The Null Device
2001/9/7
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: A medical research company has used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to silence an animal-liberationist group's web site. Huntingdon Life Sciences, by no means the darlings of the animal-rights set, have claimed that Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty's site infringes its copyright, which gives the ISP (which provides free hosting to nonprofits) a choice of either pulling the site within 24 hours or face massive legal liability; and under the DMCA, the ISP has no discretion to judge whether the claim is valid or not. Nice; as someone else commented, when all you have is a club, everything looks like someone's skull.
It's official: software monopoly and George W. Bush election campaign donor Microsoft will not be broken up; the Bush administration has instructed the Department of Justice to drop plans to break up the company, in the interests of obtaining "prompt, effective and certain relief for consumers". Which will probably be a fine of a few thousand dollars and an absolutely binding consent decree preventing Microsoft from putting Netscape out of business again or something like that. Rejoice, free world, for your right to use Windows everywhere has been upheld.