CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Tag: Innovation Policy

  • iPhone Unlocking Secret Revealed

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    The iPhone unlocking story took its next logical turn this week, with the release of a free iPhone unlocking program. Previously, unlocking required buying a commercial program or following a scary sequence of documented hardware and software tweaks. How this happened is interesting in itself. (Caveat: This is based on the stories I’m hearing; I…

  • Intellectual Property and Magicians

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    Jacob Loshin has an interesting draft paper on intellectual property among magicians. Stage magic is a form of technology, relying on both apparatus and technique to mislead the audience about what is really happening. As in any other technical field, innovations are valuable, and practitioners look for ways to cash in on their inventions. They…

  • Does Apple Object to iPhone Unlocking?

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    I wrote Monday about efforts to “unlock” the iPhone so it worked on non-AT&T cell networks, and the associated legal and policy issues. AT&T lawyers have aggressively tried to stop unlocking; but Apple has been pretty silent. What position will Apple take? It might seem that Apple has nothing to lose from unlocking, but that’s…

  • iPhone Unlocked; Legal Battle Looming?

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    In the past few days several groups declared victory in the battle to unlock the iPhone – to make the iPhone work on cellular networks other than AT&T’s. New Jersey teenager George Hotz published instructions (starting here) for a geeks-only unlock procedure involving hardware and software tweaks. An anonymous group called iPhoneSimFree reportedly has an…

  • Behind the iPhone Frenzy

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    Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord and Savior. The iPhone might turn out to be insanely great. It might become the best-selling mobile phone ever. Or it might not. Either way, the iPhone’s arrival and the attendant frenzy mark the beginning of a…

  • Why CEOs and Companies Break the Law

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    Ben Horowitz, CEO of Opsware, offers an interesting essay on why so many bigshot CEOs seem to be in legal trouble. Why, he asks, would a rich and powerful executive risk going to prison? The easy answer, greed, is too simple because many of these guys were already tremendously rich and stood to gain little…

  • All the Interested Parties? Not Quite.

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    Here’s a quick quiz to detect whether you’re stuck in Washington groupthink. There’s a patent reform bill under consideration in Congress. According to a blog entry by Andrew Noyes at the National Journal, a group of Republican senators sent a letter to Rep. Howard Berman, the chair of the relevant House subcommittee, asking that the…

  • Staying Off the Regulatory Radar

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    I just returned from a tech policy conference. It was off the record so I can’t tell you about what was said. But I can tell you that it got me thinking about what happens when a tech startup appears on policymakers’ radar screens. Policymakers respond to what they see. Generally they don’t see startups,…

  • Internet So Crowded, Nobody Goes There Anymore

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    Once again we’re seeing stories, like this one from Anick Jesdanun at AP, saying that the Internet is broken and needs to be redesigned. The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since…

  • Cablevision and Anti-Efficiency Policy

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    I wrote recently about the Cablevision decision, in which a judge appeared to draw a line between two kinds of Digital Video Recorder (DVR) technologies. (DVRs let home viewers record TV shows and play them later.) The judge found unlawful a Remote Storage DVR (RS-DVR) in which recorded shows are captured and stored in the…