Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
With the release last month of its report on Violent Television Programming and Its Impact on Children, the FCC teed up the issue of regulating televised violence and tossed it over to Congress with a recommendation that lawmakers go ahead and swing for the fences. And Congress appears ready to oblige, although not necessarily in [...]
Technological progress drives change in copyright law, Major League Baseball criticizes Slingbox over its place-shifting technology, and states consider new regulations of social networking sites. The shows’s panelists this week are Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, Braden Cox of the Association for Competitive Technology, Prof. Randy Picker of the University of Chicago Law School, and Eric Bangeman of Ars Technica.
I’m reading Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet, an excellent history of the Internet starting with its origins as the ARPANET in the 1960s. The most interesting things I’ve learned about so far is the heated battled between the TCP/IP protocol, which was favored primarily by the computer science research community, and the competing X.25 protocol, [...]
In recent years there has been a trend toward the use of trade agreements as a means of bullying smaller nations into adopting copyright and patent policies favored by domestic special interest groups in the United States. Over at the EFF blog, Gwen Hinze has the goods: In exchange for the promise of increased access [...]
Via Yglesias, Robert Farley thinks that we’re not giving enough attention to economic “cyber war”: Lots of work has been done on “cyber war”, the promise and vulnerability of networked military organizations. Less attention has been paid to the economic prospects of cyber warfare, and to the ability of states to exert power and coercion [...]
This site tracks the value of some “black market” goods from pirated movies to body parts and human trafficking. Missing: Murder for Hire, though Kidnapping is represented. One ought to distinguish at least two types of markets represented here; a) those in which the goods being sold do indeed “belong” to the seller who wishes [...]
The Washington Times recently reported that “A media watchdog group is criticizing Delta Air Lines for making the graphic HBO series ‘Rome’ and other bawdy shows available for in-flight viewing after a passenger complained that children could see nudity and sex scenes.” Apparently, the offending material was shown on overhead movie screens during a May [...]
Previous installments (1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) in this series have documented how our government seems to have a difficult time keeping tabs on laptops and personal information. The latest on this front comes from the Energy Department which notified Congress yesterday that it has lost 1,415 laptop PCs over the past six years. [...]
One of the most exciting things about technological progress, from a libertarian perspective, is that as technologies get cheaper, they get harder and harder for the state to regulate. The prolific Chris Anderson has the latest example: he’s built an unmanned aerial vehicle for under $1000. He explains his motivations here: The main aim of [...]
Randy Barnett mocks George Lucas for his walled garden approach to mash-ups: According the Wall Street Journal this morning, the fan-created videos will run along with commercials “with Lucasfilm and Eyespot splitting the proceeds.” Asked about why Lucasfilm will allow this use of their images, a spokesman said, “If someone wants to commercialize it, that’s [...]
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.
