Author: Ed Felten
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More on the Cato DRM Paper
I wrote yesterday about the new Cato Institute paper on the economics of peer-to-peer and anti-copying technology, which argues that everything will be okay in the online-music market because competition will force vendors to offer consumer-friendly products. I agree that a competitive market would have this effect. But how competitive is the market? One of…
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How Competitive is the Record Industry? A Natural Experiment
Derek Slater, responding to the recent Cato paper on DRM technologies, raises an important question: How competitive is the record industry? The Cato paper argues that market competition will blunt the possible negative effects of DRM on consumers. The theory is that a variety of competing DRM systems will emerge for online music. These systems…
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Macrovision Tries Passive Anti-Copying Technology for DVDs
Macrovision is introducing a new DRM technology for DVDs, apparently based on passive changes to the data encoded on the disc, according to a news.com article by John Borland. (The article is entitled “New Copy-Proof DVDs on the way?” The answer to that question is “no.”) The new technology, called RipGuard, tries to code the…
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Student Writing Blog: "Information Technology and the Law"
This semester, I’m teaching “Information Technology and the Law”. We’re reading a series of articles and court decisions on important techno-legal issues. I’ve created a student writing blog, on which students will post weekly essays on topics related to the course. Essays are 400-500 words in length, with due dates staggered through the week so…
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Lawrence Lessig, Unmasked
We’re watching this week’s episode of West Wing. On the TV screen, Professor Lawrence Lessig starts talking. “I know that voice,” exclaims my wife. “It’s The Hacker!” On West Wing, Lessig was played not by Himself but by the actor Christopher Lloyd. One of Lloyd’s other roles is on Cyberchase, an animated PBS Kids show,…
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Tagging Technology
Bruce Schneier points to a new product Smart Water. Each bottle has its own unique tag, and the water in it contains tagging elements (e.g., microdots), that will stick to an object if you spray the Smart Water on it. Then, if the item is stolen, the company says that the police can use the…
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Copyright Education: Harder Than It Looks
This afternoon I’m going to lead a discussion among twenty-five bright Princeton students, about the basics of copyright. Why do we have copyright? Why does it cover expression and not ideas? Why fair use? The answers are subtle, but I hope to guide the discussion toward finding them. I can say for sure that a…
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Splitting the Grokster Baby
David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy predicts, astutely, the outcome of the Grokster case. He predicts that the Supreme Court will try to split the baby by overturning the lower court decision (which Hollywood is asking for) while upholding the Sony Betamax doctrine immunizing designers of dual-use technologies from secondary liability (which technologists are asking…
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BitTrickle
Mike Godwin notes a serious error in the recent NYT future-of-TV article: A more important problem with the article is that it gives a false impression of the normal user experience of BitTorrent: Created by Bram Cohen, a 29-year-old programmer in Bellevue, Wash., BitTorrent breaks files hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a song…
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Groundhog Day
Yesterday was Groundhog Day, the holiday. But for SunnComm, the embattled CD-DRM vendor, it may have been Groundhog Day, the movie, in which Bill Murray’s character is doomed to repeat the same unpleasant events until he learns certain lessons. Yesterday SunnComm announced a new product. According to a Register story, the product fixes SunnComm’s infamous…