Tag: Technology and Freedom

Donna Wentworth at Copyfight reports that the U.S. has signed a trade agreement with Singapore that requires the U.S. to refrain from repealing the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This looks suspiciously like an end-run around the legislative process. One complaint about the DMCA has been that it holds back the development…

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s much-discussed article in Saturday’s New York Times details planning by the record industry to launch aggressive cyber-attacks against suspected copyright infringers. Some of the world’s biggest record companies, facing rampant online piracy, are quietly financing the development and testing of software programs that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people…

Yesterday, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference had a session on the copy protection wars. Louis Trager reports, in a story headlined “Hollywood Survival Isn’t Worth Sacrificing Tech Freedom, Activists Say”, in today’s Washington Internet Daily: Legal restrictions on technology and content copying pose a far greater risk to society than the extinction of the established…

Most businesses know that it’s wise to honor the values of their customers. So you’ve got to wonder what Blackboard was thinking when it sued to block a conference presentation last weekend. Blackboard’s customers are colleges and universities. As Karl-Friedrich Lenz observes, these are organizations that hold freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry as…

Two of the best sources on the RIAA vs. student lawsuits come, appropriately, from other students. Joe Barillari, a student in my “Information Technology and the Law” course at Princeton, has written an interesting analysis of the case against his fellow Princeton student Dan Peng. [Annoying disclaimer: Joe doesn’t speak for me; I don’t speak…

A state court in Georgia has issued temporary restraining order, which forced the cancellation of a conference panel this past weekend. A company called Blackboard, which sells campus automation systems to colleges and universities, convinced the court to block the publication of embarrassing details about Blackboard products. Blackboard sent a demand letter. Blackboard filed a…

The RIAA has announced the filing of lawsuits against four college students for allegedly running “Napster-like” networks. Two of the students are from RPI, one from Michigan Tech, and one from Princeton.

In the April issue of Reason, Mike Godwin offers a clear description of the mess surrounding the digital-television transition, along with a provocative approach to resolving it.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing discusses an amazing document in which an American Bar Association panel lays out their view of the future of WiFi. High-order cluelessness pervades.