Category: Uncategorized
-
Story Time
In a speech today, John Fictitious, president of the Hospital Association of America, expressed his industry’s disappointment at the continuing prevalence of cancer in America. “Our industry stands ready to deploy a cure, but the doctors and drug companies have been unwilling to sit down at the bargaining table to work out a mutually agreeable…
-
File Sharing Vs. The Web
Ernest Miller is on a roll over at LawMeme. His latest post asks why people treat HTTP (i.e., the web) and peer-to-peer systems so differently: P2P and http uploading and downloading of copyrighted MP3s are, essentially, functionally equivalent from a copyright point of view. From a technical point of view, however, there are significant differences.…
-
Senate Commerce Testimony: Post-Mortem
Today I testified at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. The issue under discussion was whether (or how) the government should require the inclusion of DRM (anti-copying) technology in digital TV equipment. Here is my written testimony. If you haven’t been to such a hearing, you might be surprised at some of what happens. For one…
-
Volokh and Solum Debate IP
Eugene Volokh and Lawrence Solum are having an interesting debate on the theory behind intellectual property. So far there have been four postings: Volokh’s initial posting, explaining via a clever example why it might make sense to treat information as property Solum’s response, challenging Volokh’s example Volokh’s response to Solum Solum’s response, digging deeper into…
-
Senate Testimony
I’ll be testifying tomorrow morning at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on “Consumer Privacy and Government Technology Mandates in the Digital Media Marketplace.” The hearing is really about two topics: the DMCA subpoena process that allows copyright owners to learn the identities of Internet users (“Consumer Privacy”), and the impact of regulations that would require…
-
A Virus Made Me Do It
According to press reports, an Alabama accountant has been acquitted on charges of tax evasion, after he argued that a computer virus had caused him to underreport his income three years in a row. He could not say which virus it was. Nor could he explain why it had affected only his own return, but…
-
More RIAA Suits to Come
Louis Trager at the Washington Internet Daily (no link; subscription only) reported yesterday that the RIAA is planning on filing hundreds of additional lawsuits against peer-to-peer users within the next month. RIAA VP Matt Oppenheim also expressed outrage at the criticism of the group’s amnesty program. Trager quotes Oppenheim as saying, “We can only give…
-
Why So Many Worms?
Many people have remarked on the recent flurry of worms and viruses going around on the Internet. Is this a trend, or just a random blip? A simple model predicts that worm/virus damage should increase in proportion to the square of the number of people on the Net. First, it seems likely that the amount…
-
Computers As Graders
One of my least favorite tasks as a professor is grading papers. So there’s good news – of a sort – in J. Greg Phelan’s New York Times article from last week, about the use of computer programs to grade essays. The computers are surprisingly good at grading – essentially as accurate as human graders,…
-
RIAA Files 261 Suits
The RIAA launched its long-awaited lawsuit storm today. John Borland at CNet news.com reports that 261 copyright infringement suits were filed against individual defendants. Several of the suits have already settled, reportedly for around $3,000 each.