Following up to the privacy concerns about Amazon’s “Silk” browser, the EFF spoke with Amazon and asked some questions about privacy-related matters. The EFF’s Dan Auerbach reports coming away from the conversation mostly satisfied with Amazon’s measures, with only a couple of major privacy concerns remaining. Amazon explained that Silk does not intercept encrypted traffic—HTTPS browsing sessions go directly from the Kindle Fire to the website without passing through Amazon’s EC2 servers. As for logging of requests that do pass through EC2, Amazon explains it only logs the URL of the page, a timestamp, and a session-identification token. There...

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses a recent file-sharing case in which Joel Tenenbaum was convicted of illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs.  His original verdict was an award of  $67,500 in damages to the music companies... a tenth what the jury voted to award the music companies, and an amount still under appeal by both sides. But for copyright-reform advocates, a lawsuit filed against Mr. Tenenbaum by the music industry has provided an instrument to sound alarms about a broader issue: how fear of enormous damages can chill innovation that involves even a minimal...

Over the last few days, the EFF has been looking back at predictions it made at the beginning of the year to see how they have played out. Most of these have relatively little to do with e-reading (though the one on hardware hacking does touch on it orthogonally with mention of the exemption created for jailbreaking iPhones), but one of them looks specifically at books and newspapers. At the beginning of the year, the EFF noted the increasing complaints of publishers and publishing magnates such as Rupert Murdoch about the effect the Internet was having on their bottom...

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website: With the 2010 holidays upon us, it's time to update EFF's E-Book Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy, which summarizes and comments on the privacy-related policies of several e-readers. What's new. We've added in the iPad and also added in the software used by many libraries and devices for e-book access, made by Adobe called Adobe Content Server. Adobe doesn't keep a list of libraries that use their software, but it does have a list of supported devices. Remember that the list only tells you what information is available to Adobe, not what information may be made...

The Creative Commons licensing system has gone hand in hand with a lot of e-book-and e-writing-related news. For example, Cory Doctorow and others use it to give their e-books away for people to read for free while retaining rights to other uses, and Ficly (and its predecessor Ficlets) uses it to permit selected uses of reader-submitted content. (In fact, it is because Ficlets used that license that Ficly was able to rescue its predecessor’s archives.) Lately, ASCAP has launched a fundraising campaign painting Creative Commons (as well as Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation) as a threat...

Taking advantage of the zero-marginal-cost nature of electronic media distribution, a group of independent computer game developers has teamed up to offer the “Humble Indie Bundle”, a bundle of five games (including the award-winning World of Goo) for Windows, Macintosh, or Linux as a set-your-own-price download. Purchasers can choose how much of their purchase contribution they want to go to the games’ developers and how much to go to the non-profits Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The default is to split it fifty-fifty, but if purchasers want it all to go to the developers, or...

Back in February, I mentioned that Victoria Espinel, the Obama administration’s new Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) or “copyright czar,” was seeking public input on how to carry out the duties of her office. The deadline for submissions recently passed—and as usual, almost everybody responded on the very last day, so that other groups would not have time to read and respond to their arguments. Ars Technica covers filings by the content-creating industries, such as the RIAA, MPAA, and so forth, in which they suggest that Espinel should concentrate her efforts on “online copyright theft.” As...