Earlier this month, a Minnesota jury found a Duluth-area single mother guilty of illicit file-sharing and ordered her to pay a six-figure fine. The evidence against the defendant seemed pretty airtight, but the fine struck me as unreasonably harsh—you’d never get a $222,000 fine for your first conviction of shoplifting physical CDs.
In this week’s podcast, we’re joined by two individuals who have been following this issue closely. Eric Bangeman is the managing editor of Ars Technica. He spent a week in Minnesota covering the trial, and he gives us a first-hand account of the proceedings Debbie Rose is an IP fellow at the Association for Competitive Technology, and she gives us her perspective on the broader legal and ethical issues.
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TLF contributor Jerry Brito and his colleague Jerry Ellig, both of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, recently released a comprehensive new paper on the law and economics of network neutrality regulation. In a wide-ranging discussion, we explore the economic arguments for network neutrality regulation, discuss how economic theory applies to the issue, and Jerry Brito fills us in on the legal status of the FCC and FTC’s various pronouncements.
I generally try to have podcasts up within 24 hours of recording them, but this one was recorded last Wednesday. My apologies for the delay.
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Last there was more big news out of Europe regarding Microsoft’s ongoing antitrust saga in the European Union. The European Court of First Instance made an important holding regarding what Microsoft would be able to bundle in its Windows operating system, as well as some rulings about the disclosure of interoperability information for its systems. This week, we’ll be discussing the implications of the ruling for the software industry and consumers.
Our guest this week is Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology. We’re also joined by TLF regulars Hance Haney, Cord Blomquist, Tim Lee, and Adam Thierer.
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This week’s podcast focuses on two copyright issues. First, Congress has been considering legislation that would extend copyright-like protections to the fashion industry. Second, in the decision of Golan v. Gonzales earlier this month, the Tenth Circuit held that Congress cannot re-impose copyright restrictions on public domain materials without invoking heightened First Amendment scrutiny.
Our first guest is a man who’s been in the thick of both controversies. Chris Sprigman is professor of law at the University of Virginia. He was one of the attorneys behind the Golan case, and he wrote a widely-read paper called The Piracy Paradox” arguing against extending copyright law to the fashion industry. Our other guest, Julian Sanchez, wrote an article for the American on the Congressional effort to impose copyright restrictions on the fashion industry.
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Adam’s been generating a lot of debate with his recent posts questioning the propriety of sharing your wireless broadband connections and urging telecom companies to experiment with metered broadband access.
Seeking to continue the discussion, Adam asked Ben Worthen, the Wall Street Journal reporter who kicked off the latest discussion of wi-fi piggybacking, and Mike Masnick, who’s been on issue for years, to join myself and TLFer James Gattuso for an in-depth discussion of the economics and ethics of piggybacking.
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We took the podcast on the road this week and recorded at our Alcohol Liberation Front event on the last day of the PFF Aspen Summit conference. First off, Bill Rosenblatt of DRMWatch.com tells us why he thinks fair use might just be a quaint old notion that’s on its way out the door. We continue the fair use discussion with Solveig Singleton of PFF and Jim Harper of the Cato Institute. Finally, Adam Thierer of PFF and Declan McCullagh of C-Net’s News.com discuss the specter of data retention mandates.
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Lately I’ve been writing about the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new First Sale Doctrine case, which will consider whether it’s copyright infringement to resell those “promo CDs” that record labels send to DJs, journalists, and others in the hopes of drumming up publicity. Universal Music says that such sales amount to copyright infringement, but EFF’s Fred Von Lohmann charges that UMG’s lawsuit runs afoul of the First Sale Doctrine.
Fred joins us for this week’s podcast along with Prof. Randy Picker of the University of Chicago to discuss the legal and policy implications of the case. In a wide-ranging discussion, they covered the differences between contract and copyright law, the implications for the software industry, and whether the GPL runs afoul of the First Sale Doctrine. TLFer Braden Cox also weighed in, and Adam Thierer hosted.
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We took the podcast on the road this week and recorded at our Alcohol Liberation Front event on the last day of the PFF Aspen Summit conference. Giving us their reaction to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote address are Cord Blomquist of CEI, James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, and Jeff Eisenach of Criterion Economics, as well as yours truly. Also, Adam Thierer of PFF and Hance Haney of the Discovery Institute discuss Lawrence Tribe’s address on tech policy and the First Amendment. In two weeks we’ll have another “Live from Aspen” podcast featuring Solveig Singleton, Jim Harper, and Bill Rosenblatt on copyright fair use.
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Earlier this month, in the wake of a University of California study revealing serious security weaknesses in touch-screen voting machines, California’s secretary of state decertified the state’s electronic voting machines, and then re-certified them with added security restrictions. And last month, Florida released a security analysis of Diebold voting software and found that the company had still failed to fix security problems identified in earlier analyses of the systems.
In this week’s podcast, Adam and I are joined by one of the most prolific and insightful scholars in tech policy today: Ed Felten, computer science professor at Princeton. He discusses his research on the security of e-voting systems, the Holt bill now making its way through Congress, and the future of secure elections.
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Over the weekend, Congress passed legislation that dramatically expands the executive branch’s domestic surveillance powers. The legislation replaces the FISA warrant process that has governed domestic surveillance since the 1970s with a new process in which courts would only review the general procedures used to select surveillance targets, not a list of the targets themselves.
In this week’s podcast, Adam and I are joined by two of my favorite commentators on civil liberties: Derek Slater of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Julian Sanchez of Reason magazine. They explain what’s wrong with the legislation, how it’s connected to EFF’s ongoing lawsuit against AT&T, and what we need to do to restore our privacy rights.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.