April 30, 2007

Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Microsoft in Patent Dispute

Link: Court Favors Microsoft in Patent Fight - washingtonpost.com.

The Supreme Court sided with Microsoft Corp. on Monday, finding that U.S. patent law doesn't apply to software sent to foreign countries.

In a 7-1 decision, the court rejected AT&T's position that it is entitled to damages for every Windows-based computer manufactured outside the United States using technology that compresses speech into computer code.

The telecom company had said computers running the Windows operating system infringe on AT&T technology for a digital speech coder system.

The court cannot say that Congress intended "to place the information Microsoft dispatched from the United States in a separate category" from blueprints, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. "The presumption that United States law governs domestically but does not rule the world applies with particular force in patent law."

Justice John Paul Stevens dissented.

"Unlike a blueprint that merely instructs a user how to do something, software actually causes infringing conduct to occur," wrote Stevens. "It is more like a roller that causes a player piano to produce sound than sheet music that tells a pianist what to do."

When a patented product is manufactured and marketed in a foreign country, U.S. patent law generally does not apply.

But AT&T said Microsoft ran afoul of a 1984 law making it patent infringement for a company to ship components of a patented product to a foreign country for assembly there. A U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed with AT&T.

Microsoft ships its Windows-operating system to foreign countries on master disks or via electronic transmissions. That data is copied by foreign companies that install it on the computers they manufacture.

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 30, 2007 at 09:23 PM in Globalization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers - washingtonpost.com

Link: Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers - washingtonpost.com.

A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about "the daily ins and outs of being a mom" was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.

As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 30, 2007 at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2007

Slave Labor Helped Build UVA; UVA Apologizes

Link: University apologizes for using slaves to build school - CNN.com.

The University of Virginia's board marked founder Thomas Jefferson's birthday with an apology for the school's use of slave labor between 1819 and 1865.

The board of visitors unanimously passed an apology resolution on April 13, the 264th anniversary of Jefferson's birth, but did not announce the action until Tuesday.

...Slaves in Virginia helped build some of the first buildings at University of Virginia, which opened in 1825, and the university continued to use slave labor for four decades after that.

"The board expresses its particular regret for the employment of enslaved persons in these years," the resolution reads. It says "the notion of involuntary servitude is repugnant and incompatible with the ideals upon which this university was founded."

...Nine percent of the university's undergraduate students are black, according to university spokeswoman Carol Wood.

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 26, 2007 at 09:17 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Yale Hosts Access to Knowledge Conference

Link: Yale Information Society Project | Events | A2K2 2007.

The last several years have witnessed the coalescing of the Access-To-Knowledge (A2K) social movement that champions human rights, human development, and the public interest as the focal points of innovation and information policy.

I'm in New Haven for the A2K2 conference, which includes leading civil society and academic leaders from around the globe working on promoting access to knowledge. If you're around New Haven this weekend, it will be well worth attending.

Yale’s ISP 2006 Access to Knowledge (A2K) conference advanced our commitment to building a broad conceptual framework of "Access to Knowledge" that can foster powerful coalitions between diverse groups. The A2k conference brought together over 300 leading scholars and activists from over 40 countries to participate in the construction of an intellectual framework for access to knowledge. Full conference proceedings and foundational resources for Access to Knowledge are available at the Yale A2K conference wiki.

This year, on April 27th-29th 2007, the weekend of World Intellectual Property Day, the A2K2 conference will be a pivotal event mobilizing the A2K coalition. A2K2 will further build the coalition amongst the institutions and stakeholders that crystallized at the first landmark conference, help set the agenda for access to knowledge policy and advocacy, and deepen the understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of access to knowledge issues. Developing both a theoretical framework and delving into the details of practical implementation, the program will focus on mobilizing the private sector, governments, technologists, and civil society around A2K issues. A2K2's policy panels will be structured towards tangible legal and technological solutions and collaborative strategies for policy makers and individual institutions.

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 26, 2007 at 06:39 AM in Globalization | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 17, 2007

Dalrymple on the British Raj

Link: How the World Works - Salon.com.

Andrew Leonard praises William Dalyrymple's recent review of two books on the Raj:

His article is the kind of book review during which, about a third of the way through, the reader realizes that the books that must be read immediately are those that have been written by the reviewer, and not the unhappy subjects of his keen intelligence. This impulse was only confimed by Dalrymple's closing paragraphs.

...In 1600, when the East India Company was founded, Britain was generating 1.8 percent of the world's GDP while India was producing 22.5 percent. By 1870, at the peak of the Raj, Britain was generating 9.1 percent, while India had been reduced a poor third-world nation, a symbol across the globe of famine and deprivation.

Today, things are slowly returning to their traditional pattern. Last year the richest man in the UK was for the first time an ethnic Indian, Lakshmi Mittal, and last month news has come that Britain's largest steel manufacturer, Corus, has jsut been brought by Tata, an Indian company. Extraordinary as it is, the rise of India and China, seen from the wider perspective, is merely the rebalancing of the ancient equilibirum of world trade, with Europeans no longer appearing as gun-toting, gunboat-riding colonial masters but instead reverting to their traditional role -- eager co

nsumers of the much-celebreated manufactures, luxuries, and services of the East.

And so I await a knock on the door from the FedEx man, who should be delivering to me a copy of William Dalrymple's "The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857," any second.

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 17, 2007 at 11:57 AM in Globalization | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 16, 2007

Video on Servers Around World

Link: Threat for Big Media: Guerrilla Video Sites - WSJ.com.

Unlike YouTube, which stores videos on its own servers in the U.S., the guerrilla sites offer menus of shows that are often stored on servers in places like France and China. The sites act as gateways to pirated material offered on other sites and say they don't break copyright laws because they don't have the material on their own computers. Content owners say the sites are abetting copyright infringement, which is illegal.

Whatever the legality, it's tough to clamp down on sites that just about anyone can set up with links to video stored on computers around the world. "If one host gets shut down, there are three others that are going to pop up," says Mr. Martinez, who covers the site's expenses by carrying some advertising.

... Like many similar sites, YouTVpc relies heavily on video-sharing sites outside the U.S., such as a French outfit called Dailymotion and Ouou.com in China. Mr. Martinez estimates that about 40% of the shows and films on the site -- including episodes of "Desperate Housewives " and Fox's "Prison Break" are provided by Ouou.com.

... Other sites have re-emerged quickly after shutdowns. QuickSilverScreen.com says it suspended the site in December after News Corp.'s Fox threatened to sue its U.S.-based owner for $150,000 for every episode of a Fox show to which the site linked. The owner handed over control to two Europeans and the hosting moved to Malaysia.

... About two weeks later, The Go Daddy Group Inc., the company that handles registration of YouTVpc's Web address, clamped down. Go Daddy stopped directing people to YouTVpc's site when they typed YouTVpc.com into their Web browsers. Go Daddy official Ben Butler says his company acted at the MPAA's request but relented after Mr. Martinez submitted a statement swearing his site doesn't infringe copyrights. Mr. Butler says he hasn't heard from the MPAA recently.

Since when has GoDaddy gotten into the business of policing content on websites--without even a court order? Do they believe that they might be held to be a secondary infringer?

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 16, 2007 at 10:48 PM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Internet Helps Foster Terror Networks

Link: A World Wide Web of terrorist plotting - Los Angeles Times.

SARAJEVO, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA — They never met face to face, but the two young zealots became brother warriors in the new land of jihad: the Internet.

Investigators say their bond made them central figures in a terrorism network that spanned eight countries, involved more than 30 suspects and hatched plots in Washington, Toronto, London and Sarajevo.

Maximus was the online moniker of Mirsad Bektasevic, a lanky Bosnian refugee with a dark stare and a hunger for action. At 18, he returned from Sweden to this war-scarred city, where he assembled an arsenal for a suicide attack and filmed a "martyrdom" video.

Irhabi007 was Younis Tsouli, a Moroccan living in London with his diplomat father, investigators say. Hunched day and night over his computer, the diminutive 22-year-old allegedly served as a pioneering cyber-operative for Al Qaeda, oversaw Bektasevic's mission and was at the hub of other plots.

Their case shows that the Internet has become a virtual training camp and operations center replacing the Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and Bosnia that produced a legion of fighters, formed them into cells and launched them at targets.

The soldiers of this looser network were more technologically and culturally agile than the grim fanatics who executed attacks in the past, according to trial evidence, court documents and interviews with investigators, defense lawyers, family and friends. They spoke more English than Arabic and listened to the rap of Kanye West along with the harangues of Abu Musab Zarqawi. Their Western ways enabled them to communicate and cross borders with ease. And investigators say they had a youthful disregard for life.

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 16, 2007 at 10:10 PM in Digitization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

What Can Bush Do About Darfur?

Link: Driving Up the Price of Blood - New York Times.

Suggestions from Nicholas Kristof:

What is harder to fathom is President Bush’s refusal to stand up to the genocide for four years. Why not impose a no-fly zone, why not hold an international conference on Darfur, why not invite survivors to the White House for a photo-op, why not give a prime-time speech about Darfur?

Perhaps the explanation for Mr. Bush’s passivity is the same as the explanation for Mr. Bashir’s brutality. Maybe Mr. Bush has made his calculations, looked at the number of calls and letters he gets about Darfur, weighed the pros and cons, and decided that Americans really don’t care enough about genocide to make him pay a major price for allowing it to continue.

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 16, 2007 at 09:50 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 13, 2007

US Food Scandal?: Over Third of Aid Money Wasted on Shipping

Link: Oversight Report Says U.S. Food Aid Practices Are Wasteful - New York Times.

The United States government’s food aid programs are riddled with wasteful practices and hit by rising logistical costs that have halved the amount of food delivered to the hungry in Africa, Asia and Latin America over the past five years, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office released yesterday.

The G.A.O., which briefed Congress last month on the preliminary findings of its yearlong investigation of food aid, yesterday laid out for the first time what it described as the “inherently inefficient” sale of American-grown food in poor countries to finance antipoverty programs run by aid groups.

Under this practice, known as monetization, food is shipped at great expense across oceans to the world’s poorest countries. There, managers at nonprofit groups double as grain traders, selling the food on local markets to generate cash for development programs.

Thomas Melito, the G.A.O.’s director of international affairs and trade, said this practice was a highly inefficient way to raise money for development, given that over a third of food aid spending has been consumed by the rapidly rising costs of ocean shipping.

Under American law, virtually all food given as aid must be grown in the United States, which means it has to be shipped out.

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 13, 2007 at 08:45 PM in Globalization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Videos of "New Haven School" Conference

Hat tip: Chris Borgen of Opinio Juris.

Those like me unable to attend the "New" New Haven School Conference at Yale Law School might console themselves with videos...  Michael Reisman's opening critical commentary offers an important starting point.

Panel I: Historical Perspectives on the New Haven School

Moderator:

• Michael Reisman, Yale Law School

Presenters:

• Paul Berman, Princeton University,
        A Pluralist Approach to International Law

• Christopher Borgen, St. John’s University,
        Whose Public, Whose Order?: Imperium, Region, and Normative    Friction

Discussants:

• Sarah Cleveland, Harvard University

• Siegfried Wiessner, St. Thomas University

• Andrew Willard, University of Iowa

Panel II: Applications of the New Haven School: Professional Scholarship

Moderator:

• Harold Hongju Koh, Yale Law School

Presenters:

• Rebecca Bratspies, City University of New York,
        Crafting a Green Landing for Spaceship Earth: Some Navigational Advice From The New Haven School

• Janet Levit, University of Tulsa,
       Bottom-Up Transnational Lawmaking: Reflections on the New Haven School of International Law

• Hari Osofsky, University of Oregon,
        A Law and Geography Perspective on the New Haven School

• Melissa Waters, Washington and Lee University,
        Normativity in the “New” New Haven School: Assessing the Legitimacy of International Legal Norms Created by the World’s Judges

Panel III: Applications of the New Haven School: Student Scholarship

Moderators:
• Paul Dubinsky, Wayne State University

• Noah Novogrodsky, Georgetown University

• Beth Van Schaack, Santa Clara University

Presenters:

• Michael Gottesman, Yale Law School,
       Revising the Golden Rule: Reciprocity and the Geneva Conventions in Modern Conflicts

• Nicole Hallett, Yale Law School,
        National Human Rights Institutions: Bringing Human Rights Home

• Ji Li, Yale Law School,
        From “See You in Court!” to “See You in Geneva!” An Empirical Study of the Role of Social Norms in International Trade Dispute Resolution

• Dakota Rudesill, Center for Strategic & International Studies,
        Precision War and Responsibility

Panel IV: Is there a “New” New Haven School?

Moderators:• Laura Dickinson, Princeton University 

• Oona Hathaway, Yale Law School

Discussants:

• Robert Ahdieh, Emory University

• Rosa Brooks, Open Society Institute

• Ryan Goodman, Harvard Law School

• Derek Jinks, University of Texas

Posted by Anupam Chander on April 13, 2007 at 03:17 PM in Globalization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack