Millennium writes: "San Francisco Superior Court Judge Stuart Pollack has ruled that eBay is not liable for bootleg music sold on its site. The interesting thing about this ruling: Judge Pollack based his opinion on the CDA, of all things."

Lawrence Lessig offers a diatribe on the strange distinction the court system draws between different types of speech infringement. For anyone who's ever wondered why the good guys won the CDA case but lost the DeCSS case...

A reader writes "Annoy.com, the web site that pushes the first amendement envelope, has emerged victorious in their most recent court ruling. Haven't heard of the case? That's not surprising. The magistrate's gag order covered not only the details of the case, but also the very existence of the case. Read details in this SF Gate Article or this annoy.com release."

A lot of people have written in regarding the announcement from scientists at the University of Texas @ Austin discovering "invisibilty". Well, sort of. What it does do is make small areas of skin (humans have not been tested) transparent for a short amount of time. By transparent, I mean 2 mm of transparency - not exactly enough to make me Inside Out Boy. Yet.

PerlDiver writes: "Free speech online scored a major win Wednesday. A federal judge ruled that ISPs are not responsible (under Section 230 of the CDA) for the content of Web sites hosted using their services. This goes a long way to removing the incentive for service providers to proactively censor such sites. (Interestingly enough, the case in question involved sites selling tapes of nude college athletes, shot in locker rooms without their knowledge.)" We've seen a number of cases like this, where an offended party tries to target the deep pockets of the ISP rather than the actual offender - that section of the CDA seems to be working as designed, however, to prevent these.

Last week you asked online activist Scott Reents about his organization The Democracy Project, about online political action, about the worth of political involvement in general. He's obliged with some lengthy, thoughtful answers. If nothing else, his words should give you pause when you vote -- or don't.

Greetings, all. I thought I'd let things settle down a little bit after my Cluetrain review, and try something slightly safer. :-) It never ceases to amaze me how, in an age where we use the phrase "that's so yesterday!" without flinching, the best lessons are those from "long ago." Book burning has been a hallmark of our century, although we certainly did not invent it. From the blatant actions of the Nazis to the self-censorship of the post-WWII age to today's filtering fights, the struggle to express ourselves has never ended. Come the middle of this century, at a time when the status quo was as strong as it has been in recent memory, a man with a story reminded us of something that Thomas Jefferson expressed two centuries before, that a little revolution now and then is a good thing. That revolution may generate some uncomfortable instability, but in the end we as a society are better for it.

P.J. Hinton writes: "The News-Gazette, a newspaper in Champaign, IL, ran a feature in their Sunday edition about the founder of Project Gutenberg. Besides offering descriptions of his unusual eating habits, it gives an insight into the projects foundations almost thirty years ago and notes some criticism that he's received for his work. Defintiely a good read and a reminder that long before CDA, RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, and the USPTO, there were other entities all too willing to block access to information. "

Note: This is the second in a two-part series.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a frontal assault on the open source ethic, both technological and social. The underlying political issue is both clear and significant: Must we depend on the creative choices and products of a handful of ferociously greedy and monopolistic corporations who have increasingly come to dominate media, culture and entertainment? Or can we define our own cultural experiences? (Read more below.)

Ben Green says, "First of all, I want to thank Robin Miller, Hemos, and CmdrTaco for giving me the opportunity to participate in this discussion. Slashdot has been a great resource for me both professionally and recreationally, since I started at Gore 2000."

I'm halfway through Susan Blackmore's book "The Meme Machine," and it's rekindled my interest in meme dispersal. In a memetic sense, the battle over filters in the Holland library is just one of implanting the right ideas in enough people's minds by the day of the vote. Here's a look at one of the more annoying memes the opposition is using: a lie about the results of my very own organization. Click for more.

Our interview guests this week are American Jim Tyre and Australian Irene Graham. Both are long-time, well-known online free speech and anti-censorware activists; links from Monday's call for questions can tell you all about them. Anyway, here are their answers to your questions. They'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about censorware and why it's not a good thing. There are also a lot of good tips about online and political activism in general contained in their answers; you may want to read this to pick up on those even if censorware and free speech aren't your personal "hot button" issues. (mucho more below)

diathesis writes "The Candian Copyright Board has finally implemented the long-feared recordable media levy. Fortunately, the tariff is 5.2 cents per disc for CD-R and CD-RW media, which is far less than had been reported as likely. " A serious question: they distinguish between "Audio CDs" and "CDs". Is a blank CD somehow different? Because it's 60 cents for Audio CDs. Update: 12/17 02:08 by H :If you want to speak-out against this, check out this petition.

TheSync writes "CNET is reporting that the state of New Mexico is in federal court defending its law that prohibits exposing minors to "harmful" material via the Net, in this article. "Harmful to minors" is the new catchphrase for attacks on Internet freedom of speech, now that "decency" limits are clearly unconstitutional. "

A lengthy submission, but I find it rather fascinating to look at how other countries handle the internet. Someday people will write books about this, but for now, the pattern seems to be that as soon as public use of the net reaches a certain point, sensational journalism kicks in, the public (most of whom have no direct experience with the internet) rises up in outrage, and the first net-regulation laws get passed.

Miguel Farah writes "Chile has been connected to the Internet since 1992, and during all this time, it's been working mostly free of external regulations. All the time since then, though, those of us who've been on the net have feared that the day would come when our Congress would try to regulate it by law. Aw, hell... eventually it had to happen, and has happened now.

As promised last Friday, here's more on the Munich conference. Pay attention or wait to be forced to label your internet content. It's your choice.

Monday we asked Jonah Seiger and Shabbir Safdar of Mindshare Internet Campaigns a bunch of questions about effective online political activism. Here are their answers. (They skipped two questions. Perhaps they'll explain why on the message boards later today.)

After this most recent succesful foray into reviewing for us, Stern has sent us a review of net.wars. Written by Wendy M. Grossman, the book attempts to take a brainshot of the mid-1990s Internet. Click below to read more.

cswiii writes "The Supreme Court has ruled that keeping obscene language out of email, in certain circumstances, does not violate freedom of speech. " Part of this law is a hold over from the CDA - in terms of what could and could not be sent. In this case, it's "obscence material". ApolloMedia, owners of annoy.com had originally the case against this. In this situation, the Court upheld the ruling of a CA District Court.

John Dillinger wasn't nailed with much more fanfare than the alleged creator of the now-famed Melissa virus, whose apprehension in New Jersey a few days ago drew a governor and a platoon of state, local and federal cyber-cops. This syndrome is becoming almost ritualistic. The virus and the arrest tell us a lot about Crime and Hype; Technological Hostility, and Closing the Distance that makes so much online hostility so easy.