The Hardest Thing to Predict Is the Future

SOPA and PROTECT IP are dead… for now. (They’ll be back. COICA is like a wraith inhabiting PROTECT IP.) Until then, Michelle Schusterman has a terrific graphic about the movie industry’s predictions of doom with each new technological revolution. (Ditto the music industry: the player piano, radio, CDs, the MP3 player, etc., etc.) One reason [...]

Censorship on the March

Today, you can’t get to The Oatmeal, or Dinosaur Comics, or XKCD, or (less importantly) Wikipedia. The sites have gone dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, America’s attempt to censor the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. This is part of a remarkable, distributed, coordinated protest effort, both [...]

The Fight For Internet Censorship

Thanks to Danielle and the CoOp crew for having me! I’m excited. Speaking of exciting developments, it appears that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is dead, at least for now. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said that the bill will not move forward until there is a consensus position on it, which is to [...]

Transparency, Internet Freedom, and IP

On Saturday, January 7, at 8:30AM (yes, that’s early, bring coffee), I’ll be speaking on a panel on Governmental Transparency in the Digital Age, run by the National Security Section of the AALS. It’s in Delaware Suite B on the lobby level of the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. In addition to having painful flashbacks to [...]

Breaking the Net

Mark Lemley, David Post, and Dave Levine have an excellent article in the Stanford Law Review Online, Don’t Break the Internet. It explains why proposed legislation, such as SOPA and PROTECT IP, is so badly-designed and pernicious. It’s not quite clear what is happening with SOPA, but it appears to be scheduled for mark-up this [...]

Six Things Wrong with SOPA

America is moving to censor the Internet. The PROTECT IP and Stop Online Piracy Acts have received considerable attention in the legal and tech world; SOPA’s markup in the House occurs tomorrow. I’m not opposed to blacklisting Internet sites on principle; however, I think that thoughtful procedural protections are vital to doing so in a [...]

Copyright and Your Face

The Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop on facial recognition technology, such as Facebook’s much-hated system, and its privacy implications. The FTC has promised to come down hard on companies who abuse these capabilities, but privacy advocates are seeking even stronger protections. One proposal raised was to provide people with copyright in their faceprints [...]

Threading the Needle

Imagine that Ron Wyden fails: either PROTECT IP or SoPA / E-PARASITE passes and is signed into law by President Obama. Advocacy groups such as the EFF would launch an immediate constitutional challenge to the bill’s censorship mandates. I believe the outcome of such litigation is far less certain than either side believes. American censorship [...]

How Not To Secure the Net

In the wake of credible allegations of hacking of a water utility, including physical damage, attention has turned to software security weaknesses. One might think that we’d want independent experts – call them whistleblowers, busticati, or hackers – out there testing, and reporting, important software bugs. But it turns out that overblown cease-and-desist letters still [...]

Choosing Censorship

Yesterday, the House of Representatives held hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act (it’s being called SOPA, but I like E-PARASITE tons better). There’s been a lot of good coverage in the media and on the blogs. Jason Mazzone had a great piece in TorrentFreak about SOPA, and see also stories about how the bill [...]

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