CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Month: May 2005

  • Register of Copyrights Misunderstands Copyright

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    The office of the U.S. Register of Copyrights recently released its annual report for 2004. Along with some useful information about the office’s function, the report includes a sort of editorial about the copyright system, entitled “Copyright in the Public Eye.” The editorial displays a surprising misunderstanding of the purposes of copyright. Consider, for example,…

  • New Study on Effects of E-Voting

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    David Card and Enrico Moretti, two economists from UC Berkeley, have an interesting new paper that crunches data on the 2004 election, to shed light on the effect of touchscreen voting. The paper looks reasonable to me, but my background is not in social science so others are better placed than me to critique it.…

  • RFID on DVDs

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    A group at UCLA is studying how to deter DVD copying by putting RFID chips on DVDs, according to a story in RFID Journal by Mary Catherine O’Connor. (Noted by Rik Lambers at CoCo.) The article doesn’t say much about what they are planning. Reading between the lines, it looks like the group hasn’t reached…

  • Newsweek Fails AP Math

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    Newsweek just released its list of the top 100 U.S. high schools. Like the more famous U.S. News college rankings, Newsweek relies on a numerical formula. Here is Newsweek’s formula: Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement and/or International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students…

  • Nobody Disputes This Post

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    Friday’s debate between Dean Garfield (MPAA’s head lawyer) and Wendy Seltzer (EFF lawyer) at Princeton was fairly interesting. I’m hoping video will be available sometime soon. At one point, though, Dean Garfield said something that totally floored me. He was talking about technologies like Audible Magic that claim to be able to detect and block…

  • A View from DMP World

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    The “6th General Assembly of the Digital Media Project” recently released a set of documents “providing an Interoperable DRM Platform”. I’ve written before about the self-contradictory nature of their goal (A Perfectly Compatible Form of Incompatibility). Now we get to see how they plan to achieve the goal. And I have to say, the documents…

  • Fear-to-Peer, Art and Science at Princeton

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    “Fear-to-Peer at Princeton: A Debate about Filesharing on Campus” will be held Friday, May 6, at 3:30 P.M., in Friend Center 101 on the Princeton campus. (directions) Dean Garfield, VP and Director of Legal Affairs at the MPAA, will square off against Wendy Seltzer, an intellectual property attorney with the EFF. I’ll be the moderator.…

  • Frist Filibuster

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    Last night about 9:30 I was walking across campus, and I came across the Frist filibuster, an event that had until then existed only in the media for me, even though it has been going on for nearly a week, no more than 500 yards from my office. The filibuster is a clever bit of…

  • Mobile Network Providers Flirt with (Self-)Regulation

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    Mobile phone networks in the U.S. are developing a rating and filtering system to apply to content on their networks, according to a Reuters story by Antony Bruno. The Federal Communications Commission oversees the distribution of wireless spectrum to U.S. operators, and wireless carriers do not want the [FCC’s] indecency campaign against radio, TV and…