Constitutional DRM
Lawrence Lessig's blog has the scoop on a E-book version of the United states Constitution being sold by Amazon. The book is protected by DRM and has limits on how many times you can print it. The E-book can only be read via Microsoft's E-book reader.

Spider Man 2 nets a Camcorder Pirate
A teenage boy in Los Angeles has been arrested for videotaping the box office record-smashing movie, Spider Man 2 (personally, I thought it sucked). This is significant because the boy could be the first person to be prosecuted under a new law that makes it illegal to take a camcorder into a movie theater. (Since the Pirate Act has yet to pass the House I'm not sure what they are talking about, but I'll update this post when I figure it out). The head of Sony Pictures is quoted in the article as saying: "Hundreds of people have put tens of thousands of hours into making a truly great picture and the notion of having it stolen and sent out for free around the world is just plain wrong." Yeah. $257 Million in 2 weeks. Oh, how the movie industry suffers.

Software Industry Loses 1 Gazillion Dollars Due to P2P
The Business Software Alliance(BSA) claims that losses due to software piracy have doubled in the last year to $29 Billion. They of course blame peer-to-peer. Look, I realize that the readers of this site are in general ,well, older then me, so you may not all be hip to the new scene. Here's the story. Without admitting guilt, I will tell you that downloading software over peer-to-peer networks just plain does not work. Half of it is corrupt or fake, and the other half contains viruses. It just isn't practical. Furthermore, the latest numbers I can find (from 2000) show that the software industry is only a $37 Billion business. While I'm sure that it has grown since that time, I have to wonder how they could afford to take a $29 Billion loss and still function. They neglect to explain.

Death and Taxes. Well, Taxes Anyway
The IRS is considering using a tax implemented during the Spanish-American war to tax VoIP Internet phone calls. How? Apparently, the tax was originally conceived as a 1% luxury tax on phone lines to help pay for the Spanish-American war in 1898. The tax was later increased to 3% and remains with us today. Rep. Dick Army(R) has been trying to repeal the tax for a number of years, but to no avail. I doubt he'll succeed here either. Not that it matters. Perhaps I'll eat my words, but I just can't see how the US government can tax a Internet service that requires no cooperate of governmental infrastructure to work. Maybe I'm missing something though.

Atavista Employee steals code, Defects to Microsoft, Gets Arrested
This week, a programmer who works for Microsoft's Search engine division was arrested for breaking into AltaVista's Servers and stealing some of the code used to run the search engine. The employee, who formerly worked for AltaVista, says he stole the code before he worked for Microsoft. Microsoft has not been implicated in any part of the crime.

Other News of Note