CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Category: Uncategorized

  • Wireless LANs, Security, and Intrusions

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    News.com has an article about drive-by spam. The idea is that a spammer will find a building with a wireless LAN. The spammer will then connect to that LAN, without permission, from outside the building, and use the building’s email server to send a big load of spam email. This is abusive behavior. The spammer…

  • Dornseif: Technological Definitions in the Law

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    Maximillian Dornseif offers some comments following up on my previous posts about Source vs. Object Code, and definitions in the Berman-Coble bill. A brief excerpt: The court system and legal doctrine is built all arround definitions. While defining things like cruelty, carelessness and such stuff is a well understood problem for lawmakers and courts, technical…

  • The Other Digital Divide

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    Long and well-written articleby Drew Clark and Bara Vaida in the National Journal’s Tech Daily, about the history of the current Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley battle over copy protection. If you’re still coming up to speed on this issue, the article is a great scene-setter. Even if you know the issue well, you still might…

  • "Peer to Peer" in the Berman-Coble Bill

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    Yesterday’s defense of the Berman-Coble bill resurrected the argument that the bill only hurts the bad guys, because it authorizes hacking only of peer to peer file trading networks. And we all know that “Decentralized P2P networks were designed specifically (and ingeniously) to thwart suits for copyright infringement by ensuring there is no central service…

  • What's That "Followups" Link?

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    You may have noticed the small “Followups” link at the bottom of recent entries in this blog. That’s a feature called TrackBack. (The link previously said “TrackBack” but I’ve changed it to “Followups” since that seems a more intuitive name.) Kieran Healy offers a nice explanation of the TrackBack feature. If you’re a reader, the…

  • Preliminary Injunction Against Aimster

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    A Federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against the Aimster file sharing service. The judge found it likely that Aimster will ultimately (after all the evidence is heard) be found liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. Based on a quick reading, it looks like this is based on Aimster’s involvement in promoting the…

  • Defense of Berman-Coble Bill Offered

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    In Politech today, Congressman Berman (through an aide) offers a defense of the proposed Berman-Coble bill. (This bill would legalize certain forms of hacking by copyright owners against users of file-sharing systems.) The gist of the defense is that the bill would only shelter copyright holders from liability to the extent that they were actually…

  • Adobe Files DMCA Challenge

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    Adobe has filed a federal lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment that its Acrobat product does not violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. (Here’s Adobe’s press release. I don’t have a link to the court papers yet.) Here is the story, as far as I can tell at this point: Any TrueType-compatible font can be labeled with…

  • R.I.P. Napster

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    A judge has nixed Bertelsmann’s purchase of Napster. This looks like the end of the road for Napster. From now on Napster will be nothing but a cautionary example – though precisely what cautionary lesson it offers, and to whom, will be a subject of vigorous debate.

  • Source Code and Object Code

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    [This item is long and geeky. Sorry about that. I hope that at least some of you will find it interesting. The rest of you can skip right to the (slightly) pithier items below.] When lawyers discuss software, they typically draw distinctions between source code and object code. These distinctions often fail to account for…