By Stephen Downes
April 25, 2003
Judge: File-swapping Tools Are
Legal
Wow. "A federal judge in Los Angeles has
handed a stunning court victory to file-swapping services
Streamcast Networks and Grokster, dismissing much of the
record industry and movie studios' lawsuit against the two
companies." The judge ruled these are legal tools, even
though they can sometimes be used for illegal purposes.
This is the same logic that allows hardware stors to sell
crowbars and video stores to sell VCRs. At last, sanity
from the U.S. judicial system. By John Borland, CNet, April
25, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
File Sharing Forfeits Right To
Privacy
The argument accepted by the court is
seductive: "If users of pirate peer-to-peer sites don't
want to be identified, they should not break the law by
illegally distributing music." That sounds fine, but in
today's surround-sound world, everyone is a suspect, and so
everyone has forfeit their right to privacy. The fact is,
the RIAA (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot establish
that a person has shared copyrighted materials without
already having done a little packet-snooping or
hard-drive hacking. After all, a Madonna MP3 looks pretty
much like the soundtrack from one of my talks from the
outside; you have to actually intercept and read the file
to determine that it's contraband. So it's a bit much for
them to allege that only the guilty will be punished.
Everyone is punished is the suurveillance society. By
Jonathan Krim, Washington Post, April 25, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Venture Capital: Seattle VCs are Starting to
Take Notice of Canada
Not that I am one to wave
the flag or anything... aw, who am I kidding? This article
summarizes what I have been saying about Canada all along:
we are absolute leaders in the field of information
technology, including e-learning, and as the article
suggests, "If you are in the venture business and you are
not looking at Canada, you are negligent." This article
focuses on Vancouver, but a similar story could be said of
every major centre in the country, including right here in
New Brunswick. By John Cook, Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
April 25, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Higher Education, Upping the
Ante
Review of Derek Bok's Universities in the
Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. The
argument is familiar. Universities are in need of ever more
money, and so the prospects offered by commercial
enterprises are alluring. But such ventures, as is
evidenced in the management of university sports teams,
leads to a distortion of the university's priorities. The
reviewer argues that Bok should have assumed a more
outraged tone, and while I am inclined to agree, I would
observe that such a tone would simply alienate those for
whom the book was written. By Jonathan Yardley, Washington
Post, April 24, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
New Federal Rules on Privacy
In
January, 2004, Canada's Personal Information Protection and
Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) comes into force. This
website was launched by the Chartered Accountants of Canada
providing information, background and guidelines to the
Act. The Act prohibits the collection of personal
information (with some rare exceptions) without the
individual's consent. It will have wide applicability,
including within the education sector. By Various Authors,
Chartered Accountant of Canada, April, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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