Recent Articles

Federal Circuit Reins in Business Method Patents

October 31, 2008 20:00

This has been a big year for patent law in the technology industry. A few weeks ago I wrote about the Supreme Court's Quanta v. LG decision. Now the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over all patent appeals, has handed down a landmark ruling in the case...

DMCA Week: Predictions Are Hard, Especially about the Future

October 31, 2008 02:07

My previous post on DVD jukeboxes has prompted an interesting discussion among our commenters. There seems to be a lively difference of opinion about how useful a DVD jukebox would be, what it would look like, and who would use it. Personally, I had envisioned a high-end video device that DVD...

Wikipedia as a Public Good

October 30, 2008 18:45

My post about Wikipedia and public goods prompted an interesting response from Judd Antin at Berkeley's School of Information. He makes a number of sharp points, but let me focus on this response to the idea that free-riders don't hurt Wikipedia: This completely depends on what your goal is. On the...

DMCA Week: A second orphan works problem?

October 30, 2008 01:58

The orphan works problem in copyright is real and serious. Several congressional hearings and a Copyright Office inquiry that drew hundreds of thoughtful comments---not to mention countless articles and blog posts---attest to that fact. This attention is heartening, and while orphan works...

DMCA Week: Where's My DVD Jukebox?

October 28, 2008 23:29

A difficult challenge in thinking about public policy is understanding which innovations have not happened as a result of bad government policies. For example, it's generally believed that the Bell phone monopoly stifled innovation in the telecommunications sector during the 1950s and 1960s. But if...

DMCA Week, Part I: How the DMCA Was Born

October 27, 2008 21:05

Ten years ago tomorrow, on October 28, 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law. The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, which became 17 USC Section 1201, made it a crime under most circumstances to "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to" a...