Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Melissa Ngo has hung out her shingle as a privacy and information policy consultant, and she’ll be blogging about various privacy and civil liberties issues at PrivacyLives.com. In her prior role as senior counsel and director of the Identification and Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Melissa was a real credit to that [...]
Orin Kerr is a law professor at George Washington University and a blogger on the popular Volokh Conspiracy. He is a thoughtful, open-minded legal scholar, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he reliably sides with law enforcement on Fourth Amendment issues. He recently posted a draft article defending the third-party doctrine, which [...]
“[T]here are two policy goals on which we need to make real progress,” the FCC’s Michael Copps told Congress last year, “minority and female ownership is one, localism is the other.” Indeed, the two goals have long been sandwiched together like ham and cheese by media reformers on the left. But it turns out [...]
It’s worth noting that the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube makes little sense in light of the DMCA. For the few TechLiberation readers unfamiliar with the DMCA, that’s because the law grants YouTube, and other sites with unedited user-generated content “safe harbor.” So long as YouTube honors requests to take-down material that is claimed to be [...]
As the Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google rolls forward, it’s worth asking if any outcome of the suit will change the situation for Viacom. In fact, were the impossible to happen, like a judge shutting down YouTube altogether, Viacom may be worse off. CNET’s coverage of the piece sites an anonymous [...]
Google co-founder Larry Page came to Washington last week to take on the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the lobbying group that represents over-the-air television stations. It’s a whole new adversary for the beleaguered broadcasters, who have been fighting cable and satellite television for years. The Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a proposal, by [...]
I’ve long known and liked Danny Weitzner, going way back to the CDA wars of the mid-1990s. Danny co-founded the Center for Democracy & Technology, which is were I first met him, and he currently serves as Co-Director of MIT’s Decentralized Information Group, which is part of the computer science department up there. Apparently he [...]
Could you make it through an entire 5-day vacation without the Internet, blogs, e-mail and your other daily informational inputs? Well, I almost did it. Why would I do that? Two reasons. First, a few months ago I read a random blog post in which someone deep within the comments to the entry said he [...]
I’ve doing several interviews this week. In a couple of hours I’m interviewing Patri Friedman about Seasteading. Then, tomorrow I’ll be talking to Jim Bessen of Patent Failure fame, and the president of the Encyclopedia Britannica. What should I ask them?
I’m doing a piece on the Seasteading Institute, and I’m reading their fascinating summary of past efforts to achieve sovereignty via the oceans. My favorite case so far is the pirate radio wars of the 1960s: In the 1960′s, a new form of offshore activity emerged. Commercial radio as known in the United States didn’t [...]
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.
