Leftovers gone and plates cleared, Copycense Clippings weighs in a tad larger than expected, given last week’s holiday. Articles include the joy of watching DVDs of The Wire and The Sopranos in concentrated doses; the movie industry passing out spyware to colleges and universities; Maryland taxing computer services; and France’s ill-considered plan to terminate Internet access to consumers who are suspected of illegally downloading entertainment content.

This is Copycense.

Articles of the Week

Adam Liptak. Doling Out Other People’s Money. The New York Times. Nov. 26, 2007. Throw a million to an eating disorder program; $5 million to George Washington University’s law school for an antitrust settlement concerning settlement prices; and a random mill here and there for various and sundry causes, and all of a sudden you’re talking about real money. Meet cy pres, the flip side of the class action lawsuit. Categories: Cases & Litigation.

if:book. The Novelodeon. Nov. 26, 2007. A delightfully tasty article about the joys of waiting for cable series to be released on DVD, then watching the entire series sequentially in a concentrated dose. This is how we were introduced to The Wire, whose Season 4 gets released on DVD next Tuesday, and whose fifth and final season begins January 2008. Categories: Film & Video.

Security Fix (WashingtonPost.com). MPAA University ‘Toolkit’ Raises Privacy Concerns. Nov. 23, 2007. “Rootkit” redux: the content lobby surreptitiously spies on colleges and universities, exposing the schools’ network in the process. Columnist Krebs identifies two open-source monitoring tools — including Snort (a tool that captures detailed information about all traffic flowing across a network) and ntop (a that captures data feeds from tools like Snort and display the data in more user-friendly graphics and charts) — in the “toolkit” the movie industry offers schools identified as havens for illegal music downloading. We want to know why any institution would think of installing this software on its network, even without a known security risk? Categories: Education; File Sharing, P2P & Downloads; Open Source; Privacy & Security.

Quote of the Week

“We could not agree more that anyone who truly wants to be President needs to understand the age they are living in. Each candidate should be asked and expected to answer how they would change or influence the copyright policy and law in the coming decade - policies and laws that affect every single American.

“… Thanksgiving or not, here is where this rare agreement comes to an end. With an accurate appreciation of how important copyright law and policy is to Americans, perhaps candidates of every stripe for every office should focus a little less on Hollywood’s agenda and more on the consumer’s rights and concerns. — Digital Freedom.

Digital Freedom. How Much Should Copyright Issues Matter? A Lot. Nov. 21, 2007. Digital Freedom’s response to Copyright Alliance propagandist publicity campaign (see Clippings below). We believe the group has summed up this issue quite nicely. Categories: Politics & Government.

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