CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Month: June 2003

  • P2P Evolution to Accelerate

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    The Washington Post online has a nice summary/directory of articles on the RIAA’s upcoming crackdown on peer-to-peer file sharers. The crackdown seems like a risky move, but it seems the industry can’t think of anything else to do about their P2P problem. When the industry sued Napster into oblivion, Napster was replaced, hydra-like, by a…

  • A Modest Proposal

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    Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress can condition Federal funding for libraries on the libraries’ use of censorware (i.e., that a law called CIPA is consistent with the constitution), it’s time to take a serious look at the deficiencies of censorware, and what can be done about them. Suppose you’re a librarian…

  • Hatch "Clarifies" His Position

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    Senator Orrin Hatch issued a short press release yesterday, backtracking from his previous (mis-)statement about remedies for copyright infringement. There are some interesting tidbits in the release, which I quote here in full, with the surprising bits italicized: HATCH COMMENTS ON COPYRIGHT ENFORCEMENT Washington – Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary…

  • Layers

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    Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung have a new paper, “The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law,” in which they argue that layering is an essential part of the Internet’s architecture and that Internet regulation should therefore respect the Internet’s layered nature. It’s a long paper, so no short commentary can do it justice, but…

  • DRM and Black Boxes

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    Lisa Rein has posted (with permission) a video of my short presentation at the Berkeley DRM conference. I talked about the push to turn technologies into “black boxes” that the public is not allowed to study, understand, or discuss, and how that paralyzes public debate on important issues such as electronic voting.

  • RIAA/Student Suits Back in the News

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    Jesse Jordan, one of the students sued by the RIAA, is back in the news. It’s not that anything new has happened; it’s just that Jordan and his father are complaining about the unfairness of the suit and of the $12,000 settlement. It’s true, as Seth Finkelstein observes, that continuing to fight the suit was…

  • "If It's Not Snake Oil, It's Pretty Awesome"

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    In today’s Los Angeles Times, Jon Healey writes about a new DRM proposal from a company called Music Public Broadcasting. The company’s claims, which are not substantiated in the story, give off a distinct aroma of snake oil. The warning signs are all there. First, there is the flamboyant, self-promoting entrepreneur, newly arrived from another…

  • Lessons from the SCO/IBM Dispute

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    Conventional wisdom about the SCO/IBM dustup is that it demonstrates a serious flaw in the open-source model – an asserted lack of “quality control” on open-source code that leaves end users open to potential copyright and patent infringement suits. If any pimply-faced teenager can contribute code to open-source projects, how can you be sure that…

  • How To Annoy Your Mother-in-Law

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    Look up her age here. Then send her an email informing her that anyone on the Net can do the same. UPDATE (9:00 PM): How to run up your mother-in-law’s AOL bill: tell her she can look up her friends’ ages.

  • Privacy, Blogging, and Conflict of Interest

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    Blogging can create the most interesting conflicts of interest. Here is a particularly juicy example: William Safire’s column in today’s New York Times questions the motives of the new LifeLog program at DARPA. (DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the part of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that funds external research and…