Originally passed by Congress and signed into law in 1998, COPA was supposed to protect children from “harmful” Internet content.  The wording of the law was very broad and would have required website operators to implement a number of measures to enforce “contemporary community standards,” reports Ars Technica.  According to the ACLU blog, it would have even barred adults from seeing material that was not appropriate for a child and would have affected, among other things, the online availability of sexual health information.

The law has been struck down again and again and never enforced in its 10 years of existence.  For instance, in 2007, the District Court ruled it unconstitutional.  It found that COPA violated the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution, ruling that “COPA prohibits much more speech than is necessary to further Congress’ compelling interest.”  The government appealed once again, bringing us to yesterday’s development.

“In a unanimous decision, the court ruled (PDF) that COPA was ‘not narrowly tailored’ enough to serve the government’s goal of protecting children from content on the Internet, it was not the least restrictive means available, and was substantially overbroad.

The government now has the same decision to make as it has many times in the past: whether to appeal to the Supreme Court (again), or let it die.  It wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see the case appealed one last time.”  Enough already!

Here are some selected resources related to copyright law and fair use:

• Online Digital Slider for Copyright  From the American Library Association’s Office of Information Technology Policy, the most recent useful tool for determining whether a work is still under copyright.  See image below.
• LLRX resources on copyright  Law and technology resources for legal professionals.
• Checklist for Fair Use (PDF)  From the Copyright Management Center at IUPUI.  IUPUI has other reliable information on copyright.
• Fair Use guidelines  From Dartmouth.
• Fair Use Chart  From Association for Research Libraries.
• Teacher’s Guide to Fair Use and Copyright   “Modeling Honesty and Resourcefulness.”
• Creative Commons (CC)  How creators can share their work but retain some rights.
• How to choose a CC license that works for you.

A study released by a Library of Congress digital information program reviewed the impact of various laws on digital preservation of copyrighted works, reports Library Journal.  Proposals were offered for legislative reform, as well as suggestions for non-legislative solutions.

Suggestions included:

• That countries establish “laws and policies” to encourage and enable the digital preservation of at-risk copyrighted materials and that these apply to “all non-profit libraries, archives, museums and other institutions,” provided they do not seek commercial advantage;
• That preservation laws and policies apply equally to all categories of copyrighted materials, including “literary, artistic, musical and dramatic works, as well as motion pictures and sound recordings;”
• That laws cover all copyrighted materials in all media and formats, “hard copy or electronic, born digital or digitized for preservation;”
• That “preservation institutions” be allowed to actively harvest publicly available content (such as web sites) for preservation purposes;
• That “preservation institutions” be permitted to “proactively preserve at risk copyrighted materials before they deteriorate, are damaged or are lost.

The need for more significant research and discussion was also identified in order to form policies and best practices, including research “on the national level” to determine “whether and under what circumstances access to digital preservation copies can be provided without harm to right holders,” and “to reexamine the interaction between copyright and private agreements as it relates to digital preservation.”

Solutions in the digital preservation arena are increasingly urgent.  LJ notes that although the report recognizes that copyright and related laws as just one obstacle to digital preservation activities, it clarifies that “there is no question that those laws present significant challenges.”

The new wiretapping bill, H.R. 6304, just posted about was quickly signed into law by President George W. Bush, and the ACLU and other civil liberties groups immediately filed suit, according to a Yahoo News report.

Statements from the two camps highlight their differing opinions.  “This law will protect the liberties of our citizens while maintaining the vital flow of intelligence,” Bush said at the White House ceremony marking the bill’s signing.

The ACLU and others said, “The lawsuit asks the court to stop the government from enforcing the new unconstitutional wiretapping law, which will give the Bush administration unfettered power to spy on Americans without warrants or judicial oversight.”

The bill, which authorizes U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop without court approval on foreign targets believed to be outside the United States, has been opposed by many who believe it allows warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of Americans who communicate with them. The bill is supposed to minimize such eavesdropping on Americans, but critics say the safeguards are inadequate.

H.R. 6304 was especially controversial because it provides protection to telecom companies that took part in a warrantless domestic spying program Bush began after the September 11 attacks, as reported in my previous post.

Senator Barack Obama’s perceived flip-flop on the bill disappointed and/or angered many of his supporters. It was believed he would support efforts to block legislation with a telecommunications immunity provision, but Obama voted for the overall bill after casting a losing vote for an amendment that would strip the immunity provision.

“Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, I’ve chosen to support the current compromise,” Obama said on his campaign Web site.

Photo by stargazer95050.  Creative Commons license.

The word was out earlier at the New York Times and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that wiretapping bill H.R. 6304 had passed with the help of 21 democrats voting in favor of it along with all Republicans.

I decided to wait for this post until I had a list of how Senators voted and, as I expected, it appeared on Open Congress today.

They note that after almost a year of wrangling with the White House, the bill was finalized to modernize and broaden the government’s ability to wiretap, and to provide retroactive legal immunity to telecoms who previously supplied customer phone data to the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program from 2001 to 2007.  The latter is the provision around which most disagreement and dissent has occurred, especially from the EFF and like-minded civil libertarians.

The twenty one Democrats who voted in favor of the bill, including Barack Obama, are listed here.

Three amendments were introduced before the vote on the final bill, but all were rejected.  Open Congress has more information on the amendments and the vote results

Seven Democrats and Independent Joe Lieberman (CT) voted against all of the telecom-immunity-altering amendments as well as voting in favor of the overall bill.  They include Evan Bayh (IN), Thomas Carper (DE), Daniel Inouye (HI), Mary Landrieu (LA), Ben Nelson (NE), Mark Pryor (AR), John Rockefeller (WV).

“It is an immeasurable tragedy that just after its return from the Fourth of July holiday, the Senate has chosen to pass a bill that betrays the spirit of 1776 by radically expanding the president’s spying powers and granting immunity to the companies that colluded in his illegal surveillance program,” said Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “This so-called compromise bill represents a shameful capitulation to the overreaching demands of an imperial president. As Senator Leahy put it in yesterday’s debate, the retroactive immunity provision of the bill upends the scales of justice and makes Congress and the courts handmaidens to the White House’s cover-up of its illegal surveillance program.”

TechCrunch, which endorsed Barack Obama partially on his policies towards telecommunications companies, said yesterday, “In voting for the bill, Obama acted in direct contradiction to his earlier statements.  In 2007 Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman, said ‘To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.’”

Senator John McCain was not present for the vote but there is existing information about his views.

For a broader outline of how this bill will change the government’s wiretapping policies, Open Congress suggests this post from ArsTechnica entitled The new FISA compromise: it’s worse than you think.

There has also been discussion of how campaign contribuitons might have affected telecom amnesty votes.

Image by Scruffy Dan and Breanne. Creative Commons license.

I really don’t know what to think — laugh or cry — about this report I found on Slashdot that The Washington Times claims that at least one senior official in the Department of Homeland Security is considering replacing air travelers’ boarding passes with a GPS-enabled shock bracelet.

The device would make it possible to monitor the whereabouts of each passenger and his/her baggage (OK, I wouldn’t mind if they knew where my bags were), and to shock passengers remotely if they got unruly.

The promotional video from Lamperd Less Lethal website makes it sound quite reasonable that the whole family would like to be tagged with this GPS-enabled, shock bracelet to make us feel “safe” when flying our unfriendly skies.

So, is this a joke, or what?  The Times says that according to a letter from DHS official, Paul S. Ruwaldt of the Science and Technology Directorate, office of Research and Development, to the inventor whom he had previously met with, he wrote, “To make it clear, we [the federal government] are interested in…the immobilizing security bracelet, and look forward to receiving a written proposal.”  In one part of the letter, Mr. Ruwaldt confirmed, “It is conceivable to envision a use to improve air security, on passenger planes.”  To be fair, the letter principally addresses detaining people at borders.

The Times author goes on to ask, “Would every paying airline passenger flying on a commercial airplane be mandated to wear one of these devices?  I cringe at the thought.  Not only could it be used as a physical restraining device, but also as a method of interrogation, according to the same aforementioned letter from Mr. Ruwaldt.”  Of course, if not everyone were required to don a bracelet, I guess that airline personnel would be applying one of those famous FBI profiles on the spot to decide who would have the honor.

The Center for Social Media at American University’s School of Communication has a report on best practices for making online videos within the boundaries of fair use.  Anyone creating videos that might involve others’ work in some way will find the report informative, guiding them through the copyright law maze, along with the Center’s previous report, Recut, Reframe, Recycle.

