Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Having read the Perfect 10 v. Google decision, I agree with Fred von Lohmann’s analysis of it: this is a basically solid decision that goes off the rails because Judge Martz didn’t seem clear on the relationship between Google Image Search and AdSense. Here’s how those two products work: Google Image Search is a search [...]
Via the Commons Music blog, I see this in-depth article about the fact that hardly any graphics cards you buy today will be compatible with the forthcoming HDCP copy-protection standard: HDCP stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and is an Intel-initiated program that was developed with Silicon Image. This content protection system is mandatory for [...]
Well, it appears my fun with telemarketers is over. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has created a “Deceased Do Not Contact” list to give family members the ability to remove the names of deceased loved ones from mass-marketing efforts. I was a little sad to hear this for reasons that you might find somewhat disturbing. [...]
Last week, Randy Picker wrote about an idea for “mistrust based” digital rights management technology: Watermarks are a form of identity-based DRM. The embedded watermark would allow a content owner to scan p2p networks in search of available content. Having found the content and the associated identity, the content owner would be able to respond [...]
Yesterday the New York Times had an editorial about network neutrality. They employed a great analogy: “When someone calls your home, the telephone company puts through the call without regard to who is calling. In the same way, Internet service providers let Web sites operated by eBay, CNN or any other company send information to [...]
Here’s a few thoughts on Jim Harper’s splendid post of a few days ago on the nature and origins of IP as compared to physical property. I can’t find much to disagree with in it, but apparently I was expected to? So I will clarify where I think points of controversy might arise starting off [...]
I’ve just finished reading Felten and Halderman’s excellent paper on the XCP and MediaMax copy-protection schemes adopted by Sony BMG. It’s well worth the read if you’re interested in getting a glimpse at the real-world implementation details faced by DRM designers. What I found most striking was how unsophisticated most of the security mechanisms in [...]
A couple of weeks ago, in comments, I got a tongue-lashing from Solveig Singleton for my suggestion that DRM was a legal, rather than a purely private, enforcement mechanism: The DMCA is certainly a legal barrier. And to some extent, effective DRM, or some of it, relies indirectly in turn on some kind of backup [...]
I haven’t checked Declan’s site in a few days, but I see that he’s posted a couple of insightful emails about the Yahoo/AOL/Goodmail pay-for-email program I last week: Imagine that you are an online service that needs to ensure that a customer order confirmation, or an equivalent critical transaction message, is delivered to the customer. [...]
TechDirt points out yet another article about how the content industries are shooting themselves in the foot with overly aggressive copy protection. Next-generation video formats will only allow themselves to be viewed at full resolution on certain hardware. A lot of computer hardware being sold today doesn’t make the cut, despite the fact that they [...]
May 16, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
