Tag: Technology and Freedom
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Google in the Spotlight
Interesting article by Josh McHugh in the January 2003 issue Wired, on Google’s attempts to keep itself on the right side of various policy issues. It’s much easier to steer clear of the tough issues when you’re small. Now that Google is so popular and powerful, policy challenges abound.
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Publish in New Jersey, Get Sued in Australia
The highest court in Australia has ruled that Dow Jones can be sued in Australia for libel, even though the article in question was published on a web site in the U.S. The Economist has a good article on the decision and its implications.
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Business Week: Hollywood's Love/Hate Relationship with Technology
Jane Black at Business Week describes how digital technology is changing the movie business. She reports that while one part of the movie industry is fighting tooth and nail against new technology, other parts are eagerly adopting it.
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Fair Use as Black Hole (Cont.)
In response to my earlier posting on fair use, Siva Vaidhyanathan points out one reason for the messiness of the fair use debate – different people mean different things by “fair use”. Some people (mostly lawyers) use “Fair Use” in a narrow, legalistic sense, to refer to a specific set of exceptions to the enumerated…
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Wilkins on Technology Policy
In 1641, John Wilkins published the very first book in English about cryptography. (It discussed many other topics as well.) The book’s title was “Mercury; or, the Secret and Swift messenger, shewing how a man may with privacy and speed Communicate his thoughts to a Friend at any distance.” Wilkins ended the discussion with two…
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Rubenfeld on Copyright and the Constitution
October’s Yale Law Review has an interesting article by Jed Rubenfeld, entitled “The Freedom of Imagination: Copyright’s Constitutionality.” (Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer and not a legal scholar, so I’m not fully qualified to judge the scholarly merit of the article. What you’re getting here is my semi-informed opinion.) Rubenfeld argues, convincingly in my view,…
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Tech Provisions in Homeland Security Bill
Orin Kerr, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, summarizes some tech-related provisions in the new Homeland Security bill. The bill changes the sentences that can be assessed for some computer crimes. The effect of these changes is unclear but will likely be small. The widely discussed life-sentence-for-hacking provision applies only in cases when the crimes deliberately…
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Pavlovich Decision
The California Supreme Court has ruled that Matt Pavlovich can’t be sued in California state court for posting DVD decryption software (though he can probably be sued elsewhere). Apparently, the key issue was whether Pavlovich’s knowledge that his action would affect California companies was by itself enough to give California courts jurisdiction. The Court ruled…
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Slate: Just Say No to Politics
Slate, a smart online magazine that normally urges citizen involvement in politics, published today a commentary by Paul Boutin, urging citizens who happen to be geeks not to participate in the political process. Boutin argues (as others have before) that geeks should stick to writing code – that freedom is a Simple Matter of Programming.…
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DarkNet
Lots of buzz lately about the DarkNet paper written by four Microsoft Research people. The paper makes a three-part argument. First, there is really no way to stop file sharing, as long as people want to share files. Second, in the presence of widespread file sharing, a copy-prevention technology must be perfect, for the presence…