Currently, I have some problems with my email service provider. If you tried to send me an email over the last 48 hours and got an error message, please use bechtold (at) jura.uni-tuebingen.de in the meantime. Thank you.
source: Problem with email
Recently, Digital Cinema Initiatives (a joint venture of Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios) finally published their Digital Cinema System Specification. In chapter 9, the document includes an 80-page-long specification of the security requirements for digitalized cinemas. There is a lot of the usual DRM parlance in there (including “trusted device lists”, device revocation, key management etc.). The chapter also includes an elaborate specification for the use of digital watermarks (called “forensic marking” in the document) as part of the security architecture.
source: DRM and movie theaters
As any decent blog in the U.S. seems to require a posting on today’s Grokster decision by the Supreme Court, here are my $ 0.02 (for a very interesting discussion of the decision, see Randal Picker’s blog).
source: On the Grokster decision
Recently, the Supreme Court of Connecticut decided that enforcing a speed limit on a rental car by a GPS-based system is illegal. Decision is here.
So the broadcast flag was struck down yesterday. As always, Ernest Miller has a nice summary of the reactions.
source: Broadcast flag struck down
At Cambridge University, Dan Lockton is working on an interesting MPhil dissertation topic that is becoming more and more important: designing products with features that restrict or enforce what consumers can do with the products. For more information, click here.
Some information about digital rights management systems used in computer games may be found here.
source: DRM in Gaming
So, today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear two cases that may profoundly shape U.S. cyberlaw and may also affect cyberlaw in other countries. For more information, see here.
source: Supreme Court
Stanford Law School is hosting a law and technology conference Saturday, April 9. The conference is a collaboration of four bay area law schools — Stanford, Boalt , USF, and Hastings.
The day-long conference will provide an unusual exploration of law and technology by focusing on four emerging areas of interest: Nanotechnology, Fair Use, E-democracy, and international IP.
Registration is $25 for professionals and FREE to students.
So here is another potential example of an application of P2P systems that might even be helpful from the music industry’s perspective.
Indicare has an interesting article
> written by Natali Helberger about the advantages and limitations of
labeling requirements as an answer to DRM. Such labeling requirements can be found, e.g., in the revised German Copyright Act, and are also being discussed in the U.S. Congress. In certain aspects, they remind of Judge Easterbrook’s well-known phrase in ProCD v. Zeidenberg and the discussions surrounding ProCD: “Competition among vendors, not judicial revision of a package’s contents, is how consumers are protected in a market economy.”
source: Labeling as an answer to DRM?
At the 3rd DRM conference this January in Berlin, Ross Anderson gave a dinner speech in which he envisaged a world suffused by region-coding technology (imagine region-coding in RFID-equipped jeans, e.g.). While we are not at this stage yet (at hopefully will never be), here is just another example of the increasing use of this technology:
source: A world of region-coding
Some readers may remember that we used to have a big comment spam problem at CIS blogs (see here and, more generally, here). Now that this problem has been fixed by a workable solution for several months, we are increasingly getting a new kind of spam: trackback spamming. As long as no workable solution to trackback spamming is installed on the server on which the CIS blogs are running, the trackback functionality will remain turned off. Sorry about that. For some information about the motivations of blog spammers, read here.
source: Trackback spamming
I spent fifteen hours on Election Day in a conference room in a Manhattan law firm, surrounded by dozens of attorneys, fielding questions from what felt like all of them. It wasn’t the callback interview from hell, though: I’d volunteered to help work the Election Protection Coalition’s 866-OUR-VOTE callin hotline.
The hotline has existed for some years, but after 2000, it became much more well-publicized and well-funded. Its goal is to allow poll watchers, voters, and election workers to call in with questions, comments, and especially their observations of anything that looks like irregularities in the electoral process. The line connects callers to banks of volunteer attorneys and law students at call centers all over the country. Even though there was a call center in San Francisco, I’d been tapped to fill a last-minute hole in a phone bank responsible for handling calls from Pennsylvania.
(much more below the fold…)
source: How I spent my Election Day
Approved by the FCC. That’s nice, I guess, though a bit weird. Is anyone seriously talking about providing this in the market?
source: Broadband over power lines?
Together with Professor Pamela Samuelson from Berkeley and some colleagues from Germany and the U.K., I am currently co-organizing a large conference on digital rights management, alternative compensation systems, and trusted computing. The bi-lingual conference will be held in Berlin, Germany, on January 13 & 14, 2005. We have quite a number of speakers from outside Germany, including Pam Samuelson, Hal Varian (UC Berkeley), Ross Anderson (Cambridge University), Barb Fox (Microsoft), Bill Way (RealNetworks), Bernt Hugenholtz (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Lee Bygrave (University of Oslo), Leonardo Chiariglione (Digital Media Project/MPEG), Fred von Lohmann (EFF), Deirdre Mulligan (UC Berkeley), and Terry Fisher (Harvard University). For the trusted computing panel, we have speakers such as Graeme Proudler (Chair, Technical Committee, TCG), Thomas Rosteck (Infineon), Ahmad-Rez-Sadeghi (University of Bochum) and Seth Schoen (EFF). More information (including registration information) may be found over here.
Today Professor Mark Lemley spoke at the law school on the current state of patent law for the field of biotechnology. It was the first chance I’ve gotten to hear him speak since he arrived from Boalt Hall this year, and he is a pretty engaging and thought-provoking speaker.
Basically, his talk centered on the proposition that patent law is “technology specific” — that despite the fact that a U.S. patent grant is a “one size fits all” solution, the rules of the patent game differ tremendously whether you are applying for a software patent or a biotechnology patent, because of the body of common law judicial decisions validating or invalidating patents in a given field. Lemley thinks that in general, this technology-specific approach is a decently responsive way to tailor the patent process to the ideal conditions each field needs to incentivize innovation, and to adapt to technology that often changes too quickly for legislation to be relevant. However, he also thinks that in the field of biotechnology, the rules laid down by the courts are not optimal, which has led to something he calls the “Biotech Uncertainty Principle.”
If you’re interested, the ideas laid out in his talk can be found in several law review articles that he’s co-written with Dan Burk. See: Is Patent Law Technology-Specific?, 17 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 1155 (2002); Policy Levers in Patent Law, 89 Virginia Law Review 1575 (2003); and Biotechnology’s Uncertainty Principle, in 50 Advances in Genetics: Perspectives on Properties of the Human Genome Project 305 (2003).
source: biotech and patent law
Amplifying Steve: Bruce Schneier just wrote a good op-ed in the International Herald Tribune on RFID.
source: Schneier on RFID
The Virginia legislature heard testimony today about the wisdom of implanting RFID chips in their state driver’s licenses. No state currently uses RFID chips in driver’s licenses, but once past that obvious target, resistance to the technology would likely diminish significantly. Because the RFID tags would essentially broadcast personal information to anyone nearby with a reader, the ACLU is actively involved in dissuading Virginia from this plan. But given the strong RFID push from the Bush administration, immediate testing of RFID tags in a limited fashion, such as in one state’s driver’s licenses, could provide much-needed empirical evidence of privacy infringement. Such a scenario could stave off more aggressive RFID plans such as a federal mandate for RFID-enabled driver’s licenses nationwide, RFID-enabled passports, or other types of ID cards such as those envisioned for federal employees. Just as long as the pilot test is not in my state.
source: RFID in our wallets