Wikinews, the collaborative online journalism project spawned from Wikipedia, has been digging up more dirt on the Wikipedia edits made by Capitol Hill staffers.
Last week, the scandal broke about how staff using computers connected to the US senate’s network had been airbrushing out unflattering facts about their bosses while adding unsavoury titbits about political foes in over 1,000 changes to related Wikipedia articles.
Amongst the spinning and doctoring was the removal of a campaign promise by Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass., that he would serve only four terms, as was the detailed description of a bill introduced by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., designed to make it more difficult for gay parents to visit their children in hospitals.
Naturally, dirty tricks, slurs and insults loomed large, with the entry for the Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. saying that he had been voted “the most annoying senator by his peers.”
Hot on their trail, the meticulous volunteers at Wikinews collected every Senate IP which had ever been edited on Wikipedia (up to February 3) and examined where the IPs came, what was edited and what the edits comprised of.
Someone (presumably Wikinews contributors) then sent emails to specific Senators’ offices and noted down the IP addresses that were included in the headers of the autoresponder emails.
Armed with this information, the Wikinews sleuths were then able to look back at Wikipedia edit histories and figure out which office was responsible for each edit.
The full name’n’shame article detailing who edited what can be seen here: Wikinews
(Unfortunately, edits coming from the US House of Representatives were harder to uniquely trace as they came through a proxy server, with one IP address covering all offices.)
Open, collaborative information projects like Wikipedia and Wikinews have been welcomed by Internet activists keen to make unbiased information freely available, but the very nature of the project makes it wide open to abuse (as one pundit commented, “The information on your screen may be only as good as the most recent users’ motives.”)
But in this case, the attempts by Capital Hill staff to fiddle about on the Web and rewrite political history backfired dramatically and only made things worse for them.
And we rather like that.
Wikinews via BoingBoing
Inga Chernyak, until recently, had a legal clerk job at an IP law firm in New York City. On the 26 January she was called in to the firms HR department and fired.
There may be those who think that it’s pretty obvious that is you work in an IP firm; wanting to train as an IP lawyer; you hold views that IP law is over restrictive; then have your name and photo featured in an article that starts by describing how to circumvent CD DRM protection and are a founder of NYU chapter of the Free Culture movement – you’re going to end up in trouble said IP law firm. 
News has broken that two men in the UK have been found liable for file sharing their music. The first ruling of its kind in the UK.
Having been found liable, the two are now exposed to the BPI’s legal fees. Given the City law firms the BPI use, where it’s not unusual to pay £200/hours for their services, it’s going to be an expensive business. BPI have stated that “Total costs are estimated at £13,500 and damages are expected to take the bill even higher.”
The BBC has announced its Open News Archive, making archive news reports freely available to the UK public to download and use for free in their own creative works.
Made available under the terms of the recently-launched Creative Archive Licence, the footage can be viewed, downloaded, edited and mixed by UK residents – so long as it’s for non-commercial programming (there’s also several other caveats that budding film makers should read first 
Helen Boaden, Director, BBC News, said: “This trial is an important step in allowing us to share with our audiences the extraordinary news archive which the BBC has recorded over the years. We look forward to getting their reaction.”
The BBC already offer nearly a hundred clips in their 
A US federal appeals court has upheld the mammoth $22,500 (£12,760, €18,930) fine slapped on a 29 year old Chicago mother caught illegally distributing songs over the Internet.
After Ms Gonzalez rejected an earlier proposed settlement from music companies of about $3,500 (£1,950 €2,950), a federal judge later filed a summary judgement ordering her to shell out $750 (£425) for each of 30 songs she was accused of illegally distributing over the Internet.
Ms Gonzalez’s case was part of first wave of civil lawsuits filed by record companies and their trade organisation, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), back in September 2003.
The digital rights campaigning group, Open Rights Group, reports that the music industry is lobbying MEPs to co-opt the EU Data Retention legislation currently being debated by the European Parliament.
Coupled with the upcoming IPRED2 legislation (which creates new, Europe-wide criminal offences for intellectual property infringement), campaigners fear that we could end up with a situation where the music industry would be able to pursue criminal court copyright prosecutions entirely at the cost of the taxpayer.
Ian Brown, of the Open Rights Group (not the Stone Roses), said: “The British government claimed that Data Retention was essential in the fight against terrorism and serious crime, but it has now become clear that groups with commercial interests have their eye on the same data. Charles Clarke cannot continue to pretend that this legislation has been drafted purely for reasons of national security.”
P2P network, BitTorrent has signed an agreement with the Motion Picture Association of America to collaborate on stopping Internet piracy.
“BitTorrent Inc. discourages the use of its technology for distributing films without a license to do so. As such, we are pleased to work with the film industry to remove unauthorised content from BitTorrent.com’s search engine,” he added.
The MPAA claims that the film industry lost $3.5 billion to movie piracy last year, with a recent study predicting the figure to jump to $5.4 billion this year. The MPAA claim these losses are excluding revenue lost through online file-swapping, so the true figure could be even higher (although other will say the figures are already gloriously exaggerated).
TiVo have announced the release of new software, slated for the first quarter of 2006 that will let owners watch recorded television shows on their Sony PSPs and video iPods.
This development is a further blow to TV network schedulers and their much-relied on conventional prime time programmes. This theory is torn apart when mobile viewers are able to watch programmes recorded the previous night, on the go.
Because Criminals Make the Best Police Officers
The other law other are saying have been broken by SonyBMG, and this is one that could land them in BIG legal difficulties, is 
This weekend, there’s been lots of furious chat on blogs and Slashdot about the EULA that comes with SonyBMG’s audio CDs.
Many have reacted to RootKit by saying that they feel it is ‘safer’ for them to download their music from unlicensed file sharing services, as they aren’t exposing themselves to unauthorised pieces of software installing on their machines.
SonyBMG have managed to completely undo the small, patient steps that Sony, the hardware business, has been taking to gathering favour with the equipment buying public.