Author: Timothy B. Lee

My friend Ray Lehman points to an intriguing opportunity to expand public access to government data: insurance regulation. The United States has a decentralized, state-based system for regulating the insurance industry. Insurance companies are required to disclose data on their premiums, claims, assets, and many other topics, to state regulators for each state in which…

In my research on privacy problems in PACER, I spent a lot of time examining PACER documents. In addition to researching the problem of “bad” redactions, I was also interested in learning about the pattern of redactions generally. To this end, my software looked for two redaction styles. One is the “black rectangle” redaction method…

Since we launched RECAP a couple of years ago, one of our top concerns has been privacy. The federal judiciary’s PACER system offers the public online access to hundreds of millions of court records. The judiciary’s rules require each party in a case to redact certain types of information from documents they submit, but unfortunately…

On Tuesday Judge Denny Chen rejected a proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case. My write-up for Ars Technica is here. The question everyone is asking is what comes next. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the parties will go back to the bargaining table and hammer out a third iteration of the…

As promised, the official Freedom to Tinker predictions for 2011. These predictions are the result of discussions that included myself, Joe Hall, Steve Schultze, Wendy Seltzer, Dan Wallach, and Harlan Yu, but note that we don’t individually agree with every prediction. DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs…

We’re running a little behind this year, but as we do every year, we’ll review the predictions we made for 2010. Below you’ll find our predictions from 2010 in italics, and the results in ordinary type. Please notify us in the comments if we missed anything. (1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread…

In my last post I told a story about the Level 3/Comcast dispute that portrays Comcast in a favorable light. Now here’s another story that casts Comcast as the villain. Story 2: Comcast Abuses Its Market Power As Steve explained, Level 3 is an “Internet Backbone Provider.” Level 3 has traditionally been considered a tier…

Like Steve and a lot of other people in the tech policy world, I’ve been trying to understand the dispute between Level 3 and Comcast. The combination of technical complexity and commercial secrecy has made the controversy almost impenetrable for anyone outside of the companies themselves. And of course, those who are at the center…

One sentiment I’ve seen in a number of people express about our release of RECAP is illustrated by this comment here at Freedom to Tinker: Technically impressive, but also shortsighted. There appears a socialistic cultural trend that seeks to disconnect individual accountability to ones choices. $.08 a page is hardly burdensome or profitable, and clearly…

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Larry Lessig’s seminal work on Internet regulation, turns ten years old this year. To mark the occassion, the online magazine Cato Unbound (full disclosure: I’m a Cato adjunct scholar) invited Lessig and three other prominent Internet scholars to weigh in on Code’s legacy: what it got right, where it…

Thursday’s lunch talk here at CITP was by my co-blogger Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Adam is a leading voice in the debate over online free speech, with a particular focus on how to protect children from harmful online material while preserving First Amendment freedoms. In his lunch talk, Adam focused on…