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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TiVo has announced that it will overlay banner ads on viewers’ TV screens when they fast-forward while replaying recorded shows. Many commentators (such as Cory Doctorow) have criticized this move,…
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Online Lecture
The video of my Princeton President’s Lecture, “Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media” is now online. The lecture, which lasts about an hour,…
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Copyright, Copynorms, and Plagiarism
Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting piece in the Nov. 22 New Yorker, reflecting on the discovery that Frozen, a Broadway play, included language lifted from an earlier Gladwell article. Equally…
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Spam Kings: Mini-Review
I just finished reading Brian McWilliams’ new book Spam Kings. It’s an entertaining read that offers an interesting, nontechnical peek at some of the personalities behind the spam wars. The…
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Waiting to Vote
One of the underreported stories from last week’s election was the effect of long waiting lines at polling places. Many polling places in Ohio, for example, had lines of three…
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New Study on Filesharing Effect (Part 2)
Continuing yesterday’s discussion of the new Rob/Waldfogel filesharing study, let’s look at the possible effect of authorized downloading services. As we saw yesterday, one of the main findings of the…
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New Study on Filesharing Effects
There’s a new study out, by Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel, on the effect of filesharing on music sales. The news headlines will say that the study shows that filesharing…
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Lack of Paper Trail Ruins North Carolina Election
Just in case you thought that lawsuits about pregnant chads were the worst possible election outcome, here’s a story about the consequences of e-voting without a proper paper trail. A…
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How BitTorrent Changes the P2P Fight
The big copyright owners have gotten pretty sophisticated about monitoring P2P applications to gather evidence for lawsuits. But now P2P traffic seems to be shifting to the BitTorrent system, which…
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Needed: Careful E-Voting Correlation Study
Tuesday’s election created lots of data about voting patterns in places that used different voting technologies. Various people have done exploratory data analysis, to see how jurisdictions that used e-voting…