law

It looks like tomorrow is 'DMCA Day' in Canada.

All of this nonsense is making me physically ill. Let's go over the symptoms:

• High levels of irony brought on by doublespeak[1]:
  

  Reports have also indicated that the two ministers will unveil the Copyright Act under the slogan "Made In Canada Copyright Reform" during a scheduled press conference.

Michael Geist picked up a story about how Industry Canada staff are systematically trying to edit Wikipedia pages, deleting criticism of the new 'Canadian DMCA'. I say 'systematically' because certain text was deleted multiple times after being restored, and the edits come from the same IP range. And it's limited to a few specific points: criticism *of* the proposed act, and the fact that nobody in Canada wants it: only the US Big Media conglomerates.

Hell, it's only a few thousand over the MSRP... why the hesitation to sell the damned thing?

A while back, Torrentspy made the technical argument that it couldn't turn over its logs because it didn't keep them: the information on access was stored in RAM. Because the RAM wasn't stored, they claimed, they had no logs to give.

In what is probably the widest gulf between the real world and the legal system this decade, a Magistrate judge dropped the ball, saying information stored in RAM must be preserved: the judge making the ruling stated that capturing this data would not be an 'undue burden'.

There was much discussion on news sites around the world about what this meant: Many people believed that this ridiculous ruling would be overturned on appeal.

Well, that's not the case.

The technical challenges posed by this are interesting. So what do you do? Read all the data out of the RAM and write it to disk every second? Even if you only record what's changed: that's a lot of data. It would also bog the ram down to the speed of the disk (1000x slower, or so).

And due to the way modern OS's implement virtual memory, is there any way to determine at all what constitutes an IP address from a RAM dump, or will it all be just gibberish?

I have no suitable category for this story. Even 'WTF' doesn't do it justice.

I think Google's success has caused several minds at MS to snap. Lately, Microsoft shills have been going out of their way to attack Google in particular: According to Steve Ballmer, doubling your employee count is 'insane', and Google has no sources of revenue outside of search and advertising. Thus, by extension, all their other efforts are doomed to fail.

Right now, it seems that if all you were to pay attention to were the big news networks, you'd probably think that the music industry is just an industry sustaining itself on lawsuits. Stupid as this may seem, even Sharman networks (owners of the Kazaa network, and the poster-boy of RIAA lawsuit targets) is in on the action, suing the website p2p.net for a comment made by an anonymous poster