Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
[This post will be geekier than average. Apologies in advance to non-programmers] One of the interesting aspects of Intellectual Property and Open Source is the frequent use of programming metaphors to explain legal concepts. Given the audience, it’s a clever approach. Most of the analogies work well. A few fall flat. I found one analogy [...]
I was a HUGE fan of Mattel handheld games back in the late 70s, and I played “Football I” and “Football II” for countless hours with friends. And now you can get it on the iPhone! Sure it’s probably still primitive as hell — you could only run the ball in Football I ! — [...]
I’m reviewing Van Lindberg’s Intellectual Property and Open Source for Ars Technica. The first chapter is an introduction to the theoretical concepts that Lindberg describes as the “foundations of intellectual property law”—public goods, free-riding, market failure, and so forth. I’ve found several of the assertions in this chapter frustrating. For example, on p. 8, Lindberg [...]
Oh man, I am just in heaven. Ubiquity for Firefox is the coolest damn application for Firefox not just of the year but of all-time. Watch the video. Download it. Change your life. Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
… environmental attorney Dusty Horwitt, who recently published this outlandishly stupid and highly offensive editorial in the Washington Post calling for an information tax to reduce the supply of information in society. “[I]n our information-overloaded society,” he argues, “the concept of [too much information] is no joke. The information avalanche coming from all sides — [...]
Apropos Julian’s excellent story of watchlist incompetence, a Slashdot commenter linked to this gem:
Having covered free speech and media policy issues for many years now, one of the arguments I hear a lot is that we moderns have an unnatural fascination with murder, mayhem, and violence as well as gossip and celebrities. Social critics and proponents of media content regulation often wax nostalgic about the supposed “good ol’ [...]
Declan McCullagh has a great write-up on presumptive Democratic VP nominee Joe Biden over at CNET. Some highlights: Biden was one of only four Senators invited to a champagne reception with Jack Valenti for his work on the DMCA Surveillance legislation by Biden inspired Phil Zimmermann to write PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), an encryption program [...]
Just to chime on Berin’s post two other things that readers ought to know: the ad revenue we generate is trivial—on the order of dozens of dollars per month—and none of us get a dime of it as individuals. Rather, the money gets plowed into shared expenses for the site, such as advertising and promotional [...]
William Kennard, Obama for President Telecommunications Adviser, describes the FCC’s jurisdiction in the Comcast case as “murky” today on C-SPAN’s “The Communicators.” Kennard went on to say that enshrining net neutrality into law would be necessary to clear up this authority issue. This is a guy who knows what he’s talking about. As a former [...]
May 21, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
