Category: Uncategorized
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Assessing PACER's Access Barriers
The U.S. Courts recently conducted a year-long assessment of their Electronic Public Access program which included a survey of PACER users. While the results of the assessment haven’t been formally published, the Third Branch Newsletter has an interview with Bankruptcy Judge J. Rich Leonard that discusses a few high-level findings of the survey. Judge Leonard…
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New Search and Browsing Interface for the RECAP Archive
We have written in the past about RECAP, our project to help make federal court documents more easily accessible. We continue to upgrade the system, and we are eager for your feedback on a new set of functionality. One of the most-requested RECAP features is a better web interface to the archive. Today we’re releasing…
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My Work at CITP This Year: Judicial Policy, Public Access, and The Electronic Court
Hi. My name is Ron Hedges. I am a Visiting Research Collaborator with the CITP for 2010-11. Let me tell you a little about myself. I am a graduate of the University of Maryland and Georgetown University Law Center. I spent over twenty years as a United States Magistrate Judge and sat in Newark, NJ.…
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Jailbreaking Copyright's Extended Scope
A bit late for the rule’s “triennial” cycle, the Librarian of Congress has released the sec 1201(a)(1)(C) exceptions from the DMCA prohibitions on circumventing copyright access controls. For the next three years, people will not be ” circumventing” if they “jailbreak” or unlock their smartphones, remix short portions of motion pictures on DVD (if they…
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Private Information in Public Court Filings
Court proceedings are supposed to be public. When they are public and easily accessible, citizens know the law and the courts are kept accountable. These are the principles that underpin RECAP, our project to help liberate federal court records from behind a pay-wall. However, appropriate restrictions on public disclosure are equally critical to democracy-enhancing information…
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Announcing the CITP Visitors for 2010-2011
We are delighted to announce the CITP visiting scholars, practitioners, and collaborators for the 2010-2011 academic year. The diverse group of leading thinkers represents CITP’s highly interdisciplinary interests. We are looking forward to their work at the center, and welcome them to the family. The short list is below, but you can see more description…
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My Experiment with "Digital Drugs"
The latest scare meme is “digital drugs” or “i-dosing”, in which kids listen to audio tracks that supposedly induce altered mental states. Concerned adults fear that these “digital drugs” may be a gateway to harder (i.e., actual) drugs. Rumors are circulating among some kids: “I heard it was like some weird demons and stuff through…
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Bilski and the Value of Experimentation
The Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision in Bilski v. Kappos brought closure to this particular patent prosecution, but not much clarity to the questions surrounding business method patents. The Court upheld the Federal Circuit’s conclusion that the claimed “procedure for instructing buyers and sellers how to protect against the risk of price fluctuations in a discrete…
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Identifying Trends that Drive Technology
I’m trying to compile a list of major technological and societal trends that influence U.S. computing research. Here’s my initial list. Please post your own suggestions! Ubiquitous connectivity, and thus true mobility Massive computational capability available to everyone, through the cloud Exponentially increasing data volumes – from ubiquitous sensors, from higher-volume sensors (digital imagers everywhere!),…
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The Stock-market Flash Crash: Attack, Bug, or Gamesmanship?
Andrew wrote last week about the stock market’s May 6 “flash crash”, and whether it might have been caused by a denial-of-service attack. He points to a detailed analysis by nanex.com that unpacks what happened and postulates a DoS attack as a likely cause. The nanex analysis is interesting and suggestive, but I see the…