About Tim Lee
Timothy B. Lee is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He holds a computer science degree from the University of Minnesota, where he worked for four years as a systems administrator and web programmer. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.Posts by Tim Lee
- Some Shameless iPhone Gushing
- It’s Tough Being a Rock Star
- Will Stirs the High-Skilled Hornets Nest
- Silly Government Policies Do Eventually Go Away
- Patent Failure Review
- A Tale of Two Agency Cultures
- James Harper Exposed
- FISA Wrap-up Podcast
- The FISA Bill Was Not Progress
- Making Things Harder on the Heroes
- Oversight by Magic?
- Me on FISA on KMOX
- Great Moments in Government Accountability
- The FBI and Politics
- Digital Transition Hysteria
- The More Things Change…
- Wood in Popular Culture
- A Real Grassroots Campaign
- Showdown in Kansas City
- Nobel Laureates against Software Patents
- FISA Warrants vs. Criminal Warrants
- The Incoherent Singularity
- Cato Annual Report
- Polycentric Patent Law
- Copyright Industrial Policy
- Patent Sharks
- Neanderthal Philosophy
- Floridians’ Tax Dollars at Work Fighting Smut
- Let’s See How Well Peer Production Works
- If a Trend Can’t Continue, It Won’t Continue
- Lessig, Obama, and Grassroots Political Strategy
- FISA Capitulation: Bad Policy, Bad Politics
- Air-Headed E-Voting Advocacy
- Rush Holt on FISA
- Goose, Gander, Sauce, Etc.
- “Strange” Bedfellows
- Sigh…
- FISA Doesn’t Expire
- Kozinski on Copyright
- Masnick on the Future of Copyright
- Copyright Podcast
- Victory for the First Sale Doctrine
- Ending The War on File Sharing Doesn’t Mean the End of Copyright
- File-sharing at Cato Unbound
- Seasteading
- Zuneral
- Libertarians for Patent Trolling
- Profiles in Innovation
- Yes, I’m Secretly 12 Years Old
- Registered Capture
- The DMCA’s Safe Harbor Applies to Websites
- Imagine There’s No Fair Use
- Princeton Paper on Government Transparency
- Interviews
- Pirate Radio
- Guest-Blogging at the Atlantic
- Autodesk vs. the First Sale Doctrine
- Autodesk Smackdown
- Fun with Headlines
- The ACLU and Media Hysteria
- This Is Getting Out of Hand
- Let There Be Light
- Copyrights, Patents, and Trade
- Network Neutrality Podcast
- Does Money Ruin Everything?
- No More Intellectual Giants?
- Navel-Gazing
- The Pirate’s Dilemma
- In Re Bilski
- Tom Lee on Software Patents
- Culture Clash on the Future of News
- Felten on the Future of News
- Future of News
- Math You Can’t Use
- Future of News
- Missing Emails at Ars
- Intrinsic Motivation and Free Software
- Intellectual Ventures: A Reductio of the Patent System
- More on the OECD Broadband Report
- Free Software vs. the Tax Man
- OECD vs. SpeedTest
- Ideology
- End-to-end and the Price Mechanism
- Insulting Our Intelligence
- On The Shape of the Libertarian “IP” Debate
- Larry Lessig, Demagogue?
- George W. Bush’s Lost Emails
- Selective Quotation in the Sydnor Paper
- Free Culture and Libertarianism, Again
- Headline of the Day
- Racist Shorts and Fair Use
- Insurance and Health Care
- Is the Patriot Act the Harbinger of a Police State?
- Devastating Ubuntu Review
- Tragedy of the Spectrum Commons?
- The History of Trade and Copyright
- Story on State Secrets in the Senate
- More Broadband Progress
- Law Isn’t Really “Law” Either
- Code, Law, and Spontaneous Order
- The Challenge of Architectural Changes
- Averages Are Meaningless in an Expanding Market
- No Intelligence Allowed
- ALF 5 Tonight!
- Hans Reiser: A Creep but not a Murderer?
- Change of Venue for ALF 5
- Techno Bashing
- ALF 5 with Special Guest Brooke Oberwetter
- Dance, Dance Revolution
- Lessig and Corruption
- Cartesian Theater
- If Ladies Can Knit on Plane Trips, the Terrorists Have Won
- IT Policy at Princeton
- Dingel on FTAs
- A Flood of Home-Grown Stupidity
- Bilski Briefs
- Where’s the Trade?
- Trademark and Search Terms
- Eroding Press Freedom Isn’t An Iraq Withdrawal Plan
- Why Can’t They Get Along?
- You Can’t Make an Omelette without Breaking a Few Eggs
- Here Comes Clay Shirky
- More on the DataTreasury Patents
- Patenting the Cure for Cancer
- DataTreasury’s “Property Rights”
- The Poor, Beleaguered Patent Trolls
- Quote of the Day
- Dancing On The Newspaper’s Grave
- Guerilla Fingerprinting
- Microsoft’s Cross-Ideological Tech Summit
- I’ve Got Mine Pre-ordered
- Conflicts of Interest
- The Ridiculous Dance
- The House’s Bloated FISA Bill
- Patent Reform Lite
- The Newspaper Tailspin
- The Tech Works
- Through the Looking Glass
- Podcast!
