Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
In December, the Fourth Circuit upheld the conviction and 20-year sentence of a man who downloaded pictures, drawings, and text emails depicting minors engaged in sexual acts. Receiving obscene depictions of “a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct” is prohibited by 18 U.S.C. § 1466A(a). The court held the statute constitutional on its face, and [...]
During my summer internship at CEI, a couple of us interns discussed the book Cato’s Robert Levy published last May, The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. We looked at Levy’s list of the worst decisions and sent each other lists of our own. Now that I’m taking ConLaw, I [...]
Bureaucrash has just posted a new round of libertarian lolcats. Many involve tech policy. Check them out if you’re in the mood for some feline-and-political-commentary-based hilarity!
One of the biggest problems with the present copyright system is transaction costs, inhibiting Coasian bargaining. If I want to make a movie and have to get permission from dozens of different copyright owners, I may just give up – especially if I can’t locate some of them. (For more on the specific problem of [...]
Over the summer, I blogged about an FCC decision to ban Verizon’s practice of offering incentives to departing customers to get them to stay. Yesterday, the DC Circuit upheld that bad decision. When a customer of Verizon’s phone service decides to leave for a VOIP company, Verizon gets a notice that the number is being [...]
Seeing Adam’s recent post on the stimulus and its advocates, I had to toss in my two cents. 2008 was the year of Schumpeter. Creative destruction was doing its thing, getting rid of many unproductive old-economy companies that were simply creating economic waste by keeping inputs from going to their highest-value use. But this scared [...]
At Stanford Law School, I am a member of the Stanford Law and Technology Association and the Center for Internet and Society. I write for CIS’s publication, Packets. I just published a piece summarizing the recent Third Circuit case once again holding the Child Online Protection Act unconstitutional. When the decision was released back in [...]
As Adam Thierer has previously commented on this very blog, Mythbusters is “the best science show on TV in years.” Since the show tackles ridiculous beliefs that have entered the popular culture, it would make sense that at some point, they’d expose some dumb government policy. But, generally, the Mythbusters stay away from terribly controversial [...]
Yesterday, after my Criminal Law class, I went to a lunch talk sponsored by the Stanford Biolaw and Health Policy Society about “abandoned” DNA – that is, DNA traces that people leave all over the place. It was given by Prof. Elizabeth Joh, visiting Stanford Law this year from UC Davis Law. She focused on [...]
Presumably, everyone reading this post has purchased software at some point in the past 15 years. If you have, you may have agreed to a contract unwittingly. Breaking the seal of the shrinkwrap around the box might bind you to the terms and conditions contained inside. This is but one of many new ways you [...]
May 22, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
