A paper from the Brookings Institution argues that strict copying controls are harmful to the market for music.

It's no surprize that label revenues are dropping, since consumers want MP3s but the labels won't sell them.

Stories on filesharing in the salaried press usually mention a drop in recorded music sales during 2001. The size of the drop, though, varies wildly -- I have seen numbers as low as 2% and as high as 10% -- but most mentions are high rather than low. Record Sales, MP3 Downloads, and the Annihilation Hypothesis by Stan Liebowitz explains the variation.

A friendnet is a network topology where every TCP/IP connection is backed up by a meatspace connection.

On the question of whether artificial life is possible, the New York Times takes the position that macro-structure, not micro-structure, is what matters.

KaZaA's legal representation in DC has sent a strongly worded letter to Joseph Biden, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who released a report titled "Theft of American Intellectual Property: Fighting Crime Abroad and at Home" on February 12. Biden's report was not tame by any means -- by my count there are 48 mentions of theft and 99 mentions of piracy in the 52 page document -- and neither is the letter sent by KaZaA's representative.

Capability-based Financial Instruments "Smart Contracts: Patterns of Cooperation without Vulnerability A contract is a mutually agreeable arrangement of rules among mutually suspicious parties so they may cooperate with limited risks to each other's mischief. It is a game both are willing to play because both expect to win." Smart contracts are about the interfaces between pairs of nodes.  Self-Organizing...

This position paper puts forth the idea that it can sometimes be useful to merely cache knowledge sufficient to recognize valid data. In other words, we do not have a local copy of a data item, but possess a substitute that allows us to verify the content of that item if it is offered to us by an untrusted source.

Disney Corp's recent propaganda in their show The Proud Family is a breathtaking bit of chutzpa.

A fascinating dissent by Supreme Court Justice Stevens to the majority opinion in this case.