Tag: Copyright

P2P United, a group of P2P software vendors, sent a letter to Congress last week claiming that P2P vendors are unable to redesign their software to block the transmission of pornographic or copyrighted material. Others have claimed that such blocking is possible. As a technical matter, who is right? In this post I’ll look at…

There’s been lots of talk about the DC Circuit court’s ruling that the RIAA cannot compel ISPs to identify customers who the RIAA suspects of infringing copyrights. The court ruled on narrow grounds, saying that Congress, in the text of the DMCA, did not authorize the type of subpoena that the RIAA wants to use.…

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about compulsory license schemes for music. I’ve said before that I’m skeptical about their practicality. One reason for my skepticism is a concern about the measurement problem, and especially about the technical details of how measurement would be done. To split up the revenue pool, compulsory license schemes…

Yesterday I attended a daylong workshop at Harvard Law School about alternative compensation systems for digital media. It was a great meeting, with many interesting people saying interesting things. There was a high density of other bloggers, including Ernie Miller, John Palfrey, Derek Slater, Aaron Swartz, and Eugene Volokh, and I hope to read their…

The RIAA has filed yet another round of lawsuits against individuals they accuse of illegally redistributing music on the Net. There is some evidence that the suits filed so far may be working – that they may be successfully deterring some people from redistributing music online. And if the suits are working, that’s good news.…

Alex Halderman has published an interesting technical report analyzing the newest CD “copy protection” technology. Alex, who is a graduate student here in Princeton’s computer science department, also wrote the definitive paper on the previous generation of CD copy protection. Alex’s paper explains how the SunnComm technology works and why it won’t help the record…

A debate has started over the suggestion by Harvard Law prof Charles Nesson that artists respond to file-sharing of their work with “hacktivism,” by launching targeted denial-of-service attacks on people who redistribute their work. The reaction in blogworld has been negative. This is probably illegal, but Derek Slater writes that Prof. Nesson is looking for…

Several readers took issue with my previous post relating anti-infringement technology to anti-cancer technology. So let me clarify what I was and wasn’t trying to say. First, I wasn’t saying that infringement is okay. It’s not. And I wasn’t trying to draw a moral equivalence between infringers and copyright owners. Remember: I analogized infringement to…