CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
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P2P nets have fewer pornographic images than the Web, and P2P porn filters are ineffective, according to data in a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Mind…
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BitTorrent: The Next Main Event
Few tears will be shed if Grokster and StreamCast are driven out of business as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision. The companies are far from lovable, and their…
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Patry: The Court Punts
William Patry (a distinguished copyright lawyer) offers an interesting take on Grokster. He says that the court was unable to come to agreement on how to apply the Sony Betamax…
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Legality of Design Decisions, and Footnote 12 in Grokster
As a technologist I find the most interesting, and scariest, part of the Grokster opinion to be the discussion of product design decisions. The Court seems to say that Sony…
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Business Model as Evidence of Intent
One interesting aspect of Justice Souter’s majority opinion in Grokster is the criticism of the business models of StreamCast and Grokster (pp. 22-23): Third, there is a further complement to…
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Grokster Loses
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Grokster, finding the company’s actions to be illegal. (Reported by SCOTUSblog.) Expect an explosion of discussion in the blogosphere. My usual one-post-a-day limit will…
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Book Club Discussion: Code, Chapters 3 and 4
This week in Book Club we read Chapters 3 and 4 of Lawrence Lessig’s Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Now it’s time to discuss the chapters. I’m especially eager…
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Content Filtering and Security
Buggy security software can make you less secure. Indeed, a growing number of intruders are exploiting bugs in security software to gain access to systems. Smart system administrators have known…
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Regulation by Software
The always interesting James Grimmelmann has a new paper, Regulation by Software (.pdf), on how software relates to law. He starts by dissecting Lessig’s “code is law” argument. Lessig argues…
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Another reason for reforming the DMCA
I’ll be signing off my guest-blog stint at Freedom to Tinker now. (Thanks for your hospitality, Prof. Felten.) Before I go, I wanted to point you to a chapter excerpt…