Last week, I attended MSU’s Fifth Annual Conference on Innovation and Communications Law, where I saw a wonderful presentation by Joshua Pearce, an engineering and material sciences professor from Michigan Tech, on “distributed open-source digital manufacturing” (a.k.a. open-source 3D printing). The hardware Joshua presented is called RepRap: RepRap takes the form of a free desktop […]
Archives for 2013
Open-Source 3D Printing and Copyright Reform: It’s Time to Revisit Personal Use Copying
May 21, 2013 by
Blocking of Google+ Hangouts Android App
May 17, 2013 by
Earlier this week, online news sites started reporting the apparent blocking of Google’s Google+ Hangout video-chat application on Android over AT&T’s cellular network [SlashGear, Time, ArsTechnica]. Several of the articles noted the relationship to an earlier controversy concerning AT&T and Apple’s FaceTime application. Our Mobile Broadband Working Group at the FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee […]
CALEA II: Risks of wiretap modifications to endpoints
May 16, 2013 by
Today I joined a group of twenty computer scientists in issuing a report criticizing an FBI plan to require makers of secure communication tools to redesign their systems to make wiretapping easy. We argue that the plan would endanger the security of U.S. users and the competitiveness of U.S. companies, without making it much harder […]
Who Owns the Future? Not the Middle Class
May 14, 2013 by
Jaron Lanier, in the latest contribution to the public conversation about how we live with technology, blames the Internet for the fall of the middle class. Only the problem is he’s wrong. In his new book Who Owns the Future? Lanier–often described with the word visionary–argues that the information economy in general and network technologies […]
Design is a poor guide to authorization
May 13, 2013 by
James Grimmelmann has a great post on the ambiguity of the concept of “circumvention” in the law. He writes about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) language banning “exceeding authorized access” to a system. There are, broadly speaking, two ways that a computer user could “exceed[] authorized access.” The computer’s owner could use words […]
