Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Some people just can’t resist a David and Goliath storyline. That’s especially true of “consumer advocates” who see an underdog in the mirror no matter how big the hound is. Case in point: A site called consumeraffairs.com yesterday ran a story on the net neutrality battle with this lead paragraph: There’s nothing virtual about the [...]
As I’ve mentioned several times before on this site, I’m finishing up a new book on the future of control controls in a world of media convergence. My thesis is simple: Content regulation is doomed. A confluence of social, legal and, most importantly, technological developments is slowly undermining the ability of legislators and regulators, at [...]
Jim will have to stop needling PFF for ignoring my paper, as Patrick Ross has posted a truly epic three part critique. I found his responses disappointing for several reasons. First, he engages in a fair bit of name-calling, insinuating that anyone who agrees with EFF can’t possibly be a libertarian. (I wonder if Ross [...]
Liberal blogger extraordinaire Matt Yglesias on my DMCA paper: I have no idea whether America is becoming a theocracy (probably not) but I do rather firmly believe that our government is, to a troubling extent, falling under the iron grip of copyright law run amok. My friend Tim Lee has recently published a Cato Policy [...]
Yesterday, the Cato Institute issued Tim Lee’s paper, Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Reaction has been swift and favorable. Blog top-dog BoingBoing says “it takes sharp free-market types like the Cato characters to bust out elegant critiques like this one.” Heavyweight SlashDot congratulates Lee and Cato for “putting into [...]
In my DMCA paper, I point out that consumers with non-typical hardware and software devices, such as Linux users and audiophiles with high-end audio systems, are harmed by the DMCA. Reader Ben Galliart writes to point out another marginalized group that is particularly harmed by the DMCA: the disabled. The anti-competive nature of the DMCA [...]
Championing “openness” is in vogue now, be it net neutrality (in the telecom sense) or what is occurring in France with its online copyright bill that would mandate the sharing of proprietary digital rights management systems (call it DRM Neutrality?). But do we really want openness mandated by government? What happens to the freedom to [...]
One problem at the FCC–and most other regulatory agencies–is the difficulty of getting obsolete restrictions off the books. Even minor changes get bogged down in endless notices of proposed rulemaking and further notices of proposed rulemaking. This make good business for lobbyists, but not good policy. But a provision adopted in the ’96 Telecom Act–until [...]
Opining about French politics is difficult because I don’t speak French, and so I’m limited to third-hand reports by reporters that may or may not know anything about technology law. As a result, I’ve had trouble figuring out what the French copyright bill now under consideration actually does. In my prvious post, I assumed that [...]
May 16, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
