Author Archives: Phillips Academy

ONI Releases Green Dam Software Analysis

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At the OpenNet Initiative, we’ve spent much of this week looking hard at the Chinese Green Dam software that the state is asking all PC manufacturers to ship with their hardware. The analysis highlights — and confirms — a variety of problems with the software.

As we argue in this ONI Bulletin, this announcement is a big deal and augurs poorly for the development of the Internet and its usage in China.  “As a policy decision, mandating the installation of a specific software product is both unprecedented and poorly conceived. In this specific instance, the mistake is compounded by requiring the use of a substandard software product that interferes with the performance of personal computers in an unpredictable way, killing browsers and applications without warning while opening up users to numerous serious security vulnerabilities. The level of parental control over the software is poor such that this software does not well serve parents that wish to the limit exposure of their children to Internet content.”

Solicitor General's Brief in Cablevision Case

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The United States Solicitor General’s office has filed its brief (posted online here) in the long-running RS-DVR matter, popularly referred to as the “Cablevision” case. The brief is terrific. The United States takes the position that the Supreme Court should not review the case, which had been decided unanimously by the Second Circuit in favor of the cable companies. This case has significant copyright implications, as well as implications for the balance of power between cable providers and those who hold copyright interests in television and movie programming.

The Solicitor General takes the position that the case did not meet the traditional standard for the Supreme Court to grant cert and that the Second Circuit “reasonably and narrowly resolved the issues” before it. The reasoning in the brief is persuasive.

For more information: Several news outlets have the story. (The Reuters piece says that the SG “denied” the plaintiffs’ request for a hearing, which — at least in technical terms — overstates the matter a bit by implying decision-making authority in the SG. Though the Court asked for the SG’s opinion, the Court reserves the right to decide whether or not to hear the case. Practically speaking, though, that seems somewhat unlikely now, after the filing of this strong brief.) For previous coverage which touches on the procedural aspects of the case, see, e.g., an article by the LA Times’s David G Savage from January, 2009. Also, see the press release and summary page on the case published by Public Knowledge, which has worked on this matter; Gigi Sohn, the president, says she is pleased with the SG’s brief.

By way of disclosure: the United States Solicitor General and counsel of record in this matter, Elena Kagan, is my former boss when she was dean of Harvard Law School for six years prior to her appointment to the Obama Administration.

NPR's Talk of the Nation on Online Safety

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NPR’s ToTN ran a piece yesterday on Online Safety that references lots of good data and the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report. Guests included three experts on this topic: Lenore Skenazy (author of Free Range Kids), Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, and Janis Wolak (UNH). It is rare that one hears such a nuanced conversation about the fact that 1 in 7 youth receive an online solicitation — both a scary notion on its face but also something that needs to be understood in context.

I was most impressed by the parents who called in to the show and their level of knowledge and sophistication about how to help their kids be safe online. It’s such a complicated issue, but one where common sense shared with kids can go a very long way, as these parents demonstrate.

Online Intermediaries

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Issues swirling around Craigslist have given rise to a new round of consideration of our liability scheme of online intermediaries. David Ardia — a very thoughtful observer of this scene, a Berkman fellow, and director of our Citizens Media Law Project — comments on a podcast at Legal Talk Network. The themes are similar to those that Adam Thierer and I took up in a debate at ArsTechnica recently.

This discussion of intermediary liability is only going getting more important as time passes. Follow along as the issue develops at CMLP’s new Section 230 site.

Debate on Section 230 and Internet Intermediaries

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ArsTechnica has posted my debate with Adam Thierer, the eloquent director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Media Freedom.  I read more or less everything Adam writes and by and large agree with it all.  Here, we disagree on whether it’s time to rethink the scope of Section 230 immunity in certain cases.  Urs Gasser and I argue, in Born Digital, that there are cases where Section 230’s scope is too broad from the perspective of child safety in particular.  I realize that I break ranks with many in the Internet policy community in making this argument.  I think it’s an important debate for us to have as a society.

Spamdog Millionaire: Social Media Spam and Internet Filtering

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Our friends at StyleFeeder have offered up some great data about the geographic sources of social media spam on their tech blog.  The background: Philip Jacob, the founder of StyleFeeder, is a long-time anti-spam advocate, while also being a careful guy who doesn’t want to ruin the Net in the process of fighting nuisance online.  At StyleFeeder, they are seeing a growing number of posts about illegal movie downloads, pharaceuticals, adn the usual spammy subjects.  Along with his colleagues, he’s developed a tool called Assassin to identify the source of the posts and get rid of them on the StyleFeeder site.  In the process, they’ve noticed that the vast majority comes from India (with the US next, Pakistan as a distant third, and China weighing in over 5% in fourth place).

The rest of the post examines a familiar ONI-style question: wouldn’t it be much easier for a US-based site simply to filter out users from India, Pakistan, and China, for instance?  After all, it’s a for-profit company, with no revenues being generated through these markets.  Much to their credit, Phil and co. are taking a different path.

Phil’s post ends with a great research question: “How widespread is this kind of blocking by startups who are susceptible to the armies of computer-literate Indian social media spammers? I’m wondering what other small companies do when faced with annoying users in countries that aren’t part explicitly part of their target markets. If our experience is representative, this challenge may be more widespread than most people realize.”  In the ONI world, we study state-mandated Internet filtering.  It’s a dream to be able to figure out how frequently corporate actors in one part of the world are filtering content in another on their own, for simple business reasons.

(My disclosures: I hold equity in Stylefeeder and am an unpaid member of its board of advisors.)

Peter Suber at Harvard University on the Future of Open Access

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Peter Suber is addressing a standing-room-only house today at Harvard, in a session jointly hosted by the Berkman Center, the Office for Scholarly Communications, and the Harvard Law School Library. He insisted on a question-mark at the end of the talk’s title, so his topic is “The Future of Open Access?”, not “The Future of Open Access.”

The premise of Peter’s talk is his assessment of a series of cross-over points which move us from a proprietary world for scholarly information to an open world. There are different cross-over points for information found in books, journals, funder policies, peer-reviewed manuscripts, author understanding of the issues involved in open access, and university policies.

Peter mentioned, in passing, that the OA movement has no equivalent to the Free Software Foundation in the context of free/libre/open source software. This comment gives rise to a series of interesting side-issues. Who are the members of the OA movement? How are they (we?) organized? What is the trajectory of the movement? Is there anything that the OA movement’s leadership or followership could learn from other similar movements as to effective modes of advocacy?

It’s also interesting to think about the many disciplines involved in moving the world toward open access. Many specific fields are implicated: computer science, economics, law, and library sciences, among many others. FWIW, the crowd here at Harvard Hall is dominated by librarians, so far as I can tell, which I think is great.

Stay tuned for the archived version of the talk, to be posted soon at the Berkman Center’s site.

The Future of Open Access

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It’s our great pleasure at the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Center, along with the university’s Office of Scholarly Communications, to host Peter Suber for a public talk next week on the Future of Open Access. It will take place on Thursday, February 26 at 12:30 p.m. We’ve had a tremendous response from the Harvard community, but also across Boston, for this talk. Please do let us know — at rsvp AT cyber dot law dot harvard dot edu — if you plan to attend.