24 novembro 2005

TECNOSFERA

Over 30% of DMCA cease and desist notices deemed illegal: The study shows some interesting results about who is issuing these summary notices and what their primary motivations are. Over 84% of the notices are sent to Google, not to the ISP hosting the material in question. While the removal of a Google link makes a site much more difficult to find, it does not remove the material from the Internet itself. Most of the corporations sending the notices are small Internet businesses. 55% of the notices sent to Google are requests to remove links to the complainant's direct business competitors. A surprisingly low 6% of notices were sent by the music and movie industry.
The most surprising results, however, concerned substantial legal flaws in the notices themselves. Over 30% of the notices raised serious concerns about the fairness and enforceability of their claims. In addition, 34% of these notices concerned material that was hosted on servers outside of the United States, where the DMCA Act has no legal jurisdiction. This raises complex questions about whether Google's removal of links constitutes control by U.S. laws over foreign information.

Ver também:
Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone.
Google: quem serve quem
Sobre o GMail
Who has the right to control your PC? "A personal computer is called a personal computer because it's yours," said Andrew Moss, Microsoft's senior director of technical policy. "Anything that runs on that computer, you should have control over."
Sounds simple, but it's not.
The average consumer PC is quickly filled with a myriad of applications, from instant messaging clients to media players to confusing DSL-networking software. Many of these make deep changes to the way a computer functions--often dropping automatic update features, for example--and rarely provide license agreements both technically specific and comprehensible to the nontechnical user.