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About This Site

May 27, 2005 by

Ed Felten says:

Hi, I’m Ed Felten. In my day job, I’m a Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and Director of Princeton’s Center for InfoTech Policy.

Alex Halderman says:

Hi, I’m J. Alex Halderman. In my afternoon and night job, I’m a graduate student in Computer Science at Princeton University.

Dan Wallach says:

Hi, I’m Dan Wallach. During the day, I’m an associate professor in the department of computer science at Rice University. Back in the day, I got my PhD at Princeton working for Ed. These days, I’m spending most of my time working on electronic voting security.

We, and the other authors listed in the sidebar, write this weblog. The focus is on issues related to legal regulation of technology, and especially on legal attempts to restrict the right of technologists and citizens to tinker with technological devices. But we reserve the right to write about anything that strikes our fancy.

Needless to say, we speak only for ourselves. Nothing we write here is endorsed by our employers, our fellow contributors on this blog, or by anyone else except the author. Even we are not too sure about some of this stuff. Posts by others, including our fellow bloggers, guest bloggers and other contributors, reflect their opinions, not necessarily ours.

We welcome comments, suggestions, and polite argumentation. If you send us an email about something we’ve written here, we’ll assume (unless you tell us otherwise) that we have your permission to quote your message on the site. Or you can post a comment to the site yourself.

Material in the Comments section is contributed by others. We can’t vouch for its accuracy and it doesn’t necessarily reflect our opinions. We reserve the right to remove comments that are clearly off-topic or highly offensive; but otherwise we’ll leave the comments alone.

(We also use automated tools to fight comment spam. When these tools see indications of spamminess in a comment – according to whatever criteria the tools’ authors chose to use – they will remove a comment or hold it for human inspection. We look at the held comments periodically and release any that are not spam. If your comments seem to disappear or be mysteriously delayed for hours, this is probably the explanation. We apologize for any inconvenience, but we have found automated anti-spam tools necessary given the volume of comment spam we face.)

Unless noted otherwise, the author of each post owns the copyright on that post. (Commenters may own the copyright on their comments – ask a copyright lawyer – but we assume that commenters give our readers permission to redistribute or use their comments under the same terms that apply to our material on which they are commenting.) Everything else that is copyrightable is copyrighted by Edward W. Felten, J. Alex Halderman, and Dan S. Wallach. Thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, our copyrights on this site will expire early in the 22nd century.

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Unless noted otherwise, material on Freedom to Tinker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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BitTorrent Search

May 26, 2005 by

BitTorrent.com released a new search facility yesterday, making it slightly easier to find torrent files on the Net. This is an odd strategic move by BitTorrent.com – it doesn’t help the company’s customers much, but mostly just muddles the company’s public messaging.

[Backstory about BitTorrent: The BitTorrent technology allows efficient Internet distribution of large files to many recipients, without creating a central network bottleneck. In current released versions of BitTorrent, you locate content by getting a torrent file from a standard web server. The torrent file points to the location of a “tracker” which in turn keeps track of where on the net you can go to get pieces of the content. (A new beta version eliminates the tracker, which is an interesting development but is largely irrelevant to the issues I’m discussing today.)]

The term “BitTorrent” is used to refer to three separate things:

  • a company, which I’ll call “BitTorrent.com”,
  • a software product called BitTorrent, distributed for free, with source code, by BitTorrent.com,
  • the communication protocols that enable users’ systems to communicate, which are implemented by the BitTorrent software but can be implemented by other software programs.

Blending the three together is sometimes a harmless rhetorical shortcut, but at other times leads to faulty reasoning. For example, a court could hypothetically shut down BitTorrent.com (if the company were found to be a lawbreaker) but it could neither undistribute the software code that was already in users’ hands, nor uncreate the protocol. Critics who are thinking sloppily (or want their audiences to think sloppily) sometimes ignore these distinctions. BitTorrent.com, the company, may have a business incentive to blur the distinctions, in order to make the company’s role seem more important than it really is.

The new BitTorrent.com search facility seems to be entirely separate, functionally, from the BitTorrent software and protocols. Anybody could have created this search facility; and indeed others have. Google, for instance, happens to offer a fairly complete torrent search facility. A BitTorrent.com search for “sith” returns quite a few files claiming to be the new Star Wars movie; but so does a Google search for “sith filetype:torrent”. There’s no reason, functionally, why BitTorrent.com had to be the one to offer a torrent search engine. An independent search engine would work just as well.

