Free Culture @ NYU

The good ol’ days, they’s gone, they are.

A study of 900 “DMCA takedown notices” shows that a third of them would likely be defeated in court:
Study suggests DMCA takedown regs abused
Also, don’t forget about our protest on Wednesday!
-Tom

Almost missed this… Slate.com has an article mentioning our protest here. I’ll take “motley” as a compliment.
In more protest news, keep your calendars open for November 30th. We’re planning something at Tower records. More info to come in the next day or two.
-fcb

Sounds like Sony is officially recalling all the CD’s it has shipped with the rootkit, before we even got a chance to take action ourselves! They’re also going to have an exchange program for people who already have the infected discs, and it sounds like they’re going to provide a better uninstaller. Meanwhile, [...]

Mark Russinovich, who originally discovered the Sony Rootkit, has posted another update on the current state of things. There are two basic points which haven’t been covered yet…the first is that most AV vendors are removing the cloaking in the same unsafe way that the official patch does, which could cause your computer to [...]

USA Today Article, Minutes

The Attorney General has proposed a tough new set of copyright enforcement laws dubbed the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2005, or “IPPA”. It would criminalise consumers simply for trying to make unauthorised copies of music, movies and software, whether they are successful or not. The bill has not yet been put before [...]

Quite a bit has been happening! First of all, virus/trojan writers have started leveraging the rootkit to hide their malware:
First Trojan using Sony DRM spotted
Sony is also being sued:
Sony hit by lawsuits over root kit
AV vendors also have started releasing tools to remove the rootkit-like portions of the XCP software, such as Sophos. [...]

First of all…our next meeting is Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005 at 8:00pm on the 7th floor of Kimmel. We (well, I can’t be there, but everyone else) will be discussing the impending lecture, our next demonstration, our newly allocated budget, and the Google Print debate happening on the 17th. Inga is also supposed [...]

All hail teh ph33rl3ss l34dr!!!!! l33t!!