Balance sheet.

• Author: Taylor, Jeff A.
• Position: Citings - Current events and comment - Column

Home Court

The California Supreme Court rules that Hollywood cannot drag a Texas man into Golden State courts because he posted an unlicensed DVD decoder on the Net. The DVD Copy Control Association should file suit in the man's home state or the state where it thinks the offense occurred, the court says.

French Stew

A French court brushes aside arguments from jose Bove's lawyers that the tech-hating sheep farmer had no choice but to attack and destroy a field of genetically modified crops. Bove now faces several months in prison and wants President Jacques Chirac to pardon him.

Net Good

Web charity is alive and well. Visitors send $20,000 to the youthful proprietress of savekaryn.com to help defray her credit card bills. And Ernie's House of Whoop Ass enters its second year of PayPal donations to fund holiday travel for overseas U.S. military. Last year visitors donated $13,000.

Duty Call

The Bush administration calls for the elimination of all tariffs on manufactured goods by 2015. The change would affect an estimated $6 trillion in goods.

Change Due

The Ohio Education Association backs down and allows a member teacher to use her dues to support the American Cancer Society instead of the union's political activities. The union admits no wrongdoing, however, and refuses to acknowledge the "sincerity" of teacher Kathleen Klamut's 'professed beliefs."

Quantum Leap

Just in time for the total surveillance state, here comes quantum encryption. The process, which scrambles individual photons, is fast, requires no keys, and is thought to be unbreakable.

Mystery Map

The National Geographic Society says only 13 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Iraq on a map. Slightly better known--after a year of bombing it--is Afghanistan, with fully 17 percent of those surveyed able to pinpoint it.

Secret Sales

The perverse Digital Millennium Copyright Act...