Month: April 2006

  • Happy Endings

    Cameron Wilson at the USACM Policy Blog writes about a Cato Institute event about copyright policy, which was held Wednesday. The panel on the DMCA was especially interesting. (audio download; audio stream; video stream) Tim Lee, author of the recent Cato paper on the ill effects of the DMCA, spoke first. The second speaker was…

  • U.S. Copyright May Get Harsher and Broader

    Rep. Lamar Smith is preparing to introduce a bill in Congress that would increase penalties for copyright infringement and broaden the scope of the DMCA and other copyright laws, according to a news.com story. (The story seems to get some details of the bill wrong, so be sure to look at the bill itself before…

  • Serialized Posts

    Lately I’ve found myself writing short series of posts on a single topic, as with the recent sequence of four posts on HDCP security. This is a departure from the traditional style of this blog, where posts were self-contained and the topic would typically change from day to day. I typically plan out these post…

  • HDCP: Why So Weak?

    Today I want to wrap up (I think) the discussion on security weaknesses in HDCP, the encryption scheme used for sending very high-def video from a device like a next-gen DVD player to a TV monitor. I wrote previously (1, 2, 3) about how HDCP will inevitably fail – catastrophically – when somebody manages to…

  • HDCP Could Have Been Better

    I wrote Friday about weaknesses in the HDCP handshake protocol that is being used to set up encryption of very high-def TV content that is in transit from devices like next-gen DVD players to television monitors. This was not news to those who follow the area. The ideas in my post came from a 2001…

  • Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes

    I wrote yesterday about the HDCP/HDMI technology that Hollywood wants to use to restrict the availability of very high-def TV content. Today I want to go under the hood, explaining how the key part of HDCP, the handshake, works. I’ll leave out some mathematical niceties to simplify the explanation; full details are in a 2001…

  • HDMI and Output Control

    Tim Lee at Tech Liberation Front points out an interesting aspect of the new MovieBeam device – it offers its highest-resolution output only to video displays that use the HDMI format. (MovieBeam is a $200 box you buy that lets you buy 24-hour access to recent movies. There is a rotating menu of movies. Currently…

  • Understanding the Newts

    Recently I’ve been trying to figure out the politics of technology policy. There seem to be regularly drawn battle lines in Congress, but for the most part tech policy doesn’t play out as a Republican vs. Democratic or liberal vs. conservative conflict. Henry Farrell, in a recent post at Crooked Timber, put his finger on…

  • Princeton-Microsoft Intellectual Property Conference

    Please join us for the 2006 Princeton University – Microsoft Intellectual Property Conference, Creativity & I.P. Law: How Intellectual Property Fosters or Hinders Creative Work, May 18-19 at Princeton University. This public conference will explore a number of strategies for dealing with IP issues facing creative workers in the fields of information technology, biotechnology, the…

  • Interoperability, and the Birth of the Web

    Tim Berners-Lee was here yesterday, and he told some interesting stories about the birth and growth of the Web. I was particularly intrigued by his description of the environment at CERN, where he worked during the relevant years. CERN was (and still is) the European nuclear physics research lab. It had a permanent staff, but…