] If by the end of tomorrow, we have a way forward that can
] provide a better balance between the issues that has been
] mentioned of legitimacy and of transparency on the one
] hand without stifling innovation and creativity on the
] other hand, we will have contributed in a very positive
] way to the general direction in which we want to move
] forward.

Vint Cerf also has some comments in here -- I don't necessarily
agree with him -- he's basically saying that there isn't a problem
when there is: Verisign is suing ICANN so that they can do whatever
they want with .com/.net with no oversight!

UN Global Forum on Internet Governance

] Internet music piracy is not responsible for declining CD
] sales, claim the researchers behind a major new
] statistical study.

Once again...

Net music piracy 'does not harm record sales'

] CircleID: You have been quoted in the media saying "This
] is War" in reference to the VeriSign vs. ICANN lawsuit.
] And it sounds like in this war there will be causalities
] -- regardless of which direction results of the lawsuit
] go. Could you elaborate on any specific dangers that may
] lie ahead?
]
] Jonathan Weinberg: What I meant was that up until now,
] VeriSign and ICANN have maintained a facade of
] cooperation -- they may not have liked each other, but
] they had to live with each other. VeriSign has now
] dropped the facade. There are dangers a-plenty. If
] VeriSign should win this lawsuit, it will be empowered to
] make unilateral changes in the COM and NET registries
] that will be harmful to the DNS as a whole. If ICANN
] should prevail, it may be emboldened to extend regulation
] and micro-management far beyond where they're warranted.
] The most likely possibility is that the parties will
] settle, and we'll continue going down to hell in a
] hand-basket, much as we've been all along.

More details of the messy contractual relationship between V$
and ICANN.

CircleID: Did ICANN Over Regulate VeriSign?

] From the first U.S. copyright statute in 1790 until the
] Copyright Act of 1976, the U.S. had a conditional
] copyright system that limited copyright protection to
] those who took affirmative steps to claim it.
]
] Our tradition of conditional copyright stands in stark
] contrast to what we have today — an unconditional system
] that grants copyright protection whether or not an author
] desires it.

aka abandonware ... check out eldred.cc for more info on this and their proposed Public Domain Enhancment Act that would require
copyrights to be renewed for $1 every 50 years just to keep track
of who holds them to avoid this orphaned-works mess.

Lessig and Copyright renewal...

] MARCH 23, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - A spam e-mail operation
] that sent out e-mails falsely claiming to be from PayPal
] or America Online Inc., tricking hundreds of consumers
] into entering their credit card, banking and user account
] information on fake PayPal and AOL Web sites, has been
] stopped by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal
] Trade Commission.

Yay.

Fake PayPal, AOL spam operations stopped by FTC, DOJ - Computerworld

]
] JERSEY CITY, March 22 - Addressing concerns that
] terrorists could bring nuclear weapons or traditional
] explosives into the country in containerized cargo,
] federal customs officials said Monday that New York and
] New Jersey ports would be the first to have technology to
] scan every truck leaving American ports.

Truck Scanners Coming to All Port Terminals

This is what I've been saying all along: as "convenient" as unique
namespaces seem to be, they are a disaster in situations
where there's no "real-world" top of the hierarchy for the arbiter to sit upon. This is exactly what we have with WIPO, ICANN, etc.

The best unique ID is a big random number, i.e. a key.

Get Out of My Namespace

] TAINAN, Taiwan, Saturday, March 20 — The president and vice
] president of Taiwan were shot in this southern Taiwan city Friday
] afternoon on the eve of bitterly contested national elections, but
] neither suffered life-threatening injuries and the central
] election commission said that the vote would proceed as
] scheduled today.

Whoa...

Taiwanese Leaders Survive Shooting Incident Ahead of Vote

] Free software is an attempt to use the 18th century
] principles for the encouragement of the diffusion of
] knowledge to transform the technical environment of human
] beings.

Eben Moglen is the fucking man! This was a follow-up to the talk Darl McBride gave there a few weeks back.

Transcript of Eben Moglen's talk at Harvard

] If big pharma price-discriminates rationally, it
] guarantees the following query from some representative
] in some committee hearing: "How come a hospital in Lagos
] spends $1 for this pill, but the local Catholic hospital
] in my district must pay $5,000?" And, of course, in the
] Inquisition that is congressional testimony, there is no
] effective way to answer such a question.

Wired 12.02: Lessig says access to drugs in the third world not an IP issue