Luis Villa’s Blog

Some bits before I head out for the weekend:

• Microsoft’s new media player is going to allow sharing of files wirelessly with your friends. Of course, to make it RIAA-safe, they’ll wrap it in their own DRM when it leaves the device- regardless of the copyright status of the file. It is sort of Grokster in reverse- MS’s technology will force violation of the terms of the CC license whenever people choose to share CC content, so while MS won’t be directly violating the license, it will certainly be contributing to that license violation. Will be interesting to see if CC says anything official about this, and if so, in what way they’ll choose to frame it.
• James Governor thinks lawyers are A’OK. That’s good, maybe redmonk will hire me when I drop out of law school ;)
• The state of New York’s court system (which promulgates the behavioral rules for lawyers) is trying to make basically all communication about law which mentions specific lawyers or firms really, really painful. It would basically kill any blogging by New York bar members. I guess another reason to look for jobs in the virtual world, or the Valley or, say, in NC :)
• Spamhaus, a UK spam blacklist, has been settled against in the US for $11M, and are going to refuse to pay it. (They lost the case, but basically because they didn’t show up for court.) This is a really interesting example of the jurisdiction problems that still plague internet law, despite Tim Wu’s excellent book claiming that such things are mostly behind us. (Hopefully my lazy self will get organized and post a review of the book at First Movers soon.)