Technology Blog

A short article by me that gives an overview of the emerging scholarship of value-centered design approaches towards DRM has been published online here.

source: Value-Centered Design of Digital Rights Management

Over the weekend, I was at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria (where Creative Commons won a Golden Nica, by the way). The festival is always quite a lot of fun and is accompanied by an interesting conference. At the conference on Saturday, Sherry Turkle from MIT gave an interesting talk on the interaction and connection between computers and people in the co-construction of identity. She identified three phases regarding research on this interaction:

source: The Culture of Nurturing Computers

A few weeks ago, a District Court in Munich, Germany, upheld an earlier preliminarly injunction according to which the GPL can effectively become part of an agreement und that it may be enforced by German courts. While this story has been reported occasionally, if you want to have a look at the actual decision, here is an (unofficial) English translation.

Update: Some more information (a different English translation and a commentary by Prof. Thomas Hoeren) may be found via Larry Lessig’s blog.

source: GPL enforceable under German Law [Updated Sep. 6]

The recent Chamberlain v. Skylink decision (see my earlier posting) has produced quite a lot of noise in the blogosphere. Ernest Miller has published the most extensive analysis of the decision so far. In addition, he has assembled a list of commentaries by other bloggers. Quite interestingly, most of these comments were made before the decision hit any news site…

source: DRM and Competition on Downstream Markets II

Over the last two years, cases in which companies used DRM technology and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA in order to control downstream markets and channel innovation on these markets have received considerable amount of attention. Particularly worrisome was the Lexmark case in which Lexmark used the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA in order to receive a preliminary injunction against a manufacturer of toner cartridges that competed with Lexmark’s own cartridges (for more information about the case, see here at pages 623-626). In an important decision called Chamberlain v. Skylink,

source: DRM and Competition on Downstream Markets