Lifehacker on Ubiquitous Infringement

Lifehacker‘s Adam Dachis has a great article on how users can deal with a world in which they infringe copyright constantly, both deliberately and inadvertently. (Disclaimer alert: I talked with Adam about the piece.) It’s a practical guide to a strict liability regime – no intent / knowledge requirement for direct infringement – that operates [...]

Stealing the Throne

Ever-brilliant Web comic The Oatmeal has a great piece about piracy and its alternatives. (The language at the end is a bit much, but it is the character’s evil Jiminy Cricket talking.) It mirrors my opinion about Major League Baseball’s unwillingness to offer any Internet access to the postseason, which is hard on those of [...]

Cary Sherman and the Lost Generation

The RIAA’s Cary Sherman had a screed about the Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT IP Acts in the New York Times recently. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick brilliantly gutted it, and I’m not going to pile on – a tour de force requires no augmentation. What I want to suggest is that the recording industry – or, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

How To Encourage Piracy

Major League Baseball has made me a pirate, with no regrets. Nick Ross, on Australia’s ABC, makes “The Case for Piracy.” His article argues that piracy often results, essentially, from market failure: customers are willing to pay content owners for access to material, and the content owners refuse – because they can’t be bothered to [...]

Behind the Scenes of Six Strikes

Wired has a story on the cozy relationship between content industries and the Obama administration, which resulted in the deployment of the new “six strikes” plan to combat on-line copyright infringement. Internet security and privacy researcher Chris Soghoian obtained e-mail communication between administration officials and industry via a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request. (Disclosure: [...]

Magic Numbers and Copyright Infringement

Round Three of the Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial is over. The recording industry both won and lost: it won on infringement, but lost on its efforts to protect the jury’s damages award of $62,500 per song (work) infringed. Judge Michael Davis of the U.S. District Court of Minnesota reduced the damages award to $2,250 per song [...]