Historical Archives
Ugh, the bill with the horrid p2p provisions passed the house without a word about those provisions. For further reading: Kenneth Green on the bill I’m disgusted. Update: Didn’t pass the house–just the committee. But the vote was unanimous. Sigh. Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the…
I am feeling a bit like New Kid today–pretty cranky–and I was going to write something random, but I wanted to comment a bit more on the proposed House legislation that would require colleges and universities to provide legal options for downloading music and require them to have a plan to prevent illegal downloading. Dean…
Democrats have included in the latest higher education bill a provision to punish colleges and universities who do not “develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.” Congress has been trying to get something…
This week’s Tech Therapy (yes, I listen) is an interview with Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA. About halfway through, Scott Carlson asks a question I sent in (I’m identified by name and school) about whether colleges and universities are doing enough to meet the DMCA requirements. He couches his answer by saying that some…
Imagine if copy machines had a way of detecting whether you were copying something you printed out yourself or a book or journal article and wouldn’t make copies if it were one of the latter. That’s what many DVD/VHS players do. Yesterday, as I was setting up my brand new, beautiful mini-dv/DVD decks and attaching…
Remember what I said yesterday about content owners making it harder for people like me to circumvent copy protections and DRM in order to legally copy something for fair use purposes? Okay maybe you didn’t get that far. For those who don’t know, the new blu-ray and hd-dvd’s have stronger copy protection. The minute they…
I wasn’t going to write about this anymore, but I can’t help myself. Yesterday, the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held a hearing on the issue of downloading on college campuses. Congressman Howard Berman suggests that colleges aren’t really doing enough to combat piracy. He claims colleges are hypocrites, saying: Perhaps the…
The RIAA is increasing its efforts to stop downloading on college campuses. Their new strategy involves sending out settlement letters to students. The letters, presumably, will be more threatening than the current takedown notices they send out regularly. I happen to be our campus DMCA agent. I’m the one who receives those takedown notices and…
Welcome to my old blog. The archives are listed below. Click the links at the top to find out more about me.