The Federal Trade Commission said today that it has warned nearly one hundred U.S. companies that personal information, including sensitive data about customers and/or employees, is floating around on P2P networks, putting those customers and employees at risk of identity theft or fraud. The federal agency also said it has “opened non-public investigations of other [...]

More people are watching video over the Internet than ever before. It is becoming increasingly easy to stream online video on your television, bringing the lean-back and lean-forward technologies together in a pleasant way. We want this to continue, right?
There are two challenges facing the growth of a legal online video market. One is piracy. [...]

Congrats to the coalition of self-described “consumer groups” that have sent letters to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission urging the federal government to step in, strip audiovisual content creators of their rights, and force all of their content online available to any distributor at prices set by someone other [...]

A key part of the copyright debate is that copyright somehow inhibits innovation. Yet if you look around, innovation has been occurring and continues to occur at a dizzying pace. Hype quickly follows that innovation, and assumptions surround each new innovation. We hear lots of references to Schumpeter, as if the Austrian economist who focused [...]

Just when you think the dangers of file-sharing are slipping out of the headlines, those silly buggers pop right back onto the front page.
The latest on this front blared across the cover of The Washington Post this morning, with news that dozens of U.S. federal lawmakers are being investigated by the House Ethics Committee. How [...]

It’s well understood that a darknet doesn’t function if everyone free-rides and no one shares. The more people share, the more valuable the network (i.e., network effect.) So it should be no surprise that many are skeptical of the P2P industry’s claims of voluntary steps to reduce inadvertent file-sharing, and of LimeWire’s claims that their [...]

Rapid advances in technology have been occurring since the Renaissance, and yet sometimes the greatest advocates of advancement fail to predict where science will go. In the 19th Century Lord Kelvin was a father of modern physics, identifying absolute zero, naming kinetic energy, and setting in motion the identification of the second law of thermodynamics. [...]

UCLA Law Professor Doug Lichtman has a new essay (posted by The Media Institute) and podcast on a topic that seems obvious on its face: Everyone Hates DRM. That is mostly true, at least from a consumer standpoint. But that doesn’t mean it still isn’t relevant in today’s society, and I Lichtman understands that as [...]

SEATTLE — Here we go again.
At the end of the Federal Trade Commission Town Hall here on digital rights management at the University of Washington School of Law, during the time the FTC had set aside for audience ranting — I mean feedback — an FTC official read a question from someone watching the webcast. [...]

SEATTLE — My overall impression of the Federal Trade Commission Town Hall meeting held here at the U. of Washington School of Law regarding digital rights management? Too many lawyers and technologists.
Nothing against lawyers and technologists; some of my best friends are lawyers or technologists, or both. But the nature of those professions is to [...]