Some best practice uses include:

• Commenting on or Critiquing of Copyrighted Material
• Using Copyrighted Material for Illustration or Example
• Capturing Copyrighted Material Incidentally or Accidentally
• Reproducing, Reposting, or Quoting in Order to Memorialize, Preserve, or Rescue and Experience, An Event, or a Cultural Phenomenon
• Copying, Reposting, and Recirculating a Work or Part of a Work for Purposes of Launching a Discussion
• Quoting in Order to Recombine Elements to make a New Work that Depends for its Meaning on (Often Unlikely) Relationships Between the Elements

This guide to best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights, they say.  It’s not a guide to using Creative Commons licenses, material that is already free to use without considering copyright, nor to using material that someone wants to license but cannot trace back to an owner — the so-called “orphan works” problem.

The best practices address the most common situations today.  “Inevitably, online video makers will find themselves in situations that are hybrids of those described… or will develop new practices.  Then, they can be guided by the same basic values of fairness, proportionality, and reasonableness that inform this code of practices.  As community practices develop and become more public, the norms that emerge from these practices will themselves provide additional information on what is fair use.”  [via iLibrarian]

Senator Hatch:  “How many times have we heard claims that the Protect America Act would permit the government to spy on innocent American families overseas, on their vacations? Or innocent American soldiers overseas serving their country? Or innocent American students who are simply studying abroad?

“Painting this type of picture only feeds the delusions of those who wear tinfoil hats around their house and think that Nine-Eleven was an inside job”.

That’s a strong statement, notes the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).  Who exactly is Senator Hatch referring to, they ask?

EFF goes on to quote from articles published in USA Today, the New York Times, and even the Wall Street Journal which said in March of this year, “According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches … The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing.”

The Protect American Act lets telecom companies off the hook for illegally sending “millions of Americans’ private domestic communications to the NSA for at least five years,” states EFF.  They say that Hatch has devolved to name calling since the case with actual evidence and substance is a lost cause.  You can watch a video of this portion of Hatch’s testimony on the EFF site.

Photo by Paradigm.  Creative Commons license.

An AP Impact story appearing today in both the Seattle P-I and the New York Times says that Americans may once again be investigated based on certain characteristics instead of suspicion of actual wrong-doing.

The Justice Department is developing a policy that will allow the FBI to consider U.S. citizens or legal residents guilty until proved innocent if they are Muslim, Arab, or appear to have some connection to a country that might harbor terrorists.

“Although President Bush has disavowed targeting suspects based on their race or ethnicity, the new rules would allow the FBI to consider those factors among a number of traits that could trigger a national security investigation,” the article states.

Under the new policy, the FBI would be permitted to put together a profile of traits that are deemed suspicious, although they are not spelled out specifically.  These might include certain foreign travel, access to weapons or military training, as well as race and ethnicity.

The updated guidelines for domestic operations are expected late this summer and do not require the approval of Congress.  They certainly bring back memories of the bad old days when the FBI put together files on anyone the government upper echelon didn’t like, such as civil rights groups, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, and anti-war activists, notes Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Justice Department claims the new guidelines are narrower than the old disavowed COINTELPRO program.

A bill supporting legal amnesty to telecoms that aided the government’s warrantless wiretapping program was passed in the House of Representatives last Friday.  The question arises, who do they “represent?”

Wired Network Blog reports that of the 220 Democratic members of the House who voted against telecom amnesty in March, 94  switched their vote last Friday, “supporting a bill ironed out by the House leadership that expands the government’s ability to conduct blanket wiretaps inside American telecom facilities and freeing those companies from the 40 or so lawsuits pending in Federal court.”

MAPLight.org analyzed the contributions from telecom political action groups to Congress and found that 88 percent of the Democrats who changed to supporting immunity (83 Dems of the 94) received PAC contributions from Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint during the last three years (Jan. 2005-Mar. 2008).  Those who switched their votes received, on average, 40 percent more money in campaign contributions over the last three years from Sprint, Verizon and AT&T’s political action committees.

For instance, those who changed their votes collected $8,359 dollars from those PACs from January 2005 through March 2008, while those who did not change their opposition collected $4,987.

For all House members, including Republicans, those supporting immunity collected nearly twice as much money from those PACs than those who did not: $9,659 to $4,810.

MAPlight.org did not say that any member’s vote was purchased, but says the correlation raises questions.  MAPLight.org is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that tracks all campaign contributions given to members of Congress, and how every member of Congress votes on every bill, “revealing connections between money and politics never before possible to see,” they say.  Photo by Mysterious Mimir.  Creative Commons license.