Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I dashed off a piece for CNET today on the Copyright Office’s cell phone “jailbreaking” rulemaking earlier this week. Though there has already been extensive coverage (including solid pieces in The Washington Post, a New York Times editorial, CNET, and Techdirt), there were a few interesting aspects to the decision I thought were worth highlighting. [...]
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it a crime to circumvent digital rights management technologies but allows the Librarian of Congress to exempt certain classes of works from this prohibition. The Copyright Office just released a new rulemaking on this issue in which it allows people to “unlock” their cell phones so they can be [...]
Two privacy bills are already up for consideration. And at yesterday’s Senate Commerce hearing on Consumer Online Privacy, we heard Senator Kerry announce that he will be working on new legislation to regulate online privacy. While we wait to see what Kerry will offer, NetChoice has concerns over the bills we do know about: Rep. [...]
This week on the podcast, Perry Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter, an online platform for funding creative projects, discusses the enterprise. Chen talks about the inspiration behind Kickstarter and its business model, how project creators convince backers (not investors) to fund them, funding success rates, and the most interesting projects funded so far. Related [...]
The Senate Commerce Committee will hold yet another hearing today (7/27/10) at 2:30pm Eastern with two panels: Witness Panel 1 FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Witness Panel 2 Guy “Bud” Tribble, Apple’s VP for Software Technology Bret Taylor, Facebook CTO Alma Whitten, Google’s Privacy Engineering Lead Jim Harper, Cato Institute Dorothy Atwood, AT&T’s Senior Vice President, Public Policy [...]
Interesting article in the New York Times today about how the radical media activist group Free Press is now working with an organization called The Harmony Institute toward the goal of “Adding Punch to Influence Public Opinion.” The way they want to “add punch” is through entertainment propaganda. The Times article notes that Harmony’s mission [...]
The always-excellent Wall Street Journal “Information Age” columnist L. Gordon Crovitz has another editorial worth reading today, which builds on the Second Circuit’s recent decision to reverse FCC content regulation for broadcasting. In “The Technology of Decency,” Crovitz explains “parents don’t need the FCC to protect their children.” “Technology makes it easier to block seven [...]
The White House and the Federal Communications Commission have painted themselves into a very tight and very dangerous corner on Net Neutrality. To date, a bi-partisan majority of Congress, labor leaders, consumer groups and, increasingly, some of the initial advocates of open Internet rules are all shouting that the agency has gone off the rails [...]
The Economist has gotten on the wrong side of a favorite pet-peeve of mine: confusing “digital” with “electronic.” Fear the blog post, Economist. When I read in the story “Digitisation and Its Discontents” that the works of the Beatles are “scarcely available digitally,” I was struck. How does that square with the Beatles CD I [...]
I’m in the Valley today livetweeting the Space Frontier Foundation‘s NewSpace 2010 conference. Check out the exciting agenda or join the discussion on Twitter (#NewSpace2010). The conference runs all weekend, 8:30-5:30 Pacific time. As readers may know, I’ve been involved with the Foundation since 2005, was chairman 2008-2009 and was just re-elected to its Board [...]
January 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.
