Author: Ed Felten
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Self-Help
Lawyers use the term “self-help” to refer to all of the little steps people take to protect themselves. Locking your bicycle is self-help – even though it would not be necessary in a world where everyone obeyed the law, it’s a good idea in the real world. Fences and burglar alarms are self-help too. Self-help…
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RIAA To Do The Right Thing?
Fortune reports on the RIAA’s stunning new anti-infringement strategy of suing actual infringers: “The RIAA is considering a far riskier strategy–suing individuals who share large numbers of files on Kazaa, Grokster, or Morpheus. It’s a tactic guaranteed to infuriate and alienate music fans, and it underscores the awful bind record labels are in.” Assuming the…
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British Bill to Ban Mods to Cellphone ID Numbers
The British Parliament is now considering a bill that would make it illegal to change the IMEI number on a cell phone. Each phone has a unique IMEI which it uses to identify itself to the cell network; it’s like a serial number for the phone. If you report your phone stolen, the cell operator…
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Pro-Tinkering Speech from White House Cybersecurity Czar
Richard Clarke, the White House cybersecurity czar, in a speech today at the Black Hat conference, called for legal protection for tinkering by security researchers. According to an Associated Press article by D. Ian Hopper, Clarke “encouraged the nation’s top computer security professionals and hackers Wednesday to try to break computer programs, but said they…
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Vaidhyanathan: Copyright as Cudgel
Nice article on copyright abuses by Siva Vaidyanathan in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle is read mostly by professors, so the article talks at length about the harm to scholarship caused by the recent copyright expansion. Vaidhyanthan identifies two common arguments used by those opposed to copyright expansion. The first, which he…
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Berman-Coble Bill: Green Light for Cyber-Attacks
In the current climate of concern about cyber-attacks, it’s astonishing that Congress is considering a bill that would legalize a wide range of cyber-attacks – yet that is just what the proposed Berman-Coble bill would do. The bill allows the owner of a copyright to interfere with the computer or network of anybody who is…
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Australian DMCA Does Not Prohibit Mod Chips
An Australian judge has ruled that the Australian version of the DMCA does not apply to the sale of “mod chips” for Sony PlayStation game consoles. Technological background: Sony PlayStation is a game console that plugs into the back of a TV. PlayStation games come on a compact disk that is plugged into a CD…
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Edelman, ACLU File Anti-DMCA Suit
Ben Edelman, a soon-to-be law student at Harvard, has filed, with help from the ACLU, a lawsuit challenging restrictions on his right to disassemble and study a Web censorware product from a company called N2H2. The suit challenges the validity of an anti-tinkering clause in N2H2’s license agreement, and of the DMCA provisions that apply…
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Princeton Accused of "Hacking" Yale
[This is slightly off-topic, but as a Princeton person I have gotten lots of questions about this incident.] Somebody in Princeton’s admissions office, probably an associate dean of admissions, apparently accessed without authorization a Web site that Yale set up for people who had applied for admission to Yale. Yale says that 11 students’ records…