Year: 2005
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Tagging Technology
Bruce Schneier points to a new product Smart Water. Each bottle has its own unique tag, and the water in it contains tagging elements (e.g., microdots), that will stick to an object if you spray the Smart Water on it. Then, if the item is stolen, the company says that the police can use the…
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Copyright Education: Harder Than It Looks
This afternoon I’m going to lead a discussion among twenty-five bright Princeton students, about the basics of copyright. Why do we have copyright? Why does it cover expression and not ideas? Why fair use? The answers are subtle, but I hope to guide the discussion toward finding them. I can say for sure that a…
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Splitting the Grokster Baby
David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy predicts, astutely, the outcome of the Grokster case. He predicts that the Supreme Court will try to split the baby by overturning the lower court decision (which Hollywood is asking for) while upholding the Sony Betamax doctrine immunizing designers of dual-use technologies from secondary liability (which technologists are asking…
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BitTrickle
Mike Godwin notes a serious error in the recent NYT future-of-TV article: A more important problem with the article is that it gives a false impression of the normal user experience of BitTorrent: Created by Bram Cohen, a 29-year-old programmer in Bellevue, Wash., BitTorrent breaks files hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a song…
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Groundhog Day
Yesterday was Groundhog Day, the holiday. But for SunnComm, the embattled CD-DRM vendor, it may have been Groundhog Day, the movie, in which Bill Murray’s character is doomed to repeat the same unpleasant events until he learns certain lessons. Yesterday SunnComm announced a new product. According to a Register story, the product fixes SunnComm’s infamous…
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More Trouble for Network Monitors
A while back I wrote about a method (well known to cryptography nerds) to frustrate network monitoring. It works by breaking up a file into several shares, in such a way that any individual share, and indeed any partial subset of the shares, looks entirely random, but if you have all of the shares then…
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Show Us the Numbers
Today brings yet another story about how Hollywood’s finances are better than ever. Ross Johnson’s story (“Video Sales Abroad Are Good News in Hollywood. Shhh.”) in today’s New York Times tells us that the studios are keeping their overseas DVD sales secret, so as not to interfere with the industry’s tradition of lowballing its revenue.…
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Review of MPAA's "Parent File Scan" Software
Yesterday the MPAA announced the availability of a new software tool called Parent File Scan. I decided to download it and try it out. Here’s my review. According to an MPAA site, Parent File Scan software helps consumers check whether their computers have peer-to-peer software and potentially infringing copies of motion pictures and other copyrighted…
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PlaysMaybe
Natali Helberger at INDICARE questions Microsoft’s new “playsforsure” campaign. Playsforsure is a logo that will be displayed by digital music and video stores, and media devices. The program has a cute logo: According to the program’s website, Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you’re shopping for a portable music or video device and you want…
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Balancing Tests in the Grokster Briefs
The biggest issue in the Grokster case is whether the Supreme Court adjusts or clarifies its precedent from the Sony Betamax case. The fate of Grokster itself is much less important than what ground rules the Court imposes on future innovators. The core of the Betamax opinion is this oft-quoted passage: The staple article of…