CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Category: Uncategorized

  • RIAA Files 261 Suits

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    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.

  • P2P Porn

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    Yesterday’s New York Times reported that recording industry lobbyists are shocked, shocked to find porn on popular peer-to-peer networks. Naturally, they think P2P should be heavily regulated as a result. Somebody should send them a copy of Michael Kinsley’s classic Slate editorial on the most dangerous of all media: paper.

  • RIAA to Grant Semi-Amnesty

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    The RIAA is reportedly planning to offer amnesty to file sharers. According to the reports, just after the RIAA launches its upcoming flurry of lawsuits against file sharers, it will offer a deal to everybody else: send a letter to RIAA admitting that you have infringed in the past, and in exchange RIAA will promise…

  • Ruling in Garage-Door-Opener Case

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    An important ruling was issued yesterday in the Chamberlain v. Skylink lawsuit. (See this previous post for a summary of the case.) The court denied Chamberlain’s motion for summary judgment. Although this is only a ruling on a preliminary motion, the judge used it to offer her analysis of how the DMCA applies to the…

  • Hacking, by Subpoena

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    James Grimmelmann at LawMeme explains a recent opinion by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, holding that a party that used an obviously improper subpoena to get information from a computer can be sued for breaking into that computer. If you think about this, it makes some sense, if the subpoena was used to defeat…

  • The Scopes Trial, Revisited

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    This week, the Economist ran an odd piece comparing the SCO/IBM dispute to the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” SCO, for anyone who has never heard of the company, is pronounced “skoh”, as in Scopes. Indeed “the SCO case” of 2003 sounds increasingly like the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, which pitted religious fundamentalists against progressives…

  • Software Customer Bill of Rights

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    Cem Kaner has written a Software Customer Bill of Rights. His general approach is to require that customers have roughly the same rights when they buy software as when they buy other products. Much of what Kaner says makes sense. But at least one of his principles seems awfully hard to implement in practice: 2.…

  • Business Week Interview

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    Business Week Online is running an interview with me, done by reporter Heather Green.

  • Comments

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    I’m thinking about turning on the Comments feature, so that readers can react to my postings right here on the site. So far I haven’t allowed comments, because I prefer to get reader input by email; and I’m happy (at least in theory) to write followup posts that incorporate and react to reader comments. Lately,…

  • Trade Secrets and Free Speech

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    Yesterday the California Supreme Court issued its ruling in DVDCCA v. Bunner, a case pitting trade secrets against freedom of speech. The court ruled that an injunction against disclosure of a trade secret is valid, even though it restricts some speech. The case relates to CSS, the encryption scheme used to scramble the data on…