Jennifer Granick has a great new column for Wired News. her first piece, Wired News: Open Internet, We Hardly Knew Ye, picks up ways restrictive laws (copyright, CFAA, trespass) could have blocked the creation of a central hurricane-relief people-finder:

People in far-flung places across the United States turned to the robust, decentralized internet to find their loved ones. Almost immediately, there were too many sites to choose from. A grandchild looking for her grandmother, or a father for his son and wife, had literally dozens of online databases to search. The internet offered a solution here as well. An international, ad hoc group of self-described geeks built a system that automatically combined information from the dozens of refugee listing sites into a single, searchable database that family members could use to find each other.

...

But under a permission-only legal regime, the Katrinalist.net volunteers would have had to contact every site with listing data and ask for authorization to use the information first. With dozens of sites popping up in the days following the storm, getting permission would have taken a lot of time -- if the site owners could even be reached and convinced of the merit of the idea in the first place.

Thanks, David!

Cory picked up on PVRblog's coverage of what was eventually determined to be a bug: Users found their TiVos unexpectedly expiring recorded shows.

It might well have been a bug in this instance, but bugs like that don't just come from nowhere, with fully formed error messages alerting viewers that "Due to policy set by the copyright holder, 'Keep until I delete' is not permitted." Maybe it wasn't meant to show up here and now, on broadcast TV, but someplace in TiVo's corporate innards, someone decided that unrequested expiration was a feature.

Nothing in copyright law mandates this "feature." To the contrary, once you have a lawful copy of a copyrighted work, the first sale doctrine says you have the choice whether to save, lend, or discard it, while Betamax says timeshifting creates a lawful copy. If not copyright law, then copyright-holder muscle probably sits behind TiVo's design. Copyright holders work with Macrovision to implement extra-copyright controls, then jointly lean on TiVo to respond to them. Together, they restrict user rights beyond copyright.

The bug also illustrates the fallibility of proprietary technologies (particularly those with automatic update). "Update" doesn't always mean "improve" -- an update can take away functions you've come to enjoy, just because someone else objects. This misfeature of any DRM that implements "revocability" gives "planned obsolescence" a whole new meaning.

Like Cory, I've gone the MythTV route instead. With hundreds of people hacking on its open-source code, MythTV updates really are improvements. Its features are truly features, like commercial skip, time-stretch, transcoding and transfer to other media, plus an open-format music server on the side, giving full access to all the rights copyright reserves to the public. Sorry TiVo, you've been out-evolved.