Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Why again do we need the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (Induce Act)? Apple’s iTunes service sells about 2.5 million songs a week, while Wal-mart sells around 200,000 and Sony 100,000 songs per week. And soon, enter Yahoo – it’s the second most visited site on the net. And enter Microsoft. Its MSN music service [...]
Rudy Giuliani gave a pretty good speech last night, IMHO. But, alas for the GOP, the speech got cold-shouldered from the broadcast networks. Flipping around the bacast dial during the speech, I found Monday night football, a local weather report, and one local broadcast report from the convention floor–but even that didn’t show the speech. [...]
Earlier this year I read an interesting new book by Harvard Business School professor Debora Spar entitled “Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet.” Spar’s book is important because it can tell us a lot about where cyberspace and the Internet economy might be heading next. The [...]
The Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General announced today that it would be seeking Supreme Court review of an case with important ramifications for the future of broadband Internet regulation in America. The decision in question, Brand X Internet Services vs. the Federal Communications Commission, was handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of [...]
While running television ads in Washington, D.C. to show what a swell bunch of people they are, the National Association of Broadcasters have been running an aggressive campaign to squeeze out the latest threat to local broadcasters, satellite radio providers XM and Sirius. The problem, it seems, is that XM has been offering its subscribers [...]
There’s a very interesting article over at ZDNet about the unintended benefits of the continuing spam wars. The author makes the point that the war between spammers and filter designers has sparked new interest and innovation in the field of AI (artificial intelligence). In order to distinguish between spam and legitimate e-mail, filters must become [...]
Like my TFL colleague Tim Lee, I’ve been spending some time lately thinking about digital rights management (DRM), trusted computing (TC) and copyright skirmishes. Just so you know right up front, I consider myself to be right smack in the mushy middle of most copyright battles going on out there these days. I’m hopelessly undecided [...]
Reuters is reporting that the European Commission is launching an antitrust investigation into a plan by Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc. to acquire joint control of U.S. ContentGuard Holdings, a firm that makes digital rights management (DRM) technologies to help protect copyrighted files from unauthorized use. This is foolish. Most IP providers today are [...]
An important component of Apple’s iTunes Music Store and competitors from Microsoft, Real, and Sony, is “digital rights management.” Under DRM schemes, music or other content purchased online is encrypted in a way that only authorized devices or programs can read it, and tagged with rules indicating who the rightful owner is and what may [...]
May 24, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
