Tag: Technology and Freedom
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Apple Uses DMCA Threat Against Competing Product
Declan McCullagh at news.com reports on Apple’s use of a DMCA threat to force a useful product off the market. Apple’s iDVD application allows the user to burn DVDs – but only on Apple-brand drives. A DVD drive vendor called Other World Computing shipped its drives with a “DVD Enabler” program that modified iDVD so…
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Business Week: Internet is Evil
Business Week has an amazing article characterizing the Internet as a cesspool of crime and depravity. The article approvingly quotes somebody saying “[More than] 70% of all e-commerce is based on some socially unacceptable if not outright illegal activity.” To give you an idea of the tone, the main body of the article starts with…
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Who Controls Your PC?
One of the most interesting issues in technology today is the battle for control over users’ computers. Ray Ozzie offers some thoughts, and a nice tutorial.
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Misleading Term of the Week: "Broadcast Flag"
[This posting inaugurates a new feature. Each week I will dissect one widely used but misleading bit of terminology. See my previous posting on the term “piracy” for more on why terminology is important.] This week’s misleading term is “broadcast flag,” which is used by Hollywood to refer to a wide-ranging ban on video technologies…
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What's Up At CNet?
Declan McCullagh interviews Verizon lawyer Sarah Deutsch, over at CNet news.com. (Welcome back, Declan.) Verizon is taking the side of their customers, against Hollywood. But check out the headline: “Why telecoms fly the pirate flag” (on the front page) and “Why telecoms back the pirate cause” (on the article itself). The pirate flag? The pirate…
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Response to Declan's DMCA Piece
Declan McCullagh misses the boat at least twice in his August 19th column concerning the potential impact on computer science research of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [“Debunking DMCA myths,” c|net News.Com, http://news.com.com/2010-12-950229.html]. First, the DMCA has two arms: one that prohibits devices that circumvent copy protection, and one that prohibits acts of circumvention. The…
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Microsoft Does The Right Thing
Microsoft has decided not to try using the DMCA to censor a paper by former MIT student Andrew “Bunnie” Huang about security mechanisms in Microsoft’s Xbox videogame console. (See this announcment.) Good for Microsoft! If more companies behave like Microsoft did in this case, the DMCA would do less harm. Let’s not forget, though, that…
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Serendipity
I’ve been reading recently about the history of technology. That history is filled with lessons for policy-makers now. Here is one: One of the reasons we should be wary about banning technologies is that it’s often very hard to tell what a new technology will be good for. It might take a decade or more…
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Self-Help
Lawyers use the term “self-help” to refer to all of the little steps people take to protect themselves. Locking your bicycle is self-help – even though it would not be necessary in a world where everyone obeyed the law, it’s a good idea in the real world. Fences and burglar alarms are self-help too. Self-help…
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British Bill to Ban Mods to Cellphone ID Numbers
The British Parliament is now considering a bill that would make it illegal to change the IMEI number on a cell phone. Each phone has a unique IMEI which it uses to identify itself to the cell network; it’s like a serial number for the phone. If you report your phone stolen, the cell operator…