David Canton is a business lawyer and trade-mark agent with a practice focusing on technology issues and technology companies.
Wired published an article called The BitTorrent Effect , summarizing it as: Movie studios hate it. File-swappers love it. Bram Cohen’s blazing-fast P2P software has turned the Internet into a universal TiVo.
BitTorrent is the latest downloading tool that increases download speeds – and thus the size of file that is practical to download – substantially.
Read the MPAA press release about BitTorrent server operator lawsuits
Most software comes with a license that is either shrinkwrap – or more commonly now – clickwrap. After you buy the software, you are presented with the license either after opening the package, or when installing it. The license says that if you install it, you are bound by it. If you don’t like the license, you are instructed to return it for a refund.
The wrinkle is that most stores do not allow returns of opened software.
The vast majority of people just accept the terms of the license – probably without reading it. Some however would rather not have the software in light of license provisions they find annoying.
A settlement was reached a few months ago in a class action lawsuit in California that should now be changing this practice.
In the settlement, certain software companies agreed to post their licenses on their web sites with links on their packaging so you can read the license before buying.
Certain retailers agreed to provide the licenses to customers on request before buying.
In an article in today’s Toronto Star entitled Banner year for digital decisions, Prof. Michael Geist lists 26 noteworthy developments from 2004.
Stay tuned for my own predictions on what we might expect for law and technology in 2005 in my January 1 article.
DAVID CANTON – For the London Free Press – December 18, 2004
Proving that life is stranger than fiction, a U.K. company lost all copies of its source code in a bizarre chain of IT disasters. Then the courts decided they were not insured for the loss.
The fine print in an insurance policy became an issue when a U.K. company called Tektrol was left without a single copy of the source code to its most valuable asset called PowerMiser. Source code is the human written version of a software program. It is then compiled to create the object code, which is the code used by computers.
The PowerMiser source code was so valuable they kept five copies. Two copies were kept on separate computers at their headquarters, one on the managing director’s laptop and another on a computer at a remote site operated by an independent company. A final hard copy printout was kept at the headquarters.
One of the challenges in legislating against Spam is to define what it is. We all recognize the typical spam from unknown sources trying to sell us drugs or other products. It is not easy though to define where the dividing line is between those and legitimate email.
The US FTC has just released its rules under the CAN-SPAM Act that determines when email has a commercial primary purpose and is subject to the act.
As evidence of the difficulty in defining it – the document is 81 pages long!
In a blindingly fast decision, CNet reports that the court has already ruled in Google’s favour, saying that “as a matter of law it is not trademark infringement to use trademarks as keywords to trigger advertising”
I have not seen the official decision, and an appeal is always possible.
CNet has an article that contains “a list of common Internet fraud schemes drawn from the 100-plus investigations launched under Operation Cyber Sweep, a government initiative to combat online crime. The investigations were prompted by referrals from the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, which posted the list.”
It lists 12 schemes, many of which were around in different forms before the Internet.
Also see the Phonebusters (a joint effort of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Ontario Provincial Police) website for more information on how to recognize scams and tips on avoiding them.
The Geico lawsuit against Google for trade-mark infringement has commenced. Google sells ads to businesses that appear when people search on competitors trade-marks. For example – someone searching on “Geico” could see an ad for a competing insurance company.
Is this an improper “use” of a trade-mark?
Or is it similar to placing an ad in a magazine near a competitors?
Regardless of the answer to that, Google was right when it said: “For some reason, rules and propositions that are easily understood in more traditional contexts get hopelessly muddled when applied to the Internet”
DAVID CANTON – For the London Free Press – December 11, 2004
How easily do we give up our personal information when asked? How easy do we make it for others to take advantage of us for things like identity theft and fraud?
Have we safeguarded our information so it is only made available to those who really need it?
A September 2004 Privacy and Identity Management Survey addressed this issue in the United States.
CNet published an article yesterday claiming that 90% of malicious code is written not by script kiddies or teenagers, but for criminal needs such as stealing money, distributing spam and Internet rackets .
The article says that “bot nets” – or lists of compromised computers owned by unsuspecting individuals that can be used to send malicous code (also called “zombie networks”) – are actually available for sale on the Internet.
Unless otherwise stated, all original material created by David Canton included in this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
