Month: May 2004

  • Report from RIAA v. P2P User Courtroom

    Mary Bridges offers an interesting report from a court hearing yesterday, in one of the RIAA’s lawsuits against end users accused of P2P infringement. She points to an amicus brief filed by folks at Harvard’s Berkman Center, at the Court’s request, that explains some of the factual and legal issues raised in these suits. [link…

  • The Landsburg Amendment

    Can this be a coincidence? This week, Congress prepares to vote on the Pirate Act, which would impose severe penalties for online copyright infringers and redirect the Department of Justice toward copyright enforcement and away from any other insignificant law enforcement problems facing the U.S. In the same week, Steven Landsburg advocates the death penalty…

  • Landsburg's Modest Proposal

    Steven E. Landsburg has a somewhat creepy piece over at Slate, calling for the death penalty for computer worm authors. Ernest Miller responds. UPDATE (12:15 AM): James Grimmelmann has some interesting thoughts on Landsburg’s proposal.

  • Word Tracking Bug Demo and Remover

    Alex Halderman has created a page about the Word tracking bugs I described yesterday. He offers an example Word tracking bug for you to examine, and a scanner program that can find and remove Word tracking bugs on your computer.

  • Email Tracking: It Gets Worse

    When I wrote Monday about the new didtheyreadit.com privacy-invading email tracking system, I had no idea that an even more invasive system has been on the market for two years or so. This system, called readnotify.com, was pointed out by commenter Brian Parsons. readnotify.com is an email tracking system that uses Web bugs (like didtheyreadit)…

  • Must-Read Copyright Articles

    Recently I read two great articles on copyright: Tim Wu’s Copyright’s Communications Policy and Mark Lemley’s Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property. Wu’s paper, which has already been praised widely in the copyright blogosphere, argues that copyright law, in addition to its well-known purpose of creating incentives for authors, has another component…

  • Broadcast Flag for Radio

    JD Lasica has an important story about an FCC proposal, backed by the recording industry, to impose a broadcast-flag mandate on the design of digital radios. As JD suggests, this issue deserves much more attention than it has gotten. He also has copies of correspondence on this issue exchanged between RIAA president Cary Sherman and…

  • New Email Spying Tool

    A company called didtheyreadit.com has launched a new email-spying tool that is generating some controversy, and should generate more. The company claims that its product lets you invisibly track what happens to email messages you send: how many times they are read; when, where (net address and geographic location), and for how long they are…

  • Penn State: No Servers in Dorms

    Yesterday I attended the Educause Policy Conference in Washington, where I spoke on a panel on “Sharing Information and Controlling Content: Continuing Challenges for Higher Education.” One of the most interesting parts of the day was a brief presentation by Russ Vaught, the Associate Vice Provost for IT at Penn State. He said that Penn…

  • Still More About End-User Liability

    At the risk of alienating readers, here is one more post about the advisability of imposing liability on end-users for harm to third parties that results from break-ins to the end-users’ computers. I promise this is the last post on this topic, at least for this week. Rob Heverly, in a very interesting reply to…