Yesterday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the Broadcast Flag--and its younger, brattier, brother, the RIAA's proposed "Audio Flag"--swung a little wildly from its pre-ordained course. It began with committee chairman Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye, his Democrat counterpart, declaring, as with all good anti-piracy measures, that...

The DOJ's demand for one week worth of search histories has raised the concern that the government will go fishing into the data set, looking for searches and for keywords that worry the government. Even if IP numbers or other identifying data is not provided, what is to prevent the...

A while back, we wrote an open letter to SunnComm, the manufacturer responsible for the insecure MediaMax DRM software installed on audio CDs. As an initial formal response, SunnComm has released lists of all the titles, regardless of label, that use the MediaMax 5 and ...

On Wednesday, a New Mexico state court judge denied a summary judgment motion made by Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and permitted the plaintiffs in an important e-voting challenge to move forward with discovery. The suit, filed in January of 2005, challenges the state's use of paperless e-voting systems in...

The U.S. Copyright Office received 74 comments proposing exemptions to the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision as part of its triennial DMCA rulemaking proceeding. In this and subsequent posts, we will summarize the key exemption proposals made in this first round of comments. If you can offer specific factual or...

Last week, we told you about a troublesome "phone home" feature in iTunes MiniStore -- one of the new "improvements" in iTunes announced at MacWorld. The MiniStore looks at what you listen to and suggests additional songs and artists you might like, but they were some big problems with...