Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’m heading to Poland this weekend to speak at the Krynica Economic Forum, the most prominent public policy conference for Central and Eastern Europe. My organization, ACT, is sponsoring a daylong session on public policy and innovation, on which I’ve organized four panels: Localizing the Lisbon Strategy – How to Cultivate Innovation Ecosystems Open, Closed [...]
You’ll have to listen to the latest Tech Liberation Front podcast to get the full thought-provoking discussion on copyright law and the first sale doctrine, but let me tease out a portion of the discussion on extending the first sale to apply to use in addition to transfer. The main focus of the podcast is [...]
I’ve written much about the potential “chilling effect” associated with over-zealous FCC regulation of speech. Some people doubt that the FCC’s regulatory wrath is really so severe that media operators will censor important programs for fear of being fined afterward. But we know that that is exactly what happened with a 9/11 documentary last year [...]
We’ve talked about muni wi-fi problems here before. (Here, here, here, and here). Here’s another one to add to the list. The Chicago Tribune reports today that: Chicago is curtailing its digital dreams, deciding to back away from municipal Wi-Fi service after failing to reach agreement with either of two companies that sought to build [...]
I thought I’d continue the conversation Tim started a few days ago about utility trenching and libertarian property rights theory by starting a new post since this issue is quite interesting to me and I’d like to keep the conversation going. In response to Tim’s essay I argued that: “Property rights are flexible at the [...]
A new case pits Universal Music Group against an eBay merchant re-selling “promo CDs.” Fred von Lohmann of EFF has agreed to take the merchant’s case in order to vindicate the First Sale Doctrine. Randy Picker and Braden Cox also weigh in.
I agree with Jack Shafer about this: Upon waking, I’m delighted to desack the morning papers, discard the never-read sections—classified, food, home, travel, real estate, health—and arrange the buffet before me. But even if all I’ve pre-read from the Web are the Page One headlines, the print stories don’t really pop out at me unless [...]
An excellent counterpoint to that godawful piece on the alleged deficiencies of the blogosphere. NYU professor Jay Rosen provides a long list of examples in which the blogosphere did high-quality reporting on subjects ahead of the mainstream media. Hat tip: Radley, who correctly notes that he’s done some amazing investigative reporting of his own.
Ars reports on an especially egregious case of patent trolling: The patent, titled “Automatic message interpretation and routing system,” is unsurprisingly general. It was filed in 1998 and awarded to a company called Brightware, Inc. in 2002, and it basically describes an autoresponder. “The method for automatically interpreting an electronic message may also include the [...]
I earlier promised some graphs to illustrate a parable about copyright’s future. I’d like to start, here, by offering a picture of the standard economic model of IP. (Attentive readers may recall that whereas other use “IP” for “intellectual property,” I use it to stand for “intellectual privilege“). See figure 1, below:
May 26, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
