Tag: Technology and Freedom

Ernest Miller is on a roll lately, especially on the topic of the INCUDE/IICA Act. I would be saying more about this dangerous bill, but Ernie is saying most of what needs to be said. James Grimmelmann at LawMeme made a nice index of Ernie’s INDUCE/IICA writings. Ernie has instituted Hatch’s Hit List, a list…

Yesterday’s “Political Diary” at the Wall Street Journal’s online OpinionJournal had a nice little piece on Sen. Hatch’s IICA (a.k.a. INDUCE Act). (Access to subscribers only, unfortunately.) The piece, written by David Robinson, notes that Sen. Hatch, who had previously urged vigorous action against music downloaders, even suggesting “destroying their machines,” has now changed his…

Dan Gillmor, among others, bemoans the lack of effective lobbying by technology companies. Exhibit A is their weak and disorganized response to various bills, such as the Hatch INDUCE/IICA Act, that would give the movie and music industries veto power over the development of new technology. It’s true that large tech companies have been slow…

Fred von Lohmann at EFF Deep Links reports that Sen. Orrin Hatch is planning to introduce, possibly today, a bill to create a new form of indirect liability for copyright infringement. The full name of the bill is somewhat bizarre: the “Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act”. Not being a lawyer, I can’t immediately…

I just finished reading “The Creation of the Media,” by Paul Starr, a sociology professor here at Princeton. This is an important book and I recommend it highly. Starr traces the history of communications and the media in the U.S., from the 1700s until 1940. The major theme of the book is that the unique…

JD Lasica has an important story about an FCC proposal, backed by the recording industry, to impose a broadcast-flag mandate on the design of digital radios. As JD suggests, this issue deserves much more attention than it has gotten. He also has copies of correspondence on this issue exchanged between RIAA president Cary Sherman and…

Yesterday I attended the Educause Policy Conference in Washington, where I spoke on a panel on “Sharing Information and Controlling Content: Continuing Challenges for Higher Education.” One of the most interesting parts of the day was a brief presentation by Russ Vaught, the Associate Vice Provost for IT at Penn State. He said that Penn…

Japanese police have arrested the author of Winny, a peer-to-peer application popular in Japan, according to a story on ABC News’s Australian site. (Reportedly, a more detailed article is available in Japanese.) Isamu Kaneko, a 33 year old Computer Engineering “guest research associate” at Tokyo University, was arrested for conspiracy to infringe copyright. If convicted,…

The U.S. is losing its dominance in science and technology, according to William J. Broad’s article in the New York Times earlier this week. The article looked at the percentage of awards (such as Nobel Prizes in science), published papers, and issued U.S. patents that go to Americans, and found that the U.S. share had…

Ernest Miller at CopyFight has an interesting response to my discussion yesterday of the Broadcast Flag. I wrote that the Flag is bad regulation, being poorly targeted at the goal of protecting TV broadcasts from Internet redistribution. Ernie replies that the Flag is actually well-targeted regulation, but for a different purpose: [Y]ou’d have to be…