- Open Platforms vs. Central Planning
- Rickrolling Now Passe
- Short for File Servers
- Boaz on Freedom
- The Economic Value of Snake-Oil
- Grad School Bleg
- Face (book) off
- 1975 Betamax Promotional Video
- Digging into the FISA Debate
- Tweet!
- Money Isn’t Everything
- A Short History of Wiretapping Abuse
- Quote of the Day
- Intern at the New York Times
- IT Protectionism
- Peer-to-peer is Just a Tool
- Modularity and Spontaneous Order
- US Air’s Control Freakery
- Sweet, Sweet WiFi
- Free Quasi-Socialist Culture?
- Those AWOL Libertarians
- I-Banks as Miniature Police States
- Politics Makes People Dumb
- Wikipedia != Jimmy Wales
- Boom!
- Fun with Analogies
- Playmobil Airport Security
- Net Neutrality Paper
- Random Science Video
- End Software Patents
- Lessig and the Fallacy of Composition
- Lessig vs. Harper
- Specifics Needed on Network Neutrality
- Schools are not Infrastructure
- TCP/IP “More or Less by Fiat?”
- Path Dependence, Imperfect Markets, etc.
- Random Network Neutrality Bibliography
- Billboard Liberation
- Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results of 2008 Election Early
- Internet Sales Taxes and Fairness
- The Struggle of Self-Motivation
- What Part of FOREIGN Don’t You Understand?!!
- Deregulation Used to Be a Liberal Idea
- Is InfraGard a Privacy Threat?
- Network Neutrality == End-to-End Principle?
- Lessig for Congress?
- All FISA, All the Time
- Psssttt Keith…
- Multimedia Me
- “Even the Cato Institute”
- Wow
- Lies, Damned Lies, and National Security
- Shift
- Was It Illegal or Not?
- FISA Nonsense
- Self-contradictory Statement of the Day
- The NYT Gets It Right
- FISA Flip-Flop
- The Politics of FISA
- A Public Service Announcement
- More Heat than Light
- Quote of the Day
- Gripe
- Two Pieces on Privacy
- Fair Use?
- Big Business vs. Regulation
- Fun with Regulation
- Sports Bar
- FISA Podcast
- McCain for President?
- The White House Distorts, K-Lo Transcribes
- Tick, Tick, Tick
- Free Public Wi-Fi
- Big News
- Roger Pilon, Julian Sanchez ,and Me on FISA
- The Rhetoric of Property RIghts
- Believed to Have Assisted
- Senate Refuses to Be Railroaded
- Peak IP?
- The Purpose-Driven Organization
- IPv6
- Bill Gates and John Mackey, Two Peas in a Pod
- Profiles in Courage
- Things I Never Knew about Telephones
- The Bell Patents
- Financial Predators
- Savage Fury
- Anti-spam Theater
- Public Service Announcement
- Memo to Facebook…
- Cloud Computing Conference
- New York’s Idiotic Ban on Geiger Counters
- ISPs Aren’t “Editors”
- Ron Paul
- Does Akamai Violate Network Neutrality?
- Why Discuss Free Software?
- Yoo on Network Neutrality and Broadband Concentration
- Googlers for Paul
- Obsessive Fan Mindset
- Free Software and “Whip-Cracking Authority”
- Technology Advice
- Lanier on Free vs. Proprietary Software
- Happy New Year
- Music Patents
- Epstein on Technology Patents
- Schultz on Richter Scales and Fair Use
- Computing in the Cloud
- iPhone?
- Here Comes Another Bubble
- FISA Showdown in the Senate
- Nerd Porn
- More Underwhelming Wikipedia Criticism
- Contractual Omnipotence
- The Folly of Value-Added ISPs
- A Look Back at Lessig and Lemley
- Nerd Sniping
- The Music Industry Quietly Legalizes File-sharing
- Keeping My AT&T’s Straight
- The Only Good Software Patent Is An Invalidated Software Patent
- Non-Discrimination vs. Interconnection
- Atkinson and Barnekov’s “Coasean” Interconnection Proposal
- Is Chen Shoufu China’s Dmitri Sklyarov?
- Rant: Why Are Big Companies So Bad at the Web?
