For most of day 2 of this week's meeting on the WIPO Development Agenda, we counted. We heard statements from Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and South Africa about the importance of protecting the public domain, balancing intellectual property rights with human rights, and the very real problems facing developing countries ....

While the Senate floor was
href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2126247">rejecting one flag
amendment, the Senate Commerce committee was letting another two—the broadcast flag and audio flag—slip
by. Senator Sununu spoke strongly against the flags, noting that we don't need technology mandates that inject federal bureaucrats into technology design decisions, but...

EFF went to court today to tell a federal judge that the government should not be allowed to use the "state secrets privilege" to preempt our class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The Department of Justice argues that even if the NSA program is illegal, pursuing the case might...

As if it wasn't convoluted enough, the 159-page Stevens telecoms reform bill -- which now includes broadcast and audio flag provisions -- got buried under an avalanche of 200 proposed amendments today. At the markup committee meeting, senators became quickly mired in discussions over a tiny fraction of...

This week the Department of Justice issued a 100-page "progress report," [3mb PDF] measuring its activities in the intellectual property arena (copyright, trademark, patents, trade secrets) against the October 2004 Report [also a big PDF] issued by the DoJ's "IP Task Force" (this task force was headed by...

Kim Zetter at Salon.com reports: "In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once employed at the center.... The former workers say company supervisors told...