Category: Uncategorized
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Moving to New Server
I’ll be moving this site to a new server over the next few days, so there may be a few glitches. Please let me know if any problems persist.
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Broadcast Flag and Compatibility
National Journal Tech Daily (an excellent publication, but behind a paywall) has an interesting story, by Sarah Lai Stirland, about an exchange between Mike Godwin of Public Knowledge and some entertainment industry lobbyists, at a DC panel last week. Godwin argued that the FCC’s broadcast flag rule, if it is reinstated, will end up regulating…
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Is the FCC Ruling Out VoIP on PCs?
The FCC has issued an order requiring VoIP systems that interact with the old-fashioned phone network to provide 911service. Carriers have 120 days to comply. It won’t be easy for VoIP carriers to provide the 911 service that people have come to expect from the traditional phone system. The biggest challenge in providing 911 on…
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Why I Can't Tinker with my Household Cleaner
John Mark Ockerbloom emailed an interesting story about Federal regulation of tinkering with household chemicals, which I quote here with permission: I just washed our kitchen floor tonight. And (I admit guiltily)I haven’t done it in a while– usually I “let” my wife do it. So I look at the small print on the label…
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Course Blog: Lessons Learned
This semester I had students in my course, “Information Technology and the Law,” write for a course blog. This was an experiment, but it worked out quite well. I will definitely do it again. We required each of the twenty-five students in the course to post at least once a week. Each student was assigned…
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Register of Copyrights Misunderstands Copyright
The office of the U.S. Register of Copyrights recently released its annual report for 2004. Along with some useful information about the office’s function, the report includes a sort of editorial about the copyright system, entitled “Copyright in the Public Eye.” The editorial displays a surprising misunderstanding of the purposes of copyright. Consider, for example,…
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New Study on Effects of E-Voting
David Card and Enrico Moretti, two economists from UC Berkeley, have an interesting new paper that crunches data on the 2004 election, to shed light on the effect of touchscreen voting. The paper looks reasonable to me, but my background is not in social science so others are better placed than me to critique it.…
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RFID on DVDs
A group at UCLA is studying how to deter DVD copying by putting RFID chips on DVDs, according to a story in RFID Journal by Mary Catherine O’Connor. (Noted by Rik Lambers at CoCo.) The article doesn’t say much about what they are planning. Reading between the lines, it looks like the group hasn’t reached…
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Newsweek Fails AP Math
Newsweek just released its list of the top 100 U.S. high schools. Like the more famous U.S. News college rankings, Newsweek relies on a numerical formula. Here is Newsweek’s formula: Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement and/or International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students…
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Nobody Disputes This Post
Friday’s debate between Dean Garfield (MPAA’s head lawyer) and Wendy Seltzer (EFF lawyer) at Princeton was fairly interesting. I’m hoping video will be available sometime soon. At one point, though, Dean Garfield said something that totally floored me. He was talking about technologies like Audible Magic that claim to be able to detect and block…