Category: Uncategorized
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The Decline of Localist Broadcasting Policies
Public policy, in the U.S. at least, has favored localism in broadcasting: programming on TV and radio stations is supposed to be aimed, at least in part, at the local community. Two recent events call this policy into question. The first event is the debut of the Pandora application on the iPhone. Pandora is a…
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Could Too Much Transparency Lead to Sunburn?
On Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle published a story about the salaries of local government employees. Headlined “Understaffing costs Houston taxpayers $150 million in overtime,” it was in many respects a typical piece of local “enterprise” journalism, where reporters go out and dig up information that the public might not already be aware is newsworthy. The…
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Viacom, YouTube, and the Dangerous Assembly of Facts
On July 2nd, Viacom’s lawsuit against Google’s YouTube unit saw a significant ruling, potentially troubling for user privacy. Viacom asked for, and judge Louis L. Stanton ordered Google to turn over, the logs of each viewing of all videos in the YouTube database, showing the username and IP address of the user who was viewing…
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Vendor misinformation in the e-voting world
Last week, I testified before the Texas House Committee on Elections (you can read my testimony). I’ve done this many times before, but I figured this time would be different. This time, I was armed with the research from the California “Top to Bottom” reports and the Ohio EVEREST reports. I was part of the…
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Newspapers' Problem: Trouble Targeting Ads
Richard Posner has written a characteristically thoughtful blog entry about the uncertain future of newspapers. He renders widespread journalistic concern about the unwieldy character of newspapers into the crisp economic language of “bundling”: Bundling is efficient if the cost to the consumer of the bundled products that he doesn’t want is less than the cost…
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The End of Theory? Not Likely
An essay in the new Wired, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” argues that we won’t need scientific theories any more, now that we have so much stored information and such great tools for analyzing it. Wired has never been the best source for accurate technology information, but this…
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Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law
James Grimmelmann has an interesting new essay, “Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law,” on the challenges of ensuring that the public has effective knowledge of the laws. This might sound like an easy problem, but Grimmelmann combines history and explanation to show why it can be difficult. The law – which includes both legislators’…
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New bill advances open data, but could be better for reuse
Senators Obama, Coburn, McCain, and Carper have introduced the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008 (S. 3077), which would modify their 2006 transparency act. That first bill created USASpending.gov, a searchable web site of government outlays. USASpending.gov—which was based on software developed by OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation—allows end users…
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Study Shows DMCA Takedowns Based on Inconclusive Evidence
A new study by Michael Piatek, Yoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy at the University of Washington shows that copyright owners’ representatives sometimes send DMCA takedown notices where there is no infringement – and even to printers and other devices that don’t download any music or movies. The authors of the study received more than 400…
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Government Data and the Invisible Hand
David Robinson, Harlan Yu, Bill Zeller, and I have a new paper about how to use infotech to make government more transparent. We make specific suggestions, some of them counter-intuitive, about how to make this happen. The final version of our paper will appear in the Fall issue of the Yale Journal of Law and…