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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Today on Fritz’s Hit List: traffic speed cameras. These cameras snap a picture automatically when they detect a car exceeding the speed limit, so that the police can enforce speed…
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Slate: Nigerian Scam Emails Explained
Brendan Koerner at Slate explains why we’re all getting so many Nigerian scam emails. Most of them really do come from Nigeria, though the rest of their story is of…
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Compulsory Licensing: Responses
I have gotten several interesting responses to my posting on compulsory licensing of music. Ernest Miller at LawMeme offers a tongue-in-cheek response. (At least I think it’s tongue-in-cheek.) He says…
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Edison's World
Lately I’ve been reading a biography of Thomas Edison, one of history’s great tinkerers. (I recommend the book: Edison by Matthew Josephson.) I’m amazed at how little the basic nature…
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Fritz's Hit List #23
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: musical car horns. These automobile horns play prerecorded digital sounds, so they qualify for regulation as “digital media devices” under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the…
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A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come?
On Monday I attended a workshop to discuss compulsory licensing of music. A compulsory license might work like this: a small “tax” is added to the cost of Internet connections…
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Fritz's Hit List #22
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: the Athena Mars Exploration Rovers. These machines, which are designed to explore the surface of the planet Mars, record and transmit digital video and images,…
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NYT Article on Fritz's Hit List
Today’s New York Times has an article (on page 3 of the Business section), by David F. Gallagher, about Fritz’s Hit List. I love the title: “Robotic Dogs and Singing…
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Fritz's Hit List #21
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: digital sewing machines. These machines replay digitally prerecorded stitch sequences to make complex pictures and patterns, so they qualify for regulation as “digital media devices”…
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Paper on Copy-Protected CDs
Alex Halderman, a senior here at Princeton, has written a very interesting paper entitled “Evaluating New Copy-Prevention Techniques for Audio CDs.” Here is the paper’s abstract: Several major record labels…