Category: Uncategorized
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AP: Parents Complain Too Much to Professors
AP reports on a supposed trend of parents complaining to professors about their kids’ education, grades, course scheduling, and so on. In eight years of teaching at Princeton, I have never been contacted by a complaining parent. Come to think of it, I have never been contacted at all by a parent during the academic…
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"Fair Use" in the Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan offers data on the prevalence of the term “fair use” in the media. He counted the number of times that “copyright” and “fair use” were used in the same article in any newspaper (worldwide) listed in Lexis/Nexis. Here’s the data, labeled with some possibly relevant events: 118 in 2001 113 in 2000 20…
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Publish in New Jersey, Get Sued in Australia
The highest court in Australia has ruled that Dow Jones can be sued in Australia for libel, even though the article in question was published on a web site in the U.S. The Economist has a good article on the decision and its implications.
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Business Week: Hollywood's Love/Hate Relationship with Technology
Jane Black at Business Week describes how digital technology is changing the movie business. She reports that while one part of the movie industry is fighting tooth and nail against new technology, other parts are eagerly adopting it.
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Fair Use as Black Hole (Cont.)
In response to my earlier posting on fair use, Siva Vaidhyanathan points out one reason for the messiness of the fair use debate – different people mean different things by “fair use”. Some people (mostly lawyers) use “Fair Use” in a narrow, legalistic sense, to refer to a specific set of exceptions to the enumerated…
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Wilkins on Technology Policy
In 1641, John Wilkins published the very first book in English about cryptography. (It discussed many other topics as well.) The book’s title was “Mercury; or, the Secret and Swift messenger, shewing how a man may with privacy and speed Communicate his thoughts to a Friend at any distance.” Wilkins ended the discussion with two…
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NYT Expands Fritz's Hit List
In today’s New York Times, Matt Richtel adds to Fritz’s Hit List: the Barbie Travel Train. He also interrogates a five-year-old who is about to buy this piracy tool, along with employees of a store that is openly selling it.
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Fair Use: A Rhetorical Black Hole?
Yesterday’s exchange with Ernest Miller got me to thinking about why I didn’t mention fair use in my initial posting. I realized there is another reason that I hadn’t stated before: that I was trying to avoid the rhetorical black hole that fair use has become. A rhetorical black hole is like an astronomical black…
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More on Unbreakable DRM
Ernest Miller at LawMeme likes my explanation of why unbreakable codes don’t mean unbreakable DRM. But he takes me to task for writing a posting that ignores fair use and assumes that the customer is the enemy. I guess I should have been more explicit about my assumptions. I agree that fair use is important…
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Just Ask
Sasha Volokh tells an amusing story about asking record companies for permission to tape recorded music. Once they realized he was serious, the companies almost all gave him permission and thanked him for asking. We should do more of this. When companies make silly overreaching claims about the extent of their copyrights, don’t just ignore…