Is BitTorrent.com search legal? I’ll leave that one to the lawyers; but I’ll point out two things. First, the DMCA provides a safe harbor against indirect infringement for search engines that follow certain takedown procedures on receiving infringement complaints. BitTorrent.com will apparently follow those procedures, and so the safe harbor may apply. Second, the connection from BitTorrent.com to any infringing content is quite indirect: a BitTorrent.com search result gives the address of a torrent file; the torrent file gives the address of a tracker, the tracker gives the addresses of client computers, and the client computers are the ones that actually distribute infringing content. (The new trackerless version of BitTorrent changes the details, but doesn’t reduce the number of steps.) There are at least three intermediaries between BitTorrent.com and any infringing material.

Even if the search facility is legal, it seems like a bad strategic move by BitTorrent.com. Large copyright interests have been trying to paint BitTorrent as having a pro-infringement agenda; but thus far their efforts have had only limited success because Bram Cohen (the software’s creator) and BitTorrent.com have carefully dissociated themselves from infringement and have conspicuously designed their technology for the benefit of noninfringing users.

As Joe Gratz argues, the new BitTorrent.com search facility, regardless of the merits, will make it easier for BitTorrent.com’s critics to paint the company as having a secret pro-infringement agenda. And that by itself is enough to make an in-house search engine a big mistake for the company.

BitTorrent.com needs to remember that it can be killed by Washington politics. But politicians need to remember, too, that it is the BitTorrent protocol, not the company, that is changing the world. Killing the company will not kill the protocol. A protocol is an idea; and in a free society ideas cannot be killed.

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A Land Without Music

May 25, 2005 by

Here’s a story I heard recently from an anonymous source. Based on the source’s identity and some of the details of the story, I believe it to be true. I have omitted some details here, to protect the source.

A well-known company, running a massive multi-player virtual world, was considering adding a new space to their world. Due to the nature of the space, characters there would probably want to make music. So the programmers created a set of virtual musical instruments, and tools for players to create their own instruments. The plan was that players would get virtual instruments and make music, for all of the reasons people make music in the real world.

But management nixed the idea, on advice from lawyers, because of concerns about copyright infringement. The problem was that players might use their virtual instruments to play copyrighted songs, and the game company might be sued for contributory or vicarious copyright infringement, for failing to prevent this.

Stop for a minute to think about this. All kinds of virtual objects exist in this virtual world, including a wide variety of weapons. But saxophones? Too risky. Presumably management would have approved a magic saxophone that was only capable of playing non-copyrighted songs, but the engineers had no idea how such a thing could be built.

To put this in context, recall that programmable virtual instruments are widely sold and used in the real world. They’re called synthesizers, and they’re really just computers that can be programmed to play any sequence of sounds, whether copyrighted or not. It’s not so easy to draw a principled line between real-world synthesizers and game-world instruments that makes one legal and the other illegal.

Perhaps the company was being overly cautious and the lawsuit risk was illusory. But I’m not so sure. This would hardly be the most farfetched copyright lawsuit we have seen.

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Moving to New Server

May 24, 2005 by

I’ll be moving this site to a new server over the next few days, so there may be a few glitches. Please let me know if any problems persist.

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Broadcast Flag and Compatibility

May 24, 2005 by

National Journal Tech Daily (an excellent publication, but behind a paywall) has an interesting story, by Sarah Lai Stirland, about an exchange between Mike Godwin of Public Knowledge and some entertainment industry lobbyists, at a DC panel last week. Godwin argued that the FCC’s broadcast flag rule, if it is reinstated, will end up regulating a very broad range of devices.

Godwin said any regulations concerning digital television copy-protection schemes would necessarily have to affect any devices that hook up to digital television receivers. That technical fact could have far-reaching implications, such as making gadgets incompatible with each other and crimping technology companies’ ability to innovate, he said.

“I don’t want to be the legislator or the legislative staff person in charge of shutting off connectivity and compatibility for consumers, and I don’t think you want to do that either,” he told a roomful of technology policy lobbyists and congressional staffers. “It’s going to make consumers’ lives hell.”

Godwin’s talk drew a sharp protest from audience member Rick Lane, vice president of government affairs at News Corp.

“Compatibility is not a goal,” he said, pointing out that there are currently a plethora of consumer electronics and entertainment products that are not interoperable. Lane was seconded by NBC Universal’s Senior Counsel for Government Relations Alec French, who also was in the audience.

To consumers, compatibility is a goal. When devices don’t work together, that is a problem to be solved, not an excuse to mandate even more incompatibility.

The FCC and Congress had better be careful in handling the digital TV issue, or they’ll be blamed for breaking the U.S. television system. Mandating incompatibility, via the Broadcast Flag, will not be a popular policy, especially at a time when Congress is talking about shutting off analog TV broadcasts.

The most dangerous place in Washington is between Americans and their televisions.

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