Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’m lucky enough to live in an area where broadband competition is rapidly intensifying–Fairfax County in Northern Virginia (McLean, VA to be exact). In recent years, the incumbent cable operator Cox Communications has beefed-up its network to offer phone service and high-speed broadband in addition to its growing video programming lineup (which how includes plenty [...]
Ars reports that Swedish police have shut down The Pirate Bay, which bills itself as the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker: The assault on BitTorrent tracker sites began in December 2004. At that time, the MPAA filed a barrage of lawsuits, going after over 100 BitTorrent tracker sites, Direct Connect hubs, and eDonkey servers. Shortly thereafter, [...]
David Friedman has an insigtful post about the nature of technological protection: Intellectual property in digital form is easy to copy. In a networked world, it is also easy to distribute. It is therefore likely that copyright enforcement will become increasingly difficult. Tie-ins are a good solution for some forms of intellectual property but not [...]
Patrick Ross critiques a recent presentation by Yochai Benkler: To begin with, he praised open source software (not surprisingly) and also the collaborative nature of Wikipedia. He noted that Nature had found it to be comparable to Britannica (no, he didn’t mention the stinging rebuttal later published by Britannica of that article.) He also praised [...]
As I’ve written before, America’s increasingly heavy-handed, anti-free speech campaign finance laws threaten to eventually ensnare the entire Internet and our new innovative, bottom-up world of organic “we-dia” (WE-MEDIA). Blogs are already in their crosshairs and lawmakers will be targeting other technologies of freedom in coming years. Want to know where we might be headed? [...]
The Abstract Factory flags something I’ve begun to notice when I periodically go through our comments to weed out spam: our posts about network neutrality have begun to get a steady stream of highly generic supportive comments: see here, here, here, and here, for example. Cog posits that some PR firm must be paying people [...]
I have an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer today about a new federal effort to regulate MySpace.com and other social networking websites. Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) and several members of the newly formed congressional “Suburban Caucus” recently introduced H.R. 5319, the “Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA).” It would require schools and libraries that receive [...]
Glen Whitman points out a great example of misleading statistics on music piracy: It’s from an article titled, “The Digital Music Blues.” The graph is supposed to demonstrate that, in spite of the growth in legal music downloads, illegal downloads are still cutting into the record industry’s bottom line. Notice how only a tiny 1% [...]
Julian Sanchez puzzles out the economics of Steve Jobs’s stubborn insistence on 99 cent music: One reason is the flip side of an idea Markels broaches: Prices signal quality. People might conclude that an expensive song is likely to be better (because more in demand), and conversely, might be willing to take a chance on [...]
Last week, I criticized Nick Carr’s silly claim that Wikipedia was dead. Or, at least, dead as “the poster child for the brave new world of democratic, citizen media, where quality naturally emerges from the myriad contributions of a crowd.” So today President Bush nominated a new Treasury secretary, who happened to be Goldman Sach’s [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
