Inaccurate Copyright Enforcement: Questionable "best" practices and BitTorrent specificat
[Today we welcome my Princeton Computer Science colleague Mike Freedman. Mike's research areas include computer systems, network software, and security. He writes a technical blog about these topics at the Princeton S* Network Systems -- required reading for serious systems geeks like me. -- Ed Felten] In the past few weeks, Ed has been writing about targeted and inaccurate copyright

Robots and the Law
Stanford Law School held a panel Thursday on "Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics". I happened to be in town so I dropped by and heard an interesting discussion. Here's the official announcement: Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and autonomy. Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of robotics in warfare, medicine, and exploration. Industry analysts and UN statistics predict equally significant growth in the market for personal or service robotics over

Targeted Copyright Enforcement vs. Inaccurate Enforcement
Let's continue our discussion about copyright enforcement against online infringers. I wrote last time about how targeted enforcement can deter many possible violators even if the enforcer can only punish a few violators. Clever targeting of enforcement can destroy the safety-in-numbers effect that might otherwise shelter a crowd of would-be violators. In the online copyright context, the implication is that large copyright owners might be able to use lawsuit threats to deter a huge population of would-be infringers, even if they can only manage to sue a few

Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits
One reason the record industry's strategy of suing online infringers ran into trouble is that there are too many infringers to sue. If the industry can only sue a tiny fraction of infringers, then any individual infringer will know that he is very unlikely to be sued, and deterrence will fail. Or so it might seem -- until you read The Dynamics of Deterrence, a recent paper by Mark Kleiman and Beau Kilmer that explains how to deter a great many violators despite limited enforcement capacity. Consider the following hypothetical. There are 26 players, whom we'll name A through Z. Each player can choose w

New York AG Files Antitrust Suit Against Intel
Yesterday, New York's state Attorney General filed what could turn out to be a major antitrust suit against Intel. The suit accuses Intel of taking illegal steps to exclude a competitor, AMD, from the market. All we have so far is the NYAG's complaint, which tells one side of the case. Intel will have ample opportunity to respond, and the NYAG will ultimately have the burden of backing up its allegations with proof -- so caution is in order at this point. Still, the complaint lays out the shape of the NYAG's case. The case concerns the market for x86-compatible micro