Category: Uncategorized
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The End of Theory? Not Likely
An essay in the new Wired, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” argues that we won’t need scientific theories any more, now that we have so much stored information and such great tools for analyzing it. Wired has never been the best source for accurate technology information, but this…
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Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law
James Grimmelmann has an interesting new essay, “Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law,” on the challenges of ensuring that the public has effective knowledge of the laws. This might sound like an easy problem, but Grimmelmann combines history and explanation to show why it can be difficult. The law – which includes both legislators’…
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New bill advances open data, but could be better for reuse
Senators Obama, Coburn, McCain, and Carper have introduced the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008 (S. 3077), which would modify their 2006 transparency act. That first bill created USASpending.gov, a searchable web site of government outlays. USASpending.gov—which was based on software developed by OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation—allows end users…
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Study Shows DMCA Takedowns Based on Inconclusive Evidence
A new study by Michael Piatek, Yoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy at the University of Washington shows that copyright owners’ representatives sometimes send DMCA takedown notices where there is no infringement – and even to printers and other devices that don’t download any music or movies. The authors of the study received more than 400…
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Government Data and the Invisible Hand
David Robinson, Harlan Yu, Bill Zeller, and I have a new paper about how to use infotech to make government more transparent. We make specific suggestions, some of them counter-intuitive, about how to make this happen. The final version of our paper will appear in the Fall issue of the Yale Journal of Law and…
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The Microsoft Case: The Second Browser War
Today I’ll wrap up my series of posts looking back at the Microsoft Case, by looking at the Second Browser War that is now heating up. The First Browser War, of course, started in the mid-1990s with the rise of Netscape and its Navigator browser. Microsoft was slow to spot the importance the Web and…
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The Microsoft Case: The Government's Theory, in Hindsight
Continuing my series of posts on the tenth anniversary of the Microsoft antitrust case, I want to look today at the government’s theory of the case, and how it looks with ten years of hindsight. The source of Microsoft’s power in Windows was what the government dubbed the “applications barrier to entry”. Users chose their…
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The Microsoft Case: A Window Into the Software Industry
This week I’m publishing reflections on the Microsoft antitrust case, which was filed ten years ago. Today I want to consider how the case change the public view of the software industry. Microsoft’s internal emails were a key part of the government’s evidence. The emails painted a vivid picture of how the company made its…
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The Microsoft Case, Ten Years Later
Sunday was the tenth anniversary of the government filing its antitrust case against Microsoft. The date passed almost unnoticed, though echoes of the case continue to reverberate. This week I want to reflect on the case, with the benefit of ten years’ hindsight. I’ll write at least three posts: today, on the overall legacy of…
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Live Webcast: Future of News, May 14-15
We’re going to do a live webcast of our workshop on “The Future of News”, which will be held tomorrow and Thursday (May 14-15) in Princeton. Attending the workshop (free registration) gives you access to the speakers and other attendees over lunch and between sessions, but if that isn’t practical, the webcast is available. Here…