Politics and Law

The Recording Industry Association of America is appealing a judge's decision last month to declare a mistrial in the case of Jammie Thomas, who was ordered to pay the recording industry $222,000 for allegedly sharing music online.

Thomas was charged in October with violating copyright law by making 24 songs available for others to download on the Kazaa network. In late September, though, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis threw out the verdict on the grounds that he originally misguided the jury by indicating that simply the act of making a copyrighted song available for sharing amounts to … Read more

WASHINGTON--Financial information about companies is sometimes difficult to uncover, and even more difficult to compare.

It's buried in footnotes to earnings reports and sometimes almost seems intentionally obfuscated. The Securities and Exchange Commission thinks it has the answer: a type of language for business data that could be to finance what HTML was to the Internet.

That was the plan, at least. There have been no fewer than 17 conferences so far to advance the Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, standard, and it still is not mandatory for U.S. companies. (The SEC started a voluntary XBRL filing program, … Read more

Presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama squared off Wednesday night for their third and final debate before Election Day, but the star of the show might have been Joe the Plumber.

Joe Wurzelbacher, an Ohio plumber, loomed large in the debate after McCain brought him up as an everyman worried about what might happen with tax rates under a new administration. As they have in the previous debates, McCain and Obama tried to spell out their economic philosophies for a curious electorate, and especially undecided voters.

Following the debate, which also covered the general domestic policy plans of the … Read more

WASHINGTON--The threat of cybersecurity attacks are on the rise from organized crime, terrorists, and foreign governments, an FBI official warned on Wednesday.

There are a "couple dozen" countries interested in breaching U.S. networks, said Shawn Henry, assistant director of the FBI cyber division, though he declined to list any specific countries.

The attempted attacks on U.S. networks are "increasingly sophisticated" and "the amount of information that has been stolen is significant," Henry said.

In particular, the use of botnets continues to increase, he said, while companies have lost tens of millions of … Read more

Politicians are still slowly learning how to reach out to their constituents on the Internet, but that doesn't mean citizens can't keep tabs on Washington online. The latest new-media tool from The New York Times provides an embeddable widget that allows people to analyze campaign contributions made to the presidential candidates.

The campaign finance tool is one of the application program interfaces the Times is developing to let its readers dissect the data it uses in its reporting. The data for this API comes straight from the Federal Election Commission, though the campaigns are only required to report … Read more

Just as the economy has dominated headlines in recent weeks, it is likely to be the overriding issue Wednesday night in the third and final debate between John McCain and Barack Obama.

The presidential candidates will take to the podium at 6 p.m. PDT, this time at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. Moderating the debate--which is to focus in on domestic policy as well as economic matters--will be Bob Schieffer, the chief Washington correspondent for CBS News and host of the show Face the Nation.

Both McCain and Obama this week released new proposals on ways to reinvigorate … Read more

YouTube has rejected a request from John McCain's presidential campaign for a legal review of political videos that are the subject of deletion requests.

The Google-owned company said Tuesday evening in a response to McCain's organization (PDF) that it could not give campaigns special treatment and that it was "not in a position to verify" whether infringement complaints made under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act were legitimate or not.

The McCain camp is upset that some of its political ads and videos, which used brief snippets of news broadcasts and other copyrighted material, have been the … Read more

John McCain's presidential campaign has discovered the remix-unfriendly aspects of American copyright law, after several of the candidate's campaign videos were pulled from YouTube.

McCain has now discovered the rights holder friendly nature of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forces remixers to fight an uphill battle to prove that their work is a "fair use."

However, instead of calling for an overhaul of the much hated law, McCain is calling for VIP treatment for the remixes made by political campaigns.

McCain's proposal: complaints about videos uploaded by a political campaign would be manually reviewed … Read more

John McCain's presidential campaign is protesting YouTube's video-removal policy, which has resulted in the deletion of some political advertisements the campaign believes are perfectly legal and protected by fair use.

In a letter (PDF) sent to YouTube CEO Chad Hurley and company attorneys on Monday, the campaign charges that "our advertisements or Web videos have been the subject of DMCA takedown notices regarding uses that are clearly privileged under the fair use doctrine." The DMCA is, of course, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows copyright holders to submit takedown notices.

The letter cited "… Read more