OpenLife

Yesterday Tuesday 23 November 2004 the Danish IT-lawyers Association hosted a small meeting with David Brin - author of The Transparent Society - and here are some notes from David’s speech.
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The Danish Council on IT-security - which I am a member of - today Wednesday 24 November 2004 holds a hearing on the privacy implications of pervasive computing. Follow weblogging from the hearing at http://pervasive.rfits.dk.

Times passes so quickly. The light of my life, my little son Vilhelm is now 5 years old!

Here is some video from his birthday party with the kindergarten:

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I am a big fan of Economist. Actually, to get me through big complex issues of world politics ans business I more or less rely on the Economist’s editorials. But not everybody seems to agree here as follows below

It’s Not Pirates Killing Music: “

Even though I think the Economist’s motto is “Everything in the Economist is true, except those stories you know something about,” I pass on this article on the music business. You know most of it, of course: Internet is a threat to the music business, blah, blah, blah. But it has some good nuggets in it, like this one.

“According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy. No-one knows how much weight to assign to each of the other explanations: rising physical CD piracy, shrinking retail space, competition from other media, and the quality of the music itself. But creativity doubtless plays an important part.”

“

(Via business2blog.)

Computer security expert Bruce Schneier has long - though not very loudly - been promoting the idea that software producers should be imposed more economic liability for selling insecure software. I find the idea very interesting and I am leaning towards that it should tried out in new legislation. Though not without careful consideration.

Here is Bruce Schneier’s latest posting on the subject:

Computer Security and Liability: “Information insecurity is costing us billions. We pay for it in theft: information theft, financial theft. We pay for it in productivity loss, both when networks stop working and in the dozens of minor security inconveniences we all have to…”

(Via Crypto-Gram.)

Sunday afternoon with Jeanne and Vilhelm at the Copenhagen Zoological Museum.

What absurdity! And a democratic president surely wouldn’t have done a damned thing trying to prevent this abuse of the american legal system by lawyers.

SCO-Boies Fee Agreement and SCO Corrects Some SEC Filings: “SCO and Boies Schiller & Flexner have finally finalized, as of October 31, their agreement to cap the legal expenses. Sort of cap them. In the vicinity of the moon, more or less. Here is the filing. The new Engagement Letter is here. There is still a contingency arrangement. In short, Boies’ firm intends to be paid. Lawyers like to be paid. They prefer stone cold cash. Up front. Boies Schiller and the other subsidiary firms will take the current litigation through appeals. That means to me they won’t take on anything new, not under this agreement anyway. And SCO also makes some corrections in earlier filings.”

(Via GrokLaw.)

Jeanne and I are spending a number of evenings this fall investigating which Danish school we should enroll Vilhelm in for him to start next summer when he is 5,5 years. Here is Jeanne listening to one of the teachers at den Classenske Legatskole.

So far, we think that we are going to choose either Sankt Petri skole, Krebs’ skole or Zahles Gymnasium.

Lawrence Lessig and my fellow Danish lawyer Peter Lind Nielsen at the Hans Christian Andersen and Copyright seminar November 5, 2004 at the University of Southern Denmark.

I have been a subscriber at Digitarian for half a year now. Digitarian is a Danish DVD rental service similar til Netflix. (Disclosure: Digitarian is a client at von Haller law firm).

It is very difficult for me to see why I need sophisticated video-on-demand when I can get the DVDs that I want delivered with almost only a couple of days delay. I might need business critical information instantaneously, and I will get that through online services. But I don’t have the luxury of having so much free time available for DVD entertainment that it doesn’t suit me fine just to be able to order some DVDs a couple of days in advance. Of cource, this might be different for other people. And obviously when or if renting DVDs delivered online becomes much cheaper than having the DVDs sent by postal mail, the trade-offs will become different.

However, the nicest thing about Digitarian is the interface to its service. It’s easy to navigate and does really only contain the features that I need. And naturally, the collaborative filtering - which of cource is not conceptually unique to Digitarian - is a conditio sine qua non.

By the end of the day, the best way to materially improve the Digitarian service would be to increase the library of the current 3.500 to many more titles!