Month: September 2003

  • Story Time (Cont.)

    Several readers took issue with my previous post relating anti-infringement technology to anti-cancer technology. So let me clarify what I was and wasn’t trying to say. First, I wasn’t saying that infringement is okay. It’s not. And I wasn’t trying to draw a moral equivalence between infringers and copyright owners. Remember: I analogized infringement to…

  • Diebold Voting Machines "At High Risk of Compromise"

    As expected, an independent study of the Diebold electronic voting machines purchased by the state of Maryland has found that “The system, as implemented in policy, procedure, and technology, is at high risk of compromise.” The study was commissioned by the state and performed by SAIC. A Washington Post story by Brigid Schulte reports that…

  • Story Time

    In a speech today, John Fictitious, president of the Hospital Association of America, expressed his industry’s disappointment at the continuing prevalence of cancer in America. “Our industry stands ready to deploy a cure, but the doctors and drug companies have been unwilling to sit down at the bargaining table to work out a mutually agreeable…

  • File Sharing Vs. The Web

    Ernest Miller is on a roll over at LawMeme. His latest post asks why people treat HTTP (i.e., the web) and peer-to-peer systems so differently: P2P and http uploading and downloading of copyrighted MP3s are, essentially, functionally equivalent from a copyright point of view. From a technical point of view, however, there are significant differences.…

  • Senate Commerce Testimony: Post-Mortem

    Today I testified at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. The issue under discussion was whether (or how) the government should require the inclusion of DRM (anti-copying) technology in digital TV equipment. Here is my written testimony. If you haven’t been to such a hearing, you might be surprised at some of what happens. For one…

  • Volokh and Solum Debate IP

    Eugene Volokh and Lawrence Solum are having an interesting debate on the theory behind intellectual property. So far there have been four postings: Volokh’s initial posting, explaining via a clever example why it might make sense to treat information as property Solum’s response, challenging Volokh’s example Volokh’s response to Solum Solum’s response, digging deeper into…

  • Senate Testimony

    I’ll be testifying tomorrow morning at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on “Consumer Privacy and Government Technology Mandates in the Digital Media Marketplace.” The hearing is really about two topics: the DMCA subpoena process that allows copyright owners to learn the identities of Internet users (“Consumer Privacy”), and the impact of regulations that would require…

  • A Virus Made Me Do It

    According to press reports, an Alabama accountant has been acquitted on charges of tax evasion, after he argued that a computer virus had caused him to underreport his income three years in a row. He could not say which virus it was. Nor could he explain why it had affected only his own return, but…

  • More RIAA Suits to Come

    Louis Trager at the Washington Internet Daily (no link; subscription only) reported yesterday that the RIAA is planning on filing hundreds of additional lawsuits against peer-to-peer users within the next month. RIAA VP Matt Oppenheim also expressed outrage at the criticism of the group’s amnesty program. Trager quotes Oppenheim as saying, “We can only give…

  • Why So Many Worms?

    Many people have remarked on the recent flurry of worms and viruses going around on the Internet. Is this a trend, or just a random blip? A simple model predicts that worm/virus damage should increase in proportion to the square of the number of people on the Net. First, it seems likely that the amount…