That was the heated topic of discussion late Friday between Apple’s iPhone marketing czar Greg Joswiak, Fred von Lohmann, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s copyright genius, Copyright Office officials including registrar Marybeth Peters, the record labels, movie studios and software industry.

If you're like me you have an iPhone and a portable computer running Ubuntu and you would like to have mobile internet without paying for an extra data plan from your carrier. Thanks to a few devoted individuals tethering the iPhone to Ubuntu is simple. The only prerequisite is that you must have an iPhone 3G or 3GS running OS 3.0 or higher.

Patent Office to Take Second Look at Meritless Claims Threatening Mobile Information Access. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has won reexamination from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) of a bogus patent threatening mobile information access. The reexamination order is the third granted by the PTO after challenges from EFF's Patent Busting Project.

On my first day of my new position as civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals dealt my previous employer, the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, a fantastic victory. The court's ruling in Golan v. Gonzales is also a triumph for the First Amendment and for the overwhelming majority of creators.

Everyday, plentiful funny video clips are uploaded to YouTube.com. These videos will disappear soonest due to reasons, why not to download those good video clips and save to our computer before they're gone forever? What more convert them to watch on your favoriate players like iPod, Creative Zen Vision, Archos, iRiver, aigo MP4 player, iPhone, Zune, PSP, Pocket PC, Smart Phone etc.?

Ben Cato Clough and Luke Upchurch's "When Copyright Goes Bad" (from Consumers International) is a great, 15-minute mini-documentary on what copyright can do, what it is doing, and what it needs to stop doing.

«...The existing copyright system makes a few stars very rich, supports a small fraction of artists adequately, and is an abject failure for the rest. However, it is great for supporting the big business of the copyright industry—and nowadays they are extending it to forbid sharing. It is a system that attacks our freedom so it can waste our money.

"Brazil has just created the best-ever implementation of WIPO Copyright Treaty. In Brazil's version of the law, you can break DRM without breaking the law, provided you're not also committing a copyright violation. And what's more, any rightsholder who adds a DRM that restricts things that are allowed by Brazilian copyright laws ("fair dealing" or "fair use") faces a fine."

"This was originally posted 13 years ago today by John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.