While America slept, lawyers for movie studios, record companies and other media barons may have had their way with key lawmakers. Congress is on the verge of voting on measures that would make it illegal for anybody with technological smarts to outsmart various encryption schemes.
Civil libertarians fume that such technologies could be used as gatekeepers to allow companies to charge fees for what would be public material in a library. As California representative Zoe Lofgren put it, “We’re creating a separate crime for defeating technology even if people have the right to see and use the material” being encrypted.
It could be illegal to overcome even the most lame encryption scheme, warn executives at the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association.
INDY ON-LINE
BINARY BRICKYARD
Ultratrendy Viacom Inc. (Paramount, Simon & Schuster, VH1, etc.) plans a conference on the hippest ways of moving books and other Gutenberg trivia onto the World Wide Web next month.
Speakers on tap include such digiterati as chief Wall Street Journal wonk writer Walter Mossberg; Bill Gates’ least favorite biographer, Stephen Manes of the New York Times; Dan Gillmor of Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News, and nearly a dozen other computer writers.
So where did the ink-stained cyberscribes tell their bosses they were going for this deadly serious business gathering May 17-19?
Indianapolis.
Gentlemen, start your modems.
FOES OF BILL
OH, HENRY!
Henry Holt and Company, the distinguished house known for publishing such books as The Classical Greek Reader and the biography of Cardinal Newman, has announced its latest contribution to literature, “rushed for May publication.” It’s called “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside” and is written by “the estranged daughter of one Bill Gates’s closest associates (Pam Edstrom).” If that’s not enough to make you buy the book, the Holt flacks describe the single-mindedness of the Microsoft Meanie with this wonderfully mixed-up metaphor: He can “come from behind to crush whoever’s on top.”
KIDZ TO PREZ
”CLEAN UP YOUR ACT.”
There was a whiff of behind-the-scenes Clinton hating two weeks ago when operators of the superb kid-oriented Web site www.coolbeanz.com asked youngsters 8 and up what they would ask the Prez if they had his personal phone number. Monicagate, of course, was top topic, the Minneapolis-based site’s sponsors said in a press release.
That was two weeks ago, however.
Today, the topic is the Easter Bunny, but some of the sex talk may have caught on with the powerz that be at coolbeanz, who asked whether kids think the bunny is a boy or a girl.
A boy, sez 70 percent of kidz polled.
