Internet and e-mail policy and practice
including Notes on Internet E-mail


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05 Sep 2024

Internet Archive loses their CDL appeal Copyright Law

The Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) lends out scans of physical books, ensuring that each scan is lent to one person at a time. Publishers sued nd the Archive lost thoroughly in April 2023. The Archive appealed the decision to the Second Circuit court in New York. As I said at the time, the appeal seemed like a long shot since that is the same court that said that Google Books was OK, mostly because it didn't provide full copies of the books.

Yesterday the court published its decision and unsurprisingly, the Archive still lost.

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  posted at: 04:33 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/archappeal.html

15 Apr 2024

Layers and Gateways, a historical view Internet

One of the major issues in building the Internet or any large network is internetworking. If you have two networks built and run by different entities, how do you connect them together? The Internet addressed this problem in two ways. One is by layering, so that consistent upper layers can hide differences in lower layers. (In my office I have devices using wired Ethernet, fiber, wifi, and 5G, all looking the same at the Internet level.) Another is gateways, connecting things togeher and translating the differences, which to some extent is what fiber modems and routers do.

But the Internet is hardly the first time these questions have arisen.

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  posted at: 17:58 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/gauge.html

23 Mar 2024

You don't need a license to look for spam Email

Jay Fink had an interesting little business. If you lived in California, you could give him access to your email account, he'd look through the spam folder for spam that appeared to violate the state anti-spam law, and give you a spreadsheet and a file of PDFs. You could then sue the spammers, and if you won, you'd give Fink part of the money as his fee.

Last July the state of California told him to get a Private Investigator license or close his business. Since the license requires 6,000 hours of training in fields having nothing to do with looking at spam (e.g., arson investigation), Fink closed his business and sued the state. In January, each side filed motions and last week the judge issued the first significant order in the case. Fink didn't entirely win, but pretty close.

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  posted at: 21:52 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/finkwin.html

22 Jan 2024

Do you need a license to look for spam? Email

Jay Fink had an interesting little business. If you lived in California, you could give him access to your email account, he'd look through the spam folder for spam that appeared to violate the state anti-spam law, and give you a spreadsheet and a file of PDFs. You could then sue the spammers, and if you won, you'd give Fink part of the money as his fee.

While the federal CAN SPAM law largely preempts state laws, it lets states add their own penalties for fraudulent or misleading spam. California is one of the few states with a usable law, and one of the few that lets spam recipients sue in small claims court. The spammers tend to pay to settle rather than going to court (because they are pretty sure they'd lose) so this was a way to make life more difficult for the spammers, paid for by the spammers.

Last July, the state of California shut him down, saying that the stuff he was doing needed a Private Investigator (PI) license. The license is quite expensive and requires 6,000 hours of training in a field like arson investigation or insurance adjustment. Fink thought this was ridiculous, since none of the training would have anything to do with looking for spam, and the requirements were grossly excessive for what he did. He sued the state, supported by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.

Last week the parties filed the first substantive exchange, in which the state moved to dismiss the case, and Fink's lawyers said not so fast.

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  posted at: 17:56 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/spamfink.html

08 Jan 2024

Three weak copyright suits against OpenAI and one stronger one Copyright Law
In the past few months there have been four similar suits filed in New York against OpenAI and Microsoft. All four look superficially similar, and all are likely to be heard by the same judge, but one of them is a lot stronger than the other three.

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  posted at: 21:53 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/openai3.html

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