Bandwidth as Vital as Oil
Prof. Tim Wu writes for the New York Times Op-Ed page that Americans spend as much on bandwidth as on energy.
Archives for July 2008
Gridlock on NPR & NYT
Prof. Michael Heller talks with NPR’s Marketplace about his new book, The Gridlock Economy. The book also gets a mention in the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog.
Heller Book Interview
Prof. Michael Heller talks to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog about his new book, The Gridlock Economy; teaching first-year Property; and his prospects for TV.
First White Space Testing
The FCC has conducted preliminary tests on devices that use the “white space” between TV channels, Ars Technica reports.
Section 108 Report on Copyright Problems
The Section 108 Study Group, formed to recommend changes to copyright law to benefit libraries and archives, has released its final report. Links:
More on the Gridlock Economy
Two new reviews of Columbia Prof. Michael Heller’s new book, The Gridlock Economy: The first, from Time’s Barbara Kiviat, includes a video clip of Heller explaining the key idea from the book. The second comes from Columbia Prof. Tim Wu and appears in Slate magazine.
FCC To Scold Comcast
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is ready to sanction Comcast for violating net neutrality principles. Link: New York Times.
The Gridlock Economy
A new book by Columbia Prof. Michael Heller, The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives was published this week.
Written for a general audience, the book explains how the “tragedy of the anti-commons” applies to diverse areas of the economy such as radio spectrum, pharmaceuticals, airports, and farms.
Link: Amazon.com
EBay Knocked for Knockoffs
A French judge has ordered EBay to pay $60.8 million to the owners of luxury brands such as Luis Vuitton and Dior for benefiting from sales of counterfeit versions of those products. The decision also requires EBay to block sales of genuine products by unauthorized distributors.
Links:
FORTUNE Legal Pad Blog with remarks by Columbia Prof. Jane Ginsburg.
Google: 3, Viacom: 2 in Discovery Ruling
As part of its billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube/Google, Viacom requested a vast pile of information for discovery, including user IP addresses and source code, reports Ars Technica.
Although the judge did not grant all of Viacom’s requests, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog looks at what the decisions means for Internet privacy. Columbia Prof. Tim Wu commented, “We realize that there’s this giant vault of private information held by Google and YouTube and other companies, and [the ruling] makes very clear that any federal judge in the country can order access to it.”