Category: Uncategorized
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Satellite Piracy, Mod Chips, and the Freedom to Tinker
Tom Lee makes an interesting point about the satellite case I wrote about on Saturday: the problem facing EchoStar and other satellite manufacturers is strikingly similar to the challenges that have been faced for many years by video game console manufacturers. There’s a grey market in “mod chips” for video game consoles. Typically, they’re sold…
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Satellite Case Raises Questions about the Rule of Law
My friend Julian Sanchez reports on a September 29 ruling by a federal magistrate judge that retailers will not be required to disclose the names of customers who purchased open satellite hardware that is currently the subject of a copyright lawsuit. The Plaintiff, Echostar, sought the records as part of its discovery procedures in a…
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Political Information Overload and the New Filtering
[We’re pleased to introduce Luis Villa as a guest blogger. Luis is a law student at Columbia Law School, focusing on law and technology, including intellectual property, telecommunications, privacy, and e-commerce. Outside of class he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Science and Technology Law Review. Before law school, Luis did great work on open source…
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Why Patent Exhaustion Matters
In Tuesday’s post, I explained why I thought Quanta v. LG was a good decision as a matter of law. Today I’d like to talk about why it’s an important outcome from a policy perspective. The function of the patent exhaustion doctrine is to ensure that the lanes of commerce do not become clogged with…
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Popular Websites Vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks
Update Oct 15, 2008 We’ve modified the paper to reflect the fact that the New York Times has fixed this problem. We also clarified that our server-side protection techniques do not protect against active network attackers. Update Oct 1, 2008 The New York Times has fixed this problem. All of the problems mentioned below have…
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Quanta Case Preserved the Distinction Between Patent Law and Contract Law
Thanks to Ed for the invitation to contribute to FTT and for the gracious introduction. In addition to being a grad student here at Princeton, I’m also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Cato recently released the latest edition of its annual Supreme Court Review, a compilation of scholarly articles about the most recent…
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Election Machinery blog
Students will be studying election technology and election administration in freshman seminar courses taught by at Princeton (by me) and at Stanford (by David Dill). The students will be writing short articles on the Election Machinery blog. I invite you all to read that blog over the next three months, to see what a small…
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Will cherry picking undermine the market for ad-supported television?
Want to watch a popular television show without all the ads? Your options are increasing. There’s the iTunes store, moving toward HD video formats, in which a growing range of shows can be bought on a per-episode or per-season basis, to be watched without advertisements on a growing range of devices at a time of your…
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Hurricane Ike status report: electrical power is cool
Today, we checked out the house, again, and lo and behold, it finally has power again! Huzzah! All in all, it hasn’t been that bad for us. We crashed with friends, ate out all the time, and (thankfully) had daycare for our daughter as of Thursday last week. Indeed, I’m seeing fewer people’s kids around…
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Hurricane Ike status report
Many people have been emailing me to send their best wishes. I thought it would be helpful to post a brief note on what happened and where we’re all at. As you know, Hurricane Ike hit shore early Saturday morning. The wind, combined with a massive storm surge, caused staggering devastation along the Texas coast.…