authorities knowing?

What do you think? (Encrypted, please.)

IOC Bans Olympic Luge Death Videos on YouTube: Copyright / Copywrong

Digitivity — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:35:07 +0000

As you might have heard, Georgian luge slider Nodar Kumaritashvili died in luge training at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver on February 12.

The International Olympics Committee has been using copyright to suppress videos of the event.

If you look at the result for the top YouTube hit on on Google video search for “luge death“, that video has been deleted by YouTube due to a copyright claim by the IOC.

That’s the same story for a lot of the results for the videos you get if you search for “luge death” on YouTube.

The IOC has also been trying to remove a video put up by blogger Steve Pate at Not Just the News Network. However, the videos were still up at the time of this post.

Interestingly, the Huffington Post and CBS News seem to still be hosting the video, with the former also showing pictures.

My comments

By all accounts, the luge track was ridiculously dangerous, and faster than it had ever been before. With lugers reaching speeds of 95 miles per hour, many commented that they were being treated like crash-test dummies. (See the picture at NJNN.)

This was a tragic death but the IOC’s attempts to suppress the videos of it are pathetic, wrong, and immoral. The IOC has just gotten so used to controlling anything and everything remotely connected to the Olympics, the word “Olympic”, or any competitors, that I think it’s on autopilot as far as automatically using DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notices regardless of the newsworthiness of a brief excerpt, which is all that the NJNN blog used.

First of all, the only reason that the IOC could possibly think that they could tell someone to post or not post content relating to the Olympics is the copyright laws. In the US, anyway, the copyright laws are based on the copyright cluase of the Constitution

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

So how does the Olympic committee censoring the luge tragedy videos promote the useful arts?

I reject the idea that the video needs to be banned out of respect for the luger’s family. If anything, the video needs to be spread far and wide to show the Olympic organizers’ culpability in putting up unbelievably low barriers on the sides of the luge course.

Isn’t it strange that there’s supposed to be a separate category of people (reporters) who are authorized to view primary sources, and they they’re supposed to tell us what happened, but we can’t see for ourselves? That worked for the newspaper and TV era, but with the Internet, there’s no reason at all for people not to be able to see the actual news occurring and make up their minds for themselves instead of hearing newsmen debate current events.

Finally, under Canadian law (Steve Pate is Canadian, and NNJN is a Canadian site), there is explicit permission under the law to use brief excerpts under “fail dealing” (the Canadian version of “fair use”).

Other blogs following the story include TechDirt and Michael Geist. Discussion at Slashdot. Direct download link for the video.

Will the NFL Put You in Jail for a SuperBowl Party?

Digitivity — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:48:51 +0000

A lot of posts on the blogosphere are talking about the NFL’s policy regarding SuperBowl parties and how it’s actually illegal to watch the SuperBowl on a TV larger than 55 inches.

But is that really true?

Sort of.

Copyright and Public Performance

Regardless of what the NFL’s “policy” might be, people wouldn’t have to follow what they just because of their policy.

What gives force to their policy is the copyright law on public performance. The purpose behind that law was to prevent people from buying a playwright’s play and performing it and taking the profit from it without any going to the original playwright.

So the law as it stands today prevents public performance of any copyrighted work (play, book, movie, or other video) without the copyright-holder’s permission.

55 Inch TVs

Believe it or not, the law actually mentions 55-inch TV’s specifically:

if the performance or display is by audiovisual means, any visual portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 4 audiovisual devices, of which not more than one audiovisual device is located in any 1 room, and no such audiovisual device has a diagonal screen size greater than 55 inches, and any audio portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4 loudspeakers are located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space;

Source

What is Public Performance?

But the real question is, what is public?

The section of law above only applies to restaurants and bar more than 2000 square feet large:

in the case of an establishment other than a food service or drinking establishment, either the establishment in which the communication occurs has less than 2,000 gross square feet of space (excluding space used for customer parking and for no other purpose), or the establishment in which the communication occurs has 2,000 or more gross square feet of space (excluding space used for customer parking and for no other purpose) and—

So, you’re safe if you’re just hosting a party at home no matter how large your TV is.

Resources

Slashdot article
ArsTechnica article

WikiLeaks Archive of Climategate CRU E-Mail Files

Digitivity — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:44:59 +0000

Although I mentioned the East Anglia E-mails site (http://eastangliaemails.com/) in a previous post on Climategate, that site apparently doesn’t include the non-email files.

WikiLeaks has a 120 MB ZIP file available for download that includes everything that’s been released so far relating to the Climate Research Unit scandal.

Also at WikiLeaks is one article containing Sinclair Davidson’s commentary on the affair: CRU emails reveal a worrying pattern of bad behaviour.

Resources

WikiLeaks CRU Files

WikiLeaks Article on Climategate

Microsoft Rights Management Locks Users Out of Their Own Files

Digitivity — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:57:13 +0000

A problem with Microsoft’s RMS (Rights Management Services) prevented Office users from viewing their own files. The problem only affected Microsoft Office 2003, not Office 2007.

The TechNet bulletin seemed to be phrased in a strange way:

Starting on December 11, 2009, customers using Office 2003 will not be able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Rights Management Service (RMS) or save Office 2003 documents protected with RMS.

It’s as if they already knew of the problem.

What seems to have happened is that a digital certificate used to validate access expired. RMS allows companies to specify what a person who receives a file can do with it. It relies on being able to access the Internet to validate key and certificate information.

Microsoft released a hotfix to remedy the problem.

Comments

It looks like companies who relied on onerous digital restrictions were hoist by their own petard. I’d say it’s better to have fully open files and file formats which you can access without any third-party having anything to do with the process.

Resources

Blog post at Technologizer
Discussion at Slashdot
TechNet bulletin
Hotfix