Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Related to my recent post about reverse engineering and innovation, a friend points me to another dispute over one company reverse-engineering another company’s product without permission: In a statement, Green Hills confirmed that Express Logic has demanded arbitration of its ThreadX reseller agreement with Green Hills, and has accused Green Hills of illegally copying the [...]
Ars reports on a new ad by the Consumer Electronics Association opposing technology mandates on satellite radio. It’s titled “We’ve heard this song before!” and features the following humorous quotes: “I forsee a marked deterioration in American music…and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue–or rather by vice–of the [...]
You wouldn’t know it from all the focus on neutrality regulation, but core of the telecom legislation now moving through Congress would liberalize cable franchising–stripping local authorities of much of their ability to block the entry of new video competitors. There has been quite a bit of evidence already that such a move would substantially [...]
Ed Felten is back from vacation and has a great new post on the XBox Linux project: Microsoft had two reasons for locking down the hardware. It wanted to stop people from running Xbox games that had been illegally copied. And it wanted to stop people from running other (noninfringing) software such as Linux. The [...]
Today seems to be the day for Missouri NSA stories! Salon is reporting that an AT&T network operations center in Bridgetown, MO, (a St. Louis suburb) has had a secret room since 2002 being used by a government agency: In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only government officials or AT&T employees [...]
That’s probably the only time you’ll ever see that headline on TLF, but my hometown paper has a front page article describing how Missouri telecom regulators have subpoenaed AT&T for details on any information they might have shared with the NSA: The subpoenas, along with a growing number of legal challenges here and elsewhere, set [...]
In my my recent post on the DMCA, I cited the creation of a Linux DVD player as an example of innovation. Randy Picker responds: No, certainly the DVD example isn’t evidence of stifling innovation. The DVD example is a choice, nothing more than that. I have little doubt that the DVD format creators could [...]
Jim Lippard reports on another alleged case of an ISP engaging in network discrimination. Apparently, for the last few months Craigslist has been loading unbearably slowly for certain Cox cable customers. Pro-regulatory types jumped on it as evidence that new regulations were needed. The story ricocheted quickly around the blogosphere, and even ended up on [...]
Randy Picker has an interesting post on potential RIAA legal action against YouTube for posting videos containing copyrighted music: The 1909 Copyright Act assigned a number of rights to copyright holders. These included the right to print and make copies of the work; to perform the work publicly if the work was a drama; and, [...]
FCC Chairman Martin’s push to impose “multicast” must-carry rules on cable providers looked like a done deal only a few days ago. Martin had made the the new mandate a priority, and with two new Republican members of the commission sworn in, its looked like Martin would certainly be able to get a majority to [...]
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.