- More Republican Hackery on the Restore Act
- Time’s “Correction”
- You Can’t Compete With Free
- More Singel on Klein
- Klein and MSM
- Joe Klein’s Hackery
- FISA Bill in the House
- SMTP Blocking
- Take the Money
- Your 0.2 Cents
- Stone on Ashcroft and Eavesdropping
- Crashing Techdirt
- Wikipedia’s Notability Requirement
- Let’s Not and Say We Did
- Ron Paul on Tech Policy
- Lessig and Causby
- A Note to Ron Paul Activists
- Ron Paul Good, Ron Paul Spam Bad
- Ashcroft on the Telcos’ Get-Out-Of-Jail Free Card
- Yochai Benkler’s Apocalyptic Rhetoric
- Citizendium Turns One. Point Still Unclear
- Bloggingheads.tv
- The Other Holt Bill
- Sticky Technology and Patent Policy
- Freedom of Speech
- We Didn’t Start the Viral
- Big Brother is Watching 750,000 Suspected Terrorists
- Me on Wiretapping at Cato
- The Politics of Telecom Immunity
- Market Processes and Regulatory Processes
- The Dangers of Public Hotspots
- Felten on Comcast and BitTorrent
- Comcast, Reset Packets, and Network Neutrality
- Me on Eminent Domain Abuse
- Wiretapping Began Before 9/11
- Wiretapping Lies
- Copyright and Patterned Theories of Justice
- TPW 33: File Sharing Verdict
- A Bad Post Editorial
- EFF: Restore Act is “a good step forward”
- Dick Cheney, Privacy Advocate
- The US as Communications Hub
- Spinning lady
- Shouting Mat.ch
- Why DRM Doesn’t Work
- Preemptive Surrender
- RESTORE Act Text
- Helpful
- FISA on the Radio
- Goldsmith on the White House and the Rule of Law
- The Majority Controls the Calendar
- Democrats Relinquish Spine
- TPW 32: Jerry and Jerry on Net Neutrality
- It Only Took Eight Years
- Paying Customers are the Enemy
- More Blades
- Music Wants to Be Free
- Lessig and Corruption at the FCC
- $222,000
- She Did It
- Robinson to Princeton
- Me around the Web
- INSURGENCY FTW!!
- Happy Birthday Slashdot!
- Verizon/NARAL an Argument for Regulation?
- TPW 31: Microsoft vs. Europe
- The Anti-Libertarian Case for Copyright Maximalism
- News Flash: Apache Developers Not Planning to Switch to GPLv3
- Live Donkey Kong
- Humor for the Day
- Saturday Night Geekery
- TPW 30: Sprigman on Copyright
- TV vs. Computer
- ITIF E-voting Report
- Falling CS Majors
- A Free Software Experiment
- Magic without Patents
- Mr. Sulzberger, Tear Down this Wall
- Ding Dong the Witch is Dead
- Fashion Copyrights
- TPW 29: Wireless Piggybacking
- A Dubious Libertarian Argument
- Flags
- Declan on Revisionism at the White House
- Holt Bill Pushed Back Again
- Me on Japan’s Google Killer at Techdirt
- Cutting Pelosi Too Much Slack
- Golan and the First Amendment
- Transformative Use vs. Fair Use?
- Prior Restraint and Fair Use
- E-Voting Guidelines
- Professional Critics vs. Participatory Culture
- Golan and Enumerated Powers
- Fire Sale
- Japanese Copyright Law
- When Schools Matter
- Does It Matter Where You Went to School?
- First Sale and the GPL
- Holt Bill Coming Up for a Vote This Week?
- Surrealist Security Theater
- First Sale and the Software Industry
- TPW 27: Debating the First Sale Doctrine
- The Slow Death of Newspapers
- Responding to Skube
- Software Patent of the Moment: Autoresponders
- Libertarian Questions
- The Other Spying Network
- FISA’s Paperwork Burden
- Botnet Winter
- Does the NSA Monitor C-SPAN?
- The DMCA and Circumvention vs. Trafficking
- Perspectives on iPhone Hacking
- Fair Use?
- Newtonian Physics: All Wrong!
- Another IPI Piracy Study
- Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
- Pissing on Their Graves
- AltLaw
- Goblinright
- A Rant
- DRM’s Nasty, Hacking Cough
- Google Acts Un-Evil
- What He Said
- iPhone Freedom
- Don’t Look at that Patent!
- Civil Liberties: Surprisingly Strong?
- Thorough Fact-Checking and Verification
- Mendacity
- State Secrets Are Whatever We Say They Are
- TPW 25: Felten on E-Voting
- Reverse Network Discrimination
- AT&T Spying Case Today
- Dude, What if This is All, Like, An Illusion?
- First Gift Doctrine
- Prosecuting While Proprietary
- Google Video Goes Kaput
- Corruption
- Defending the First Sale Doctrine
- Fiction
- NBC May I?
- Universal Music Dips Its Toe in the No-DRM Waters
- Crunch
- TSA Mythbuster
- Liquid Security Theater
- Ma Bell Was 80 Years Ahead of Me
- TPW 24: Congress Guts FISA
- You Can’t Patch an Election
- Times Unselect
- Julian on the FISA Fiasco
- Humor for the Day
- SoundExchange Wants More Money
- Writs of Assistance, Here We Come
- Zune Dance
- The Loyal Opposition
- Congress to gut FISA?
- Business Versus Journalism?
- E-Voting Flaws in California
- How I Make a Living
- Libertarian Communalism
- TPW 23: Spectrum Policy, Open Networks, and a Free Society
- The Goblin Industry Association of America
- A Calorie-Free Defense of E-Voting
- The Webcasting Cartel
- Anti-Camcording Law in Action
- Freeing