Tag: Misleading Terms
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Cloud(s), Hype, and Freedom
Richard Stallman’s recent description of ‘the cloud’ as ‘hype’ and a ‘trap’ seems to have stirred up a lot of commentary, but not a lot of clear discussion of the problems Stallman raised. This isn’t surprising- the term ‘the cloud’ has always been vague. (It was hard to resist saying ‘cloudy.’ 😉 When people say…
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HBO Exec Wants to Rename DRM
People have had lots of objections to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology – centering mainly on its clumsiness and the futility of its anti-infringement rationale – but until recently nobody had complained that the term “Digital Rights Management” was insufficiently Orwellian. That changed on Tuesday, when HBO’s Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, suggested at an…
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"Hacking" Revisited
I wrote yesterday about the degradation of the term “hacking”. Today, the perfect illustration of my point turned up: a Hacker’s Hall of Fame published by The Learning Channel. It includes legitimate uber-programmers like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, along with computer criminals like Kevin Mitnick and Vladimir Levin. Putting those guys on the same…
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Time to Retire "Hacking"
Many confidential documents are posted mistakenly on the web, allowing strangers to find them via search engines, according to a front-page article by Yuki Noguchi in today’s Washington Post. I had thought this was common knowledge, but apparently it’s not. The most striking aspect of the article, to me at least, is that doing web…
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Standards vs. Regulation
The broadcast flag “debate” never ceases to amaze me. It’s a debate about technology, but in forum after forum the participants are all lawyers. And it takes place in a weird reality distortion field where certain technological non sequiturs pass for unchallenged truth. One of these is that the broadcast flag is a technical “standard.”…
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Standards, or Collusion?
John T. Mitchell at InteractionLaw writes about the potential antitrust implications of backroom deals between copyright owners and technology makers. If a copyright holder were to agree with the manufacturers of the systems for making lawful copies and of the systems for playing them to eliminate all trade in lawful copies unless each transaction (each…
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Misleading Term of the Week: "Rights"
A “right” is a legal entitlement – something that the law says you are allowed to do. But the term is often misused to refer to something else. Consider, for example, the use of “digital rights management” (often abbreviated as DRM) to describe technologies that restrict the use of creative works. In practice, the “rights”…
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Misleading Term of the Week: "Standard"
A “standard” is a technical specification that allows systems to work together to make themselves more useful. Most people say, for good reasons, that they are in favor of technical standards. But increasingly, we are seeing the term “standard” misapplied to things that are really regulations in disguise. True standards strive to make systems more…
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Misleading Term of the Week: "Trusted System"
The term “trusted system” is often used in discussing Digital Rights/Restrictions Management (DRM). Somehow the “trusted” part is supposed to make us feel better about the technology. Yet often the things that make the system “trusted” are precisely the things we should worry about. The meaning of “trusted” has morphed at least twice over the…
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Misleading Term of the Week: "Content Owner"
Many discussions of copyright refer to “content owners.” The language of ownership is often misused in these contexts, for example by saying that Disney “owns” The Lion King, or by saying that I “own” the content on this site. The simple fact is that I don’t own the content on this site – at least…