Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Over at Larry Lessig’s blog, David Friedman has a really interesting comment about libertarian attitudes toward patent and copyright law (I’m going to relax my usual rule about the phrase “IP” because of the way Friedman and Lessig have framed it): You write: ” There is a divide in the libertarian camp about IP extremism.” [...]
Several of the installments in my ongoing “Media DE-consolidation” series have involved Time Warner taking apart the media mega-company it created back in 2000. [See, for example, parts 12, 14 and 21]. The relationship was a bit rocky right from the start, and things have been unraveling slowly ever since. You will recall the amazing [...]
Susan Crawford points out that the Yale Information Society Project recently posted its “9.5 Theses for Technology Policy in the Next Administration.” It’s apparently also the theme for the 18th Annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference (CFP). What I found intriguing about the list is that (a) protecting free speech doesn’t make their radar screen, [...]
Tom Sydnor and Richard Bennett have both made a big deal of the fact that Larry Lessig is purportedly a demogogue. Richard, for example, says: It’s an error to consider Lessig a serious scholar with serious views about serious issues. He’s a performer/demagogue who will latch onto any issue that he can use to promote [...]
An interesting analysis of Apple and competing distributor and network business models appears on “Going Private.” Agree or disagree? Agree with about half. One point that I thought worth noting; the allegedly pernicious influence of MBAs laden with theory. This runs counter to the classic free-market (Austrian-school-influenced) model of the entrepreneur taking advantage of local knowledge [...]
Over at Ars, I have an in-depth look at the White House’s email troubles. The administration is either spectacularly incompetent or going out of its way to avoid complying with the law: When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook [...]
Julian didn’t like Tom Sydnor’s paper on Lessig either. In particular, he went back and looked up the sections in Code in which Lessig ostensibly expressed sympathy for Communism. Here’s the rest of the story: We learn that Lessig wrote, in the first edition of his book Code, of his “impulse to sympathize” with those [...]
Dennis McCauley of Gamepolitics.com takes on that issue today in a column: In the United States, the FBI tracks annual statistics on police officer slayings as well as assaults on police officers. I compared these figures to the various release dates for the three major GTA console game releases to date (GTA III, GTA Vice [...]
Our friends at the Progress and Freedom Foundation have released a paper by PFF’s new copyright guru about Larry Lessig, Free Culture, and whether libertarians should take them seriously. Since the paper is framed as a response to my recent post on Lessig’s work, I suppose I should offer some thoughts on the subject. I [...]
Hans Reiser is fscked: jury delivers guilty verdict Ars certainly has a history of running edgy headlines, but this takes things to a new level. Update: As PJ points out, fsck is a Unix file system utility, and Reiser did work on Linux file systems.
May 27, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
