Month: October 2002
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Fritz's Hit List #11
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: <a href="Today on Fritz's Hit List: recordable talking picture frames. These picture frames record a short message, to be replayed later on demand. Because the messages are stored in digital form, these picture frames qualify for regulation as “digital media devices” under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the CBDTPA passes, any…
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Postings Resume This Afternoon
I’m back from an interesting trip, which gave me lots of material for posting but not much time to actually post. Regular postings will resume this afternoon, including a double dose of Fritz’s Hit List.
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LawMeme's "Law School in a Nutshell"
LawMeme is running a wonderful continuing feature, written by James Grimmelmann, to teach non-lawyers, and especially techies, how to read a legal brief: Future lawyers spend three years in law school learning how to read and write legalese, but what serious geek has that kind of time to spare? This series will cover the basics…
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Garfinkel on Wireless Tags
Simson Garfinkel has an interesting short article in Technology Review about wireless tags. He advocates a sort of consumers’ bill of rights, that would protect people against being observed or tracked against their will. Wireless tags are an important and potentially scary technology. As I’ve written before, I think we need more discussion of their…
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Fritz's Hit List #10
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: the remote controlled fart machine. When a remote control is pressed, this device emits one of five prerecorded fart noises. Because these noises are stored in digital form, the device qualifies for regulation as a “digital media device” under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the CBDTPA passes, any newly manufactured fart…
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My Testimony on the Berman-Coble Bill
Today I submitted written testimony that will be included in the record of last week’s House hearings on the Berman-Coble bill.
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Doubletalk from MediaDefender?
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that MediaDefender has been sending cease-and-desist letters to universities, identifying the IP addresses of specific computers that are alleged to be offering copyrighted movies for download. These IP addresses usually correlate one-to-one with users. One of the MediaDefender letters is reprinted in the Chronicle story. The letter says in…
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Misleading Term of the Week: "Rights"
A “right” is a legal entitlement – something that the law says you are allowed to do. But the term is often misused to refer to something else. Consider, for example, the use of “digital rights management” (often abbreviated as DRM) to describe technologies that restrict the use of creative works. In practice, the “rights”…
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Slashdotted!
Sorry for the outage yesterday. A Slashdot item about Fritz’s Hit List drove enough traffic here to use up our full bandwidth allocation for the month. I’ve put another quarter into the slot, so now we’re back on the air. I’m thrilled to have so many readers, even if most of them will probably end…
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Fritz's Hit List #9
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: digital hearing aids. These hearing aids receive, process, and retransmit audio in digital form, so they qualify for regulation as “digital media devices” under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the CBDTPA passes, any newly manufactured digital hearing aids will have to incorporate government-approved copy restriction technology. Fight piracy – regulate hearing…