Tag: Copyright
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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 bars liability based solely on product design (p. 16): Sony barred secondary liability based on presuming or imputing intent to cause infringement solely from the…
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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 the direct evidence of unlawful objective. It is useful to recall that StreamCast and Grokster make money by selling advertising space, by directing ads 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 be suspended today. Unanimous opinion of the Court (written by Souter) Concurrence of Ginsburg (joined by Rehnquist and Kennedy) Concurrence of Breyer (joined by Stevens…
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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 for a long time to be careful about deploying new “security” products. A company called Audible Magic is trying to sell “content filtering” systems to…
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How to license graffiti
A member of Ourmedia.org this morning raised an interesting question that has both legal and ethical dimensions: How should photos of graffiti be licensed, if at all? Among the points he raises is that under U.S. law (as well as other jurisdictions), you can’t profit from an illegal activity like graffiti, so the graffiti artist…
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DRM and 'casual piracy'
Some background on a major transformation taking place in the music industry, even as most mainstream media organizations print not a word about it: Reuters article, May 31: Sony BMG tests technology to limit CD burning. As part of its mounting U.S. rollout of content-enhanced and copy-protected CDs, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is testing technology…
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Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Decision Architectures
Tim Wu has an interesting new draft paper on how public policy in areas like intellectual property affects which innovations are pursued. It’s often hard to tell in advance which innovations will succeed. Organizational economists distinguish centralized decision structures, in which one party decides whether to proceed with a proposed innovation, from decentralized structures, in…
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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…
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RIAA Suing i2hub Users
Yesterday the RIAA announced lawsuits against many college students for allegedly using a program called i2hub to swap copyrighted music files. RIAA is trying to paint this as an important step in their anti-infringement strategy, but it looks to me like a continuation of what they have already been doing: suing individuals for direct infringement,…
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Godwin's Law, Updated
One of the most famous observations about online discussions is Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. When it comes to copyright policy, a related law seems to hold: As a copyright policy discussion grows longer, the probability of pornography being invoked approaches…