Author: Ed Felten
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BitTorrent: The Next Main Event
Few tears will be shed if Grokster and StreamCast are driven out of business as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision. The companies are far from lovable, and their technology is yesterday’s news anyway. A much more important issue is what the rules will be for the next generation of technologies. Here the Court…
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Patry: The Court Punts
William Patry (a distinguished copyright lawyer) offers an interesting take on Grokster. He says that the court was unable to come to agreement on how to apply the Sony Betamax precedent to Grokster, and so punted the issue.
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Legality of Design Decisions, and Footnote 12 in Grokster
As a technologist I find the most interesting, and scariest, part of the Grokster opinion to be the discussion of product design decisions. The Court seems to say that Sony bars liability based solely on product design (p. 16): Sony barred secondary liability based on presuming or imputing intent to cause infringement solely from the…
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Business Model as Evidence of Intent
One interesting aspect of Justice Souter’s majority opinion in Grokster is the criticism of the business models of StreamCast and Grokster (pp. 22-23): Third, there is a further complement to the direct evidence of unlawful objective. It is useful to recall that StreamCast and Grokster make money by selling advertising space, by directing ads to…
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Grokster Loses
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Grokster, finding the company’s actions to be illegal. (Reported by SCOTUSblog.) Expect an explosion of discussion in the blogosphere. My usual one-post-a-day limit will be suspended today. Unanimous opinion of the Court (written by Souter) Concurrence of Ginsburg (joined by Rehnquist and Kennedy) Concurrence of Breyer (joined by Stevens…
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Book Club Discussion: Code, Chapters 3 and 4
This week in Book Club we read Chapters 3 and 4 of Lawrence Lessig’s Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Now it’s time to discuss the chapters. I’m especially eager to see discussion of this week’s chapters, and not just general reflections on the book as a whole. You can chime in by entering a…
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Content Filtering and Security
Buggy security software can make you less secure. Indeed, a growing number of intruders are exploiting bugs in security software to gain access to systems. Smart system administrators have known for a long time to be careful about deploying new “security” products. A company called Audible Magic is trying to sell “content filtering” systems to…
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Regulation by Software
The always interesting James Grimmelmann has a new paper, Regulation by Software (.pdf), on how software relates to law. He starts by dissecting Lessig’s “code is law” argument. Lessig argues that code is a form of “architecture” – part of the environment in which we live. And we know that the shape of our living…
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Book Club Discussion: Code, Chapter 2
This week in Book Club, we read Chapter 2 of Lessig’s Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Rather than kick off the discussion with an essay, I’ll just open the floor for discussion. (To say something, add a comment below.) I’ll chime in with my opinions as the discussion develops. For next Friday, we’ll read…
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Guest Blogger: JD Lasica
I’m happy to welcome JD Lasica, author of the new book Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation, and co-founder of OurMedia, who will be guest-blogging here this coming week. This is part of JD’s virtual book tour. I’ll be taking the week off, but the Friday book club will go on as normal.