Author: Ed Felten
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DRM and Black Boxes
Lisa Rein has posted (with permission) a video of my short presentation at the Berkeley DRM conference. I talked about the push to turn technologies into “black boxes” that the public is not allowed to study, understand, or discuss, and how that paralyzes public debate on important issues such as electronic voting.
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RIAA/Student Suits Back in the News
Jesse Jordan, one of the students sued by the RIAA, is back in the news. It’s not that anything new has happened; it’s just that Jordan and his father are complaining about the unfairness of the suit and of the $12,000 settlement. It’s true, as Seth Finkelstein observes, that continuing to fight the suit was…
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"If It's Not Snake Oil, It's Pretty Awesome"
In today’s Los Angeles Times, Jon Healey writes about a new DRM proposal from a company called Music Public Broadcasting. The company’s claims, which are not substantiated in the story, give off a distinct aroma of snake oil. The warning signs are all there. First, there is the flamboyant, self-promoting entrepreneur, newly arrived from another…
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Lessons from the SCO/IBM Dispute
Conventional wisdom about the SCO/IBM dustup is that it demonstrates a serious flaw in the open-source model – an asserted lack of “quality control” on open-source code that leaves end users open to potential copyright and patent infringement suits. If any pimply-faced teenager can contribute code to open-source projects, how can you be sure that…
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How To Annoy Your Mother-in-Law
Look up her age here. Then send her an email informing her that anyone on the Net can do the same. UPDATE (9:00 PM): How to run up your mother-in-law’s AOL bill: tell her she can look up her friends’ ages.
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Privacy, Blogging, and Conflict of Interest
Blogging can create the most interesting conflicts of interest. Here is a particularly juicy example: William Safire’s column in today’s New York Times questions the motives of the new LifeLog program at DARPA. (DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the part of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that funds external research and…
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Petition for Public Domain Enhancement Act
Larry Lessig writes: We have launched a petition to build support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. That act would require American copyright holders to pay $1 fifty years after a work was published. If they pay the $1, the copyright continues. If they don’t, the work passes into the public domain. Historical estimates would…
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Software Infringement Rate Decreasing
The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a prominent industry group, has announced the results of its annual study of copyright compliance by business software users. According to BSA, 39% of business application software, worldwide, was infringing in 2002. This is down from a high of 49% in 1994. The U.S. was the most law-abiding country, with…
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Palladium as P2P Enabler
A new paper by Stuart Schechter, Rachel Greenstadt, and Mike Smith, of Harvard, points out what should have been obvious all along: that “trusted computing” systems like Microsoft’s now-renamed Palladium, if they work, can be used to make peer-to-peer file sharing systems essentially impervious to technical countermeasures. The reason is that Palladium-like systems allow any…
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SearchKing Suit Dismissed
Stefanie Olsen at CNet News.com reports that SearchKing’s lawsuit against Google has been dismissed. The judge ruled, as expected, that Google’s page rankings are opinions, and that Google has a First Amendment right to state its opinions. Here’s the background: SearchKing sells a service that claims to raise people’s page rankings on the Google search…