Legal
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Bill S. 978 - A bill to amend the criminal penalty provision for criminal infringement of a copyright, and for other purposes. This bill, sponsored by Amy Klobuchar, Dem. of Minnesota. Makes unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content a felony with a possible penalty of up to 5 years in prison.
Limestone Technologies Inc. Polygraph Professional Suite computerized polygraph system. A polygraph (popularly referred to as a lie detector ) measures and records several physiological indices such as blood pressure , pulse , respiration , and skin conductivity while the subject is asked and answers a series of questions. [ 1 ] The belief is that deceptive answers will produce physiological responses that can be differentiated from those associated with non-deceptive answers. The polygraph was invented in 1921 by John Augustus Larson , a medical student at the University of California at Berkeley and a police officer of the Berkeley Police Department in Berkeley, California. [ 2 ] According to Encyclopædia Britannica , the polygraph was on its 2003 list of greatest inventions, described by the company as inventions that "have had profound effects on human life for better or worse." [ 3 ]
Frank Tong is peering into another man's mind. The Vanderbilt University neuroscientist is sitting in front of a bank of monitors inside a dimly lit room. On the other side of a plate-glass window, an undergraduate lies immobile, his legs protruding from a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.
American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case. Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colo., woman to decrypt the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop computer no later than February 21--or face the consequences including contempt of court. Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee , ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order.
The Supreme Court’s 2011-2012 term begins Oct. 3 with arguments on the docket concerning everything from television profanity to warrantless GPS surveillance. Cases we are tracking also surround whether Congress may place public-domain works into copyright and whether “thought” can be patented. The justices hear about six dozen cases annually, and four dozen have been chosen so far. A number of crucial cases from the appellate courts are vying to be added. The Justice Department, for instance, is asking the nine justices to review the constitutionality of a law making it a crime to lie about being a decorated military veteran. And artists want the high court to decide whether they should get “performance” royalties when a consumer purchases a digital download from iTunes.
As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer , it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets. American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.
Igor Stravinsky. Photo: Wikimedia/Library of Congress. Congress may take books, musical compositions and other works out of the public domain, where they can be freely used and adapted, and grant them copyright status again, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
The US government dropped a nuclear bomb on "cyberlocker" site Megaupload today, seizing its domain names, grabbing $50 million in assets, and getting New Zealand police to arrest four of the site's key employees, including enigmatic founder Kim Dotcom. In a 72-page indictment unsealed in a Virginia federal court, prosecutors charged that the site earned more than $175 million since its founding in 2005, most of it based on copyright infringement.
For more than a year, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have argued that existing laws were insufficient to deal with the problem of "rogue sites" hosted overseas. They've been pushing bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act as essential weapons in the fight. But evidently, American law enforcement didn't get the memo that they were powerless against overseas file-sharing services. The day after the Internet's historic protest of SOPA and PIPA last week, the United States government unsealed an indictment against the people behind Megaupload, one of the largest sites on the Internet.
Updated 6:24pm with statement from Anonymous. Hacker collective Anonymous has hacked the Department of Justice and Universal Music‘s websites to protest the government’s decision to shut down the popular Megaupload file-sharing site. The Department of Justice’s website has been intermittently down and up in the past hour, and we can only imagine hackers and government agents fighting for control like a scene out of a movie. Universal Music’s homepage has been down for the past hour as well.
Gizmodo is making some changes to its comment system that will require you to log in with a Facebook, Google, or Twitter account. You must convert your account to one of these services in order to continue using your account. Converting your account on Gizmodo will do so on all Gawker Media Sites.
Jailbreaking or rooting your phone is pretty much a nerd birthright at this point. But soon it could once again be deemed illegal, if the acts' exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act runs out . That's where you come in. If that exemption runs out, it would be illegal to install a clean version of Android over top of carrier junkware or to jailbreak an iPhone so you can download apps outside of Apple's walled garden. Apple's fought especially hard to keep jailbreaking on the periphery of iOS, and we'd expect nothing less than a concerted effort on its part to stand in the way of an extension for the DMCA exception. The other thing to take note of?