Or, Get the Guv'mint Outta My Got-damn Innernet

1. From the New York Times (registration required, but it's free): "In the first criminal court test of a law intended to prevent digital piracy [the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act], a federal jury today acquitted a Russian company [ElcomSoft] accused of illegally selling software that permitted users to circumvent security features in [Adobe e-books]." Jennifer S. Granick, the director of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, was happy about the outcome:

We don't want every country in the world to have to comply with how the U. S. does copyright. This is good for democracy: people in other countries can make determinations about what is right and wrong for themselves.

[via The Filter]

2. You may not have noticed I've chosen a Creative Commons license for my site (image in the right column, under the photo). Creative Commons licenses -- version 1.0 was just released -- are different from traditional copyright's one-size-fits-all restrictions. They let you retain your copyright but state the conditions under which others may share your work, requiring attribution (or not), allowing commercial use (or not), or allowing modifications of your work (or not). You can also choose to donate your work to the public domain. I've chosen the Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 license. [via megnut]

3. Five Technically Legal Signs for Your Library that let patrons know that the FBI may be monitoring their computer usage . . . without actually coming out and saying it, which would violate the PATRIOT Act. [on librarian.net via The Filter]