Month: December 2004
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When Is a "Network" Not a Network?
Last week, in response to the MPAA lawsuits against BitTorrent trackers, I wrote that it’s impossible to sue BitTorrent itself, because it is nothing but a communications protocol. Michael Madison was skeptical, which was a fair response given what little I had written on the subject. Let me say a bit more, to clarify. Opponents…
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P2P in 15 Lines of Code
TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless. For more…
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MPAA Sues BitTorrent Trackers
The MPAA has announced lawsuits against the operators of P2P index servers, such as BitTorrent trackers, according to a Wired News story by Xeni Jardin. A BitTorrent tracker keeps track of who is downloading and/or uploading a particular file, and makes this information available to others who want to find the file. The suits will…
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Should the U.S. Allow Region Coding?
On Friday I wrote about DVD region coding, which allows the manufacture of DVDs that (in theory) can only be played in certain regions of the world. U.S. public policy, in the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), plays an important role in shoring up the region coding mechanism. Is this good public…
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Inside the DVD Procedural Specifications
As I noted yesterday, part of the license that DVD makers have to sign is <a href="As I noted yesterday, part of the license that DVD makers have to sign is available on the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) website. It’s 48 pages of dense technolegalese, consisting mostly of a list of things that DVD…
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DVD-CCA Sues to Suppress Kaleidescape Product
DVD-CCA, the outfit that licenses the lame DVD anti-copying technology, has sued Kaleidescape, a maker of home video servers, according a news.com story by John Borland: [DVD-CCA is suing Kaleidescape.] The company, which has won several recent consumer electronics awards, said it has worked closely with the DVD CCA for more than a year, and…
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Few Sci/Tech Books in OCLC Top 1000
Recently OCLC, a large library consortium, compiled a list of the top 1000 books, measured by the number of copies held by member libraries. In light of the earlier discussion here about must-read books on science and technology, I decided to see which sci/tech books made the OCLC top 1000. As with the previous college…
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Snocap Tries Authorized P2P
Snocap, a company involving Napster founder Shawn Fanning, is trying to enable new peer-to-peer networks that identify copyrighted works and charge users for receiving them, according to Jeff Leeds’ story in Friday’s New York Times. Snocap is not itself building the P2P network(s), but is supplying the payment and song-identification technology. Based on press accounts,…
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Gator's Egregious EULA
Ben Edelman offers a nice dissection of the latest End User License Agreement (EULA) from Gator. It has to be one of the worst EULAs ever written. Below are some highlights; see Ben’s post if you want more details. [Background about Gator: Many people say Gator’s product is spyware. Gator has a habit of threatening…