CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Category: Uncategorized

  • More on Meta-Freedom

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    Tim Lee comments: The fact that you can waive your free speech rights via contract doesn’t mean that it would be a good idea to enact special laws backing up those contracts with criminal penalties. I think you’re missing an important middle ground here. The choice isn’t between no tinkering rights and constitutionally mandated tinkering…

  • The Freedom to Tinker with Freedom?

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    Doug Lay, commenting on my last post, pointed out that the Zune buyout would help make a world of DRM-enabled music services more attractive. “Where,” he asked, “does this leave the freedom to tinker?” Anti-DMCA activism has tended to focus on worst-case, scary scenarios that can spur people to action. It’s a standard move in…

  • Rethinking DRM Dystopia

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    Thanks to Ed for the flattering introduction – now if only I can live up to it! It’s an honor (and a little intimidating) to be guest blogging on FTT after several years as an avid reader. I’ve never blogged before, but I am looking forward to the thoughtful, user-driven exchanges and high transparency that…

  • Guest Blogger: David Robinson

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    I’m thrilled to welcome David Robinson as a guest blogger. David was a star student in my InfoTech and the Law course at Princeton a few years ago. He received a philosophy degree from Princeton and proceeded to Oxford, studying philosophy and political economy on a Rhodes Scholarship. A budding journalist, he was opinion editor…

  • Banner Ads Launch Security Attacks

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    An online banner advertisement that ran on MySpace.com and other sites over the past week used a Windows security flaw to infect more than a million users with spyware when people merely browsed the sites with unpatched versions of Windows … So says Brian Krebs at the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog. The ads, he…

  • Taking Stevens Seriously

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    From the lowliest blogger to Jon Stewart, everybody is laughing at Sen. Ted Stevens and his remarks (1.2MB mp3) on net neutrality. The sound bite about the Internet being “a series of tubes” has come in for for the most ridicule. I’ll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But’s let’s give the…

  • CleanFlicks Ruled an Infringer

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    Joe Gratz writes, Judge Richard P. Matsch of the United States District Court for the District of Colorado [on] Wednesday filed this opinion granting partial summary judgment in favor of the movie studios, finding that CleanFlicks infringes copyright. This is not a terribly surprising result; CleanFlicks’ business involves selling edited DVD-Rs of Hollywood movies, buying…

  • University-Purchased Music Services a Bust

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    When universities buy music service subscriptions for their students, few students use them, according to Nick Timiraos’s story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Students tend to download music illegally, or buy it from iTunes instead. In explaining the popularity of Napster and other file-sharing systems, commentators have often overemphasized the price factor and underestimated convenience.…

  • Why Do Innovation Clusters Form?

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    Recently I attended a very interesting conference about high-tech innovation and public policy, with experts in various fields. (Such a conference will be either boring or fascinating, depending on who exactly is invited. This one was great.) One topic of discussion was how innovation clusters form. “Innovation cluster” is the rather awkward term for a…

  • Does the Great Firewall Violate U.S. Law?

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    Clayton, Murdoch, and Watson have an interesting new paper describing technical mechanisms that the Great Firewall of China uses to block online access to content the Chinese government doesn’t like. The Great Firewall works in two parts. One part inspects data packets that cross the border between China and the rest of the world, looking…