Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Apple has declined to appeal its loss in last year’s Apple v. Does decision. Instead, Apple has complied with the court’s order to pay the winners nearly $700,000 in legal expenses. As I put it in Ars: Apple had asked the courts to compel two Mac rumor sites, Apple Insider and O’Grady’s PowerPage, to disclose [...]
The idea that the Democrats are the party of free speech and the great protectors of our nation’s First Amendment heritage has always been a bit of a myth. In reality, when you study battles over freedom of speech and expression throughout American history you quickly come to realize that there are plenty of people [...]
Brian Emmett, a self-described space buff (who has even attended space camp) won a trip to space in an Oracle competition, but he won’t be able to take the ride. That’s because the government counts contest winnings as income, and the tax on the ride would be about $25,000–a huge chuck of money that the [...]
Is Sam Brownback the answer for limited government types in the Republican party? He bills himself as a “full-scale Ronald Reagan conservative,” which implies a leave-us-alone attitude. Doing research at the FCC’s site today, I came across a press release (PDF) announcing the formation of something called The Task Force on “Media and Childhood Obesity: [...]
Chris Anderson points out another thriving sector of the music industry: Music as a digital product enjoys near-zero costs of production and distribution–classic abundance economics. When costs are near zero, you might as well make the price zero, too, something thousands of bands have figured out. Meanwhile, the one thing that you can’t digitize and [...]
As the recording industry flirts with releasing music in MP3 format, Ed Felten points out that the labels have become a victim of their own twisted rhetoric about DRM technology: Of course the industry won’t sell music “with no copying restrictions” or “unrestricted”. The mother of all copying restrictions–copyright law–will still apply and will still [...]
Ryan Paul at Ars has a fantastic illustrated timeline of the Microsoft/Novell deal and the subsequent flamewar among tech companies. Here’s his conclusion: Now that the steady stream of accusations has died down, the implications of the deal are beginning to become more apparent. Although Ballmer validated the critics’ concerns with unsubstantiated patent infringement claims, [...]
I’ve finished reading Bill Herman’s paper. It’s got a lot of interesting material in it, so I’ll be discussing it in several posts over the next few days. Having finished the paper, I remain convinced that Herman hasn’t given much thought to the details of how the discriminatory pricing regime he envisions would actually work. [...]
Via Mike, here’s an L.A. Times article on the thriving music industry. No, not the one represented by the RIAA, the other one: While the U.S. recording industry continues to slide under pressure from illegal downloaders and file-sharers, the other side of the music world–businesses catering to those who create the music–has nearly doubled over [...]
Thinking about Bill Herman’s argument that network discrimination threatens freedom of speech, and his broader point that broadband ISPs can use their control over the “last mile” to force Internet users to do or not do certain things (mostly, give them more money), it occurs to me that Hayek’s discussion of coercion in chapter 9 [...]
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.
