Month: August 2014
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The Dangers of the New Trade Secrets Acts
First, I want to state how thrilled I am to be joining the great group here at CITP. Every CITP scholar that I’ve gotten to know over the past several years have become friends and influenced my work in areas ranging from voting machine code access to international lawmaking processes. I’m delighted to be a…
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Takedown 2.0: The Trouble with Broad TROs Targeting Non-Party Online Intermediaries
On August 14, a federal district court in Oregon issued an ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO) in a civil copyright infringement case, ABS-CBN v. Ashby. The defendants in the case are accused of operating several “pirate websites” that infringe the plaintiffs’ copyrights in broadcast television programs. In addition to ordering the defendants to stop…
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Airport Scanners: How Privacy Risk Leads to Security Risk
Debates about privacy and security tend to assume that the two are in opposition, so that improving privacy tends to degrade security, and vice versa. But often the two go hand in hand so that privacy enhances security. A good example comes from the airport scanner study I wrote about yesterday.
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Researchers Show Flaws in Airport Scanner
Today at the Usenix Security Symposium a group of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Michigan will present a paper demonstrating flaws in a full-body scaning machine that was used at many U.S. airports. In this post I’ll summarize their findings and discuss the security and policy implications.
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The End of a Brief Era: Recent Appellate Decisions in "Copyright Troll" Litigation
The onslaught of “copyright troll” litigation began only a few years ago, with lawsuits implicating hundreds or even thousands of “John Doe” defendants, who were identified by IP addresses with timestamps corresponding to alleged uses of BitTorrent services to share and download video content without authorization. Recently, federal appellate opinions confirmed growing consensus in district…
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Princeton likely to rescind grade deflation policy
A Princeton faculty committee recommended yesterday that the university rescind its ten-year-old grading guideline that advises faculty to assign grades in the A range to at most 35% of students. The committee issued a report explaining its rationale. The recommendation will probably be accepted and implemented. It’s a good report, and I agree with its…
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Criminal Copyright Sanctions as a U.S. Export
The copyright industries’ mantra that “digital is different” has driven an aggressive, global expansion in criminal sanctions for copyright infringement over the last two decades. Historically speaking, criminal penalties for copyright infringement under U.S. law date from the turn of the 20th century, which means that for over a hundred years (from 1790 to 1897),…