Iran and the New Net

Iranian demonstrators protesting the recent election results (which look dicey) – and their opponents – are using networked technologies to communicate and organize, including Twitter, blogs, SMS, and the like. John Palfrey, Rob Faris, and Bruce Etling point out, though, that these capabilities, while empowering, won’t carry the day. Whether the demonstrations succeed depends on [...]

Follow CFP 2009 Live

You can follow along with Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2009 (”Creating the Future”) even if you’re not here in DC (where the weather is surprisingly lovely for June): via Twitter at Tweezup, the CFP blog, and streaming video. The Filtering panel, which also now includes Catherine Crump from the ACLU and Nicole Wong from Google, [...]

Cyber-Harassment

Bronxnet has a video up of a show on cyber-harassment where I get to talk about the topic. (No, I did not give a “how-to” tutorial. I charge for that sort of thing.) This has become a vexing issue legally, from the Megan Meier / Lori Drew tragedy to the AutoAdmit case. I’d love your [...]

Don’t Tug on Superman’s Cape

Update: Ben Sheffner has a great post over at Copyrights & Campaigns on this issue. Evidently it wasn’t a DMCA take-down; rather, YouTube’s audio fingerprinting system automatically flagged the work and, following Warner’s settings, removed it. Evidently the poster can fill out an on-line form to protest and, in this case, the video’s been restored.
In [...]

Oh My God, They Killed Copyright!

OK, it’s a weak title, but I needed the South Park allusion. When I was at Lotus, one of the plums was being selected to go to Lotusphere, the annual confab at the Walt Disney Swan and Dolphin resorts in Florida. I went twice (once as podium slave, once as presenter), and loved it for [...]

Copyright Filtering in the Stimulus Bill?

[UPDATE: The agreement on the stimulus bill excludes the copyright filtering language. The proposal is not, of course, dead. So a letter to your representatives is still worthwhile, although now less urgent.]
Through the good work of advocacy groups like Public Knowledge, efforts to add legal approval of copyright filtering to the economic stimulus [...]

Slipping DVD Sales and Oversimplifying Complex Phenomena

The movie studios sold fewer DVDs in 2008 than 2007 (which was itself a down year from the all-time sales peak of 2006). Why? Was it because of:

The deepening recession in the United States throughout 2008, which caused consumers to cut back on discretionary spending on entertainment, as further confirmed by the decline in the [...]

Super Bowl IP Face-Off III

This blog has reported before on the efforts of the NFL, both in 2007 and in 2008, to threaten churches that planned to hold Super Bowl viewing parties. The league claimed an infringement of its intellectual property rights.
As Tim and I explained in those past years, showing a broadcast of the game on a [...]

2nd Circuit: A Copy that Exists for 1 Second is No “Copy” at All

I’m late to the party celebrating the Second Circuit’s terrific new opinion in Cartoon Network LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc., which is the appeals court’s caption for the case formerly known as 20th Century Fox v. Cablevision. As readers of this blog might recall, I joined an amicus brief in the case, limited to [...]

Wal-Mart Execs Behaving Badly: Who Owns the Videos?

Paul Caron brought an interesting piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal to my attention: Candid Camera: Trove of Videos Vexes Wal-Mart. The story: about 30 years ago, Wal-Mart hired a small video production firm to record meetings of Wal-Mart’s executives, as well as speeches, shareholder meetings, sales presentations, and the like. The video [...]

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