Tag: Technology and Freedom
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Bernard Lang Reports on the Proposed French DRM Law
[Bernard Lang, a prominent French computer scientist and infotech policy commentator, sent me an interesting message about the much-discussed legislative developments in France. It includes the first English translation I have seen of the proposed French law mandating open access to DRM technologies. He has graciously given me permission to post his message here, with…
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Secure Flight Mothballed
Secure Flight, the planned next-generation system for screening airline passengers, has been mothballed by the Transportation Security Administration, according to an AP story by Leslie Miller. TSA chief Kip Hawley cited security concerns and questions about the program’s overall direction. Last year I served on the Secure Flight Working Group, a committee of outside technology…
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Analog Hole Bill Would Impose a Secret Law
If you’ve been reading here lately, you know that I’m no fan of the Sensenbrenner/Conyers analog hole bill. The bill would require almost all analog video devices to implement two technologies called CGMS-A and VEIL. CGMS-A is reasonably well known, but the VEIL content protection technology is relatively new. I wanted to learn more about…
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Breathalyzers and Open Source
Lawyers for 150 Floridians accused of drunk driving have asked a court to order the disclosure of the source code for software running in the breathalyzer machines used by police to analyze their blood alcohol level, according to a Tom Sanders story on vunet. The defendants say they have the right to examine the machines…
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Google Print, Damages and Incentives
There’s been lots of discussion online of this week’s lawsuit filed against Google by a group of authors, over the Google Print project. Google Print is scanning in books from four large libraries, indexing the books’ contents, and letting people do Google-style searches on the books’ contents. Search results show short snippets from the books,…
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Who Is An ISP?
There’s talk in Washington about a major new telecommunications bill, to update the Telecom Act of 1996. A discussion draft of the bill is floating around. The bill defines three types of services: Internet service (called “Broadband Internet Transmission Service” or BITS for short); VoIP; and broadband television. It lays down specific regulations for each…
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RIAA, MPAA Join Internet2 Consortium
RIAA and MPAA, trade associations that include the major U.S. record and movie companies, joined the Internet2 consortium on Friday, according to a joint press release. I’ve heard some alarm about this, suggesting that this will allow the AAs to control how the next generation Internet is built. But once we strip away the hype,…
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Recommended Reading: Crime-Facilitating Speech
Eugene Volokh has an interesting new paper about Crime-Facilitating Speech (abridged version): “speech [that] provides information that makes it easier to commit crimes, torts, or other harms”. He argues convincingly that many free-speech cases pertain to crime-facilitating speech. Somebody wants to prevent speech because it may facilitate crime, but others argue that the speech has…
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Cisco Claims Its Product is a Trade Secret
I wrote Friday about the legal threats by Cisco and ISS against researcher Mike Lynn, relating to Lynn’s presentation at Black Hat about a Cisco security vulnerability. The complaint Cisco and ISS filed is now available online. Jennifer Granick, Lynn’s lawyer, has an interesting narrative of the case (part 1; part 2; part 3; part…
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Entertainment Industry Pretending to Have Won Grokster Case
Most independent analysts agree that the entertainment industry didn’t get what it wanted from the Supreme Court’s Grokster ruling. Things look grim for the Grokster defendants themselves; but what the industry really wanted from the Court was a ruling that a communication technologies that are widely used to infringe should not be allowed to exist,…