Category: Uncategorized
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The Digital Death of Copyright's First Sale Doctrine
The legal media’s attention has been focused this past week on Supreme Court oral arguments in Golan v. Holder, an important copyright case involving the power of Congress to “restore” private rights in creative works that are already in the public domain. In this post, I’d like to focus on an important copyright case that…
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Decrees and Buses: How the Open Government Partnership Translates into Action in Brazil
The U.S. and Brazil teamed up to form an important global initiative, the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The project was launched by President Obama and President Dilma Rousseff right before the General Assembly of the United Nations this year (which by the way, was opened for the first time by a woman, President Rousseff). The…
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Corruption Bureau assigns fox to guard henhouse
Recently I wrote about my discovery that someone erased evidence on an election computer in Cumberland County, NJ. After something went wrong in a Primary Election in June 2011, the Superior Court (the Hon. David E. Krell) had ordered the County Board of Elections to make the computer available for me (the Plaintiffs’ expert) to…
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Open Access to Scholarly Publications at Princeton
In its September 2011 meeting, the Faculty of Princeton University voted unanimously for a policy of open access to scholarly publications: “The members of the Faculty of Princeton University strive to make their publications openly accessible to the public. To that end, each Faculty member hereby grants to The Trustees of Princeton University a nonexclusive,…
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A review of the FVAP UOCAVA workshop
The US Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) is the Department of Defense Agency charged with assisting military and overseas voters with all aspects of voting, including registering to vote, obtaining ballots, and returning ballots. FVAP’s interpretations of Federal law (*) says that they must perform a demonstration of electronic return of marked ballots by overseas…
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The End of Gnutella?
Almost exactly 2 years ago, I wrote an essay that examined the case of Arista Records et al v. Lime Group et al. It was presented on Freedom-to-Tinker in a series of three posts (1, 2, 3). These articles presented an analysis which showed that any open filesharing network, such as Gnutella, is vulnerable to…
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Retiring FedThread
Nearly two years ago, the Federal Register was published in a structured XML format for the first time. This was a big deal in the open government world: the Federal Register, often called the daily newspaper of our federal government, is one of our government’s most widely read publications. And while it could previously be…
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What Gets Redacted in Pacer?
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…
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Universities in Brazil are too closed to the world, and that's bad for innovation
When Brazilian president Dilma Roussef visited China in the beginning of May, she came back with some good news (maybe too good to be entirely true). Among them, the announcement that Foxconn, the largest maker of electronic components, will invest US$12 billion to open a large industrial plant in the country. The goal is to…
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New Research Result: Bubble Forms Not So Anonymous
Today, Joe Calandrino, Ed Felten and I are releasing a new result regarding the anonymity of fill-in-the-bubble forms. These forms, popular for their use with standardized tests, require respondents to select answer choices by filling in a corresponding bubble. Contradicting a widespread implicit assumption, we show that individuals create distinctive marks on these forms, allowing…