Category: Uncategorized
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Separating Search from File Transfer
Earlier this week, Grokster and StreamCast filed their main brief with the Supreme Court. The brief’s arguments are mostly predictable (but well argued). There’s an interesting observation buried in the Factual Background (on pp. 2-3): What software like respondents’ adds to [a basic file transfer] capability is, at bottom, a mechanism for efficiently finding other…
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Boosting
Congratulations to my Princeton colleague Rob Schapire on winning ACM’s prestigious Kanellakis Award (shared with Columbia’s Yoav Freund). The annual award is given for a contribution to theoretical computer science that has a significant practical impact. Schapire and Freund won this year for an idea called boosting, so named because it can take a mediocre…
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Computer Science Professors' Brief in Grokster
Today, seventeen computer science professors (including me) are filing an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the Grokster case. Here is the summary of our argument, quoted from the brief: Amici write to call to the Court’s attention several computer science issues raised by Petitioners [i.e., the movie and music companies] and amici who…
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Forecast for Infotech Policy in the New Congress
Cameron Wilson, Director of the ACM Public Policy Office in Washington, looks at changes (made already or widely reported) in the new Congress and what they tell us about likely legislative action. (He co-writes the ACM U.S. Public Policy Blog, which is quite good.) He mentions four hot areas. The first is regulation of peer-to-peer…
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More on Ad-Blocking
I’m on the road today, so I don’t have a long post for you. (Good news: I’m in Rome. Bad news: It’s Rome, New York.) Instead, let me point you to an interesting exchange about copyright and ad-blocking software on my course blog, in which “Archer” opens with a discussion of copyright and advertising revenue,…
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Can P2P Nets Be Poisoned?
Christin, Weigend, and Chuang have an interesting new paper on corruption of files in P2P networks. Some files are corrupted accidentally (they call this “pollution”), and some might be corrupted deliberately (“poisoning”) by copyright owners or their agents. The paper measures the availability of popular, infringing files on the eDonkey, Overnet, Gnutella, and FastTrack networks,…
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Google AutoLink: Doesn't Cross the Line, Yet
Google’s new Toolbar includes a feature called AutoLink that adds hyperlinks to certain content in Web pages. For example, if it spots a street address in the page, it hyperlinks the address to Google Maps; if it spots the ISBN number for a book, it hyperlinks it to that book’s page on Amazon. Some people…
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Broadcast Flag in Court
Tomorrow the DC Circuit will hear arguments in the case challenging the FCC’s authority to impose the Broadcast Flag regulation. The case will determine whether the FCC can control the design of computers, in the name of copyright. It will also determine whether the ill-conceived Broadcast Flag rule will be imposed. Today’s New York Times…
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More on the Cato DRM Paper
I wrote yesterday about the new Cato Institute paper on the economics of peer-to-peer and anti-copying technology, which argues that everything will be okay in the online-music market because competition will force vendors to offer consumer-friendly products. I agree that a competitive market would have this effect. But how competitive is the market? One of…
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How Competitive is the Record Industry? A Natural Experiment
Derek Slater, responding to the recent Cato paper on DRM technologies, raises an important question: How competitive is the record industry? The Cato paper argues that market competition will blunt the possible negative effects of DRM on consumers. The theory is that a variety of competing DRM systems will emerge for online music. These systems…