Archive for October, 2006
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
The US Copyright Office has delayed its ruling in the triennial rulemaking to determine exemptions to the DMCA's ban on circumventing technological protection measures, instead extending the current set of exemptions for the near future.
The Copyright Office website provides no reason for the delay. All we know now is that ...
Posted in Copyright, DRM, Technological Protection Measures | 1 Comment »
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
Rebecca MacKinnon reports about possible U.S. Military censorship, and warns us for the slippery slope we have started.
A couple of thousand years ago, the Chinese built the Great Wall to keep the hordes of barbarians out. Fast forward to now: the Chinese have been building the Great Firewall to keep ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
The TVUPlayer uses P2P technology to facilitate streaming TV at high quality.
HBO executives are obviously unhappy. No surprise that users, however, do like it--and their numbers are growing.
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out internationally. China isn't exactly known for the strictest of copyright enforcement, but it ...
Posted in Copyright, Internet policy | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 20th, 2006
MPAA chief Dan Glickman is proudly trumpeting his newest accomplishment: working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles to create a new merit badge in respecting copyright.
"Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why ...
Posted in Copyright | 2 Comments »
Thursday, October 19th, 2006
Okay, so this is really old news, but Lok just pointed it out and I feel compelled to share in case it's news to anyone else.
Do a Google search for Kazaa. At the bottom of the page, you'll find:
In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium ...
Posted in Copyright, Internet policy | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Music companies and others who have a product to sell (e.g., Coke) are using P2P as a marketing tool.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Jay-Z (who provided the material for half of the Grey Album and never thought of suing; btw, read this letter) is using peer-to-peer traffic to ...
Posted in Advertising, Copyright | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
As Professor Milton Mueller documented in his book Ruling the Root, US-based governance of internet naming is a politically touchy issue.
Internet servers communicate without centralized control, with one exception: everyone needs an address. The root server, which controls internet addresses, "is the only point of centralized control in what is ...
Posted in Internet policy | No Comments »
Monday, October 16th, 2006
Three years ago, Friendster was the social networking site. Google offered founder Jonathan Abrams $30m. Now, MySpace gets 50 times as many hits. What happened in the intervening years?
This CNet article has a number of partial answers, but one theme sticks out: distracted by a litany of pie-in-the-sky dreams, they ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, October 14th, 2006
In response to European and South Korean antitrust concerns, Microsoft has made several changes to its forthcoming operating system.
The new OS, Vista, will now feature less lock-in for its search, file formatting, and security features, the company has announced. So far, security firms are skeptical; the company has promised but ...
Posted in Antitrust, DRM | No Comments »
Friday, October 13th, 2006
The FCC has decided to allow experimenation in the highly desirable portion of spectrum that currently carries over-the-air TV.
The spectrum, which falls below 900 megahertz, is generally viewed as the Park Avenue of the airwaves. It carries transmissions through walls and other obstructions much more easily than the slices of ...
Posted in Antitrust, FCC, Internet policy, Media consolidation, Network neutrality, Telecommunications, Telecommunications law | No Comments »