Month: February 2005
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Forecast for Infotech Policy in the New Congress
Cameron Wilson, Director of the ACM Public Policy Office in Washington, looks at changes (made already or widely reported) in the new Congress and what they tell us about likely legislative action. (He co-writes the ACM U.S. Public Policy Blog, which is quite good.) He mentions four hot areas. The first is regulation of peer-to-peer…
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More on Ad-Blocking
I’m on the road today, so I don’t have a long post for you. (Good news: I’m in Rome. Bad news: It’s Rome, New York.) Instead, let me point you to an interesting exchange about copyright and ad-blocking software on my course blog, in which “Archer” opens with a discussion of copyright and advertising revenue,…
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Can P2P Nets Be Poisoned?
Christin, Weigend, and Chuang have an interesting new paper on corruption of files in P2P networks. Some files are corrupted accidentally (they call this “pollution”), and some might be corrupted deliberately (“poisoning”) by copyright owners or their agents. The paper measures the availability of popular, infringing files on the eDonkey, Overnet, Gnutella, and FastTrack networks,…
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Google AutoLink: Doesn't Cross the Line, Yet
Google’s new Toolbar includes a feature called AutoLink that adds hyperlinks to certain content in Web pages. For example, if it spots a street address in the page, it hyperlinks the address to Google Maps; if it spots the ISBN number for a book, it hyperlinks it to that book’s page on Amazon. Some people…
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Broadcast Flag in Court
Tomorrow the DC Circuit will hear arguments in the case challenging the FCC’s authority to impose the Broadcast Flag regulation. The case will determine whether the FCC can control the design of computers, in the name of copyright. It will also determine whether the ill-conceived Broadcast Flag rule will be imposed. Today’s New York Times…
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More on the Cato DRM Paper
I wrote yesterday about the new Cato Institute paper on the economics of peer-to-peer and anti-copying technology, which argues that everything will be okay in the online-music market because competition will force vendors to offer consumer-friendly products. I agree that a competitive market would have this effect. But how competitive is the market? One of…
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How Competitive is the Record Industry? A Natural Experiment
Derek Slater, responding to the recent Cato paper on DRM technologies, raises an important question: How competitive is the record industry? The Cato paper argues that market competition will blunt the possible negative effects of DRM on consumers. The theory is that a variety of competing DRM systems will emerge for online music. These systems…
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Macrovision Tries Passive Anti-Copying Technology for DVDs
Macrovision is introducing a new DRM technology for DVDs, apparently based on passive changes to the data encoded on the disc, according to a news.com article by John Borland. (The article is entitled “New Copy-Proof DVDs on the way?” The answer to that question is “no.”) The new technology, called RipGuard, tries to code the…
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Student Writing Blog: "Information Technology and the Law"
This semester, I’m teaching “Information Technology and the Law”. We’re reading a series of articles and court decisions on important techno-legal issues. I’ve created a student writing blog, on which students will post weekly essays on topics related to the course. Essays are 400-500 words in length, with due dates staggered through the week so…
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Lawrence Lessig, Unmasked
We’re watching this week’s episode of West Wing. On the TV screen, Professor Lawrence Lessig starts talking. “I know that voice,” exclaims my wife. “It’s The Hacker!” On West Wing, Lessig was played not by Himself but by the actor Christopher Lloyd. One of Lloyd’s other roles is on Cyberchase, an animated PBS Kids show,…