Month: March 2006

  • RIAA Says Future DRM Might "Threaten Critical Infrastructure and Potentially Endanger Lives"

    We’re in the middle of the U.S. Copyright Office’s triennial DMCA exemption rulemaking. As you might expect, most of the filings are dry as dust, but buried in the latest submission by a coalition of big copyright owners (publishers, Authors’ Guild, BSA, MPAA, RIAA, etc.) is an utterly astonishing argument. Some background: In light of…

  • Nuts and Bolts of Net Discrimination, Part 2

    Today I want to continue last week’s discussion of how network discrimination might actually occur. Specifically, I want to talk about packet reordering. Recall that an Internet router is a device that receives packets of data on some number of incoming links, decides on which outgoing link each packet should be forwarded, and sends packets…

  • USACM Policy Statement on DRM

    I’m pleased to post here a new policy statement on DRM, issued by USACM, the U.S. public policy committee of ACM, the leading professional society for computer scientists. It’s a balanced yet strong statement of principles that can be applied to many public policy questions relating to DRM. I helped to draft it, and I…

  • Nuts and Bolts of Network Discrimination

    One of the reasons the network neutrality debate is so murky is that relatively few people understand the mechanics of traffic discrimination. I think that in reasoning about net neutrality it helps to understand how discrimination would actually be put into practice. That’s what I want to explain today. Don’t worry, the details aren’t very…