Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
One of the Internet’s chief virtues is inefficiency. “Best effort” packet routing – as Jonathan Zittrain describes it, the “bucket brigade” where each link in the network tries to pass packets to the next hop, but without guarantees – is less efficient than a protocol that seeks to guarantee transmission and thereby minimizes bandwidth used [...]
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Filed under: Intermediaries, ISP, Network Neutrality, Notes, Spam
Posted on June 13th, 2006 by William McGeveran
Many Berkman-related friends are deeply involved in planning the Wikimania 2006 Conference, which will be held on the Harvard Law School campus on August 4-6, 2006. Registration recently opened. They have a ton of interesting speakers signed up, including Berkmanites Jonathan Zittrain, David Weinberger, Dan Gillmor, Larry Lessig, and (obviously) Jimmy Wales, the Godfather of [...]
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Filed under: Berkman, Peer Production, Scholarship
Posted on June 12th, 2006 by William McGeveran
The Scholar’s Copyright Project at Science Commons has developed an exciting tool for scholars who want to ensure that their work is accessible in a more open way. They have promulgated three different versions of a model “Author’s Addendum.” Essentially, these contain contractual language allowing authors to retain certain rights under copyright law, such as [...]
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Filed under: Berkman, Copyright, Education & Copyright, Law School, Open Access, Scholarship
Posted on June 12th, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
CNN has a story about a lawsuit over the use of The Standells’ song “Dirty Water” in a new set of beer commercials. The following passage caught my eye: The Standells learned of the Budweiser commercials when their record company received a “substantial” royalty payment for use of the song, their attorney said. Royalties are [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Media
Posted on June 12th, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
Just a few random thoughts in response to yesterday’s much-e-mailed NYT column (For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé) on the perils of posting too much information about oneself on social-networking sites (registration required, unless you use somebody else’s). The shorthand version: employers are trolling social networking sites like MySpace and Friendster looking for embarrassing [...]
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Filed under: Anonymity, Media, Privacy
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
I am a little late to the game, but did not want to miss the opportunity to highlight the new job opening at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School (also blogged by the Center’s Executive Director, Professor John Palfrey, here). The Center is looking to hire an Assistant Director to [...]
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Filed under: Berkman
Posted on June 10th, 2006 by William McGeveran
I will be speaking later this week at a conference at the University of Maryland entitled “Copyright at a Crossroads: The Impact of Mass Digitization on Copyright and Higher Education.” It promises to be a fascinating convergence of the legal, educational, and library worlds. Highlights include a keynote from Siva Vaidhyanathan about the “Googlization of [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Education & Copyright, Scholarship
Posted on June 8th, 2006 by William McGeveran
A column in today’s Washington Post by technology writer Leslie Walker gives further context to my earlier post emphasizing how often identity theft stems from garden-variety con artists and poor security by data collectors rather than any kind of high-tech hijinks by sophisticated computer criminals. Walker writes: The stories told by Richard W. Goldberg, a [...]
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Filed under: Privacy
Posted on June 7th, 2006 by William McGeveran
This morning’s New York Times had a neat story about Netflix [reg/$$$ req'd]. This phenomenon is Exhibit A in the argument for the “Long Tail.” According to the Times, every day customers order between 35,000 and 40,000 of the 60,000 titles available from Netflix. The article also asks and answers a question I’d asked myself: [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Intermediaries
Posted on June 7th, 2006 by William McGeveran
Copyright law guru William Patry has posted a thorough and interesting critique of the presumption of irreparable harm that most courts apply in copyright cases. It dovetails nicely with the Supreme Court’s recent eBay decision in the patent context (which I discussed here). And if the idea catches on, it has some nice potential application [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Court Decisions, Education & Copyright, Patents, Trademarks