Posted on July 31st, 2006 by William McGeveran
Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick has published a piece dusting off the lawsuit against Washingtonienne blogger Jessica Cutler by one her sexual partners who featured prominently (covered by an ineffective pseudonym) in the blog. You may remember that Cutler was a junior aide to Senator Mike DeWine whose semi-private blog included salacious gossip about her active […]
2 Comments »
Filed under: Privacy, Anonymity, Media, Blogging
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
Metallica announced they’ll make individual songs from their catalog available from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. (Previously, Metallica only offered complete albums for on-line purchase.) Music fans remember Metallica’s famous anti-Napster stance, but worries about piracy don’t apply here: Apple’s FairPlay DRM prevents that.
This decision fascinates me, because it highlights an important tension in […]
3 Comments »
Filed under: ISP, Internet & Society, Digital Media, Copyright, Media, Music
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
I’m generally fairly skeptical of the argument you see trotted out every now and then by groups like the RIAA to the effect that the file-sharing phenomenon is having culturally corrosive effects beyond just the entertainment industry by reducing respect for property rights generally. The idea being that, in a world where everyone takes […]
1 Comment »
Filed under: Internet & Society, Software, Copyright
Posted on July 27th, 2006 by William McGeveran
The New York Times reported yesterday [reg./$$$ required] that TiVo hopes to gather data about which television commercials get zapped (that is, skipped) and, eventually, who does the zapping. There are some skeptics quoted in the article who think TiVo’s relatively small market share (4.4 million users) and the limited sample size for each […]
No Comments »
Filed under: Privacy, Intermediaries, Media
Posted on July 27th, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
I’ve been meaning for some time to expand on my earlier brief remarks on Berkman Fellow Urs Gasser’s new paper, Legal Frameworks and Technological Protection of Digital Content: Moving Forward Towards a Best Practice Model. Urs’s essay does a terrific job at cataloging the range of options open to policymakers who want to provide […]
7 Comments »
Filed under: Digital Media, Copyright, Scholarship
Posted on July 27th, 2006 by William McGeveran
My co-blogger Derek Bambauer must be too modest to promote his own stuff — or maybe he’s too busy driving across the country to his new job as a law professor — so I will point out that he presented the weekly lunch at the Berkman Center on Tuesday, where he discussed how intellectual property […]
No Comments »
Filed under: Security, Software, Berkman, Scholarship
Posted on July 26th, 2006 by Derek Bambauer
I’ve been listening to satellite radio during my (long) drive to Michigan. Having a variety of niche channels, without ads, and without fading reception, is wonderful. I’m wondering if this is the death knell for standard terrestrial over-the-air radio.
That brought up a question: why don’t radio stations sell music on-line? After all, music […]
3 Comments »
Filed under: RIAA, Internet & Society, Digital Media, Copyright, Media, Intermediaries, Music
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by William McGeveran
Last year a number of top law reviews issued a proclamation that they wanted shorter articles, and a few of them said they would enforce absolute caps on length (see a summary of some major journals’ policies here). Now Hofstra law professor Matt Bodie has run the numbers and he reports over at Prawsblawg […]
No Comments »
Filed under: Scholarship, Law School
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Tim Armstrong
Spam is one of those problems that everyone (except Derek) despairs of ever solving; indeed, Cory Doctorow’s check-box form letter response to anti-spam proposals remains as salient as ever. So it’s hard to know what, if anything, to make of today’s news that the United States now accounts for nearly one-quarter of the world’s spam […]
No Comments »
Filed under: Spam
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by William McGeveran
The New York Times web site does not have a great track record with capitalizing on the interactive aspects of the web. One especially preposterous example is the seemingly random robotic creation of irrelevant or absurdly broad hyperlinks in stories (like, “Virginia was the home of Thomas Jefferson“) — which generally connect only to […]
1 Comment »
Filed under: Digital Media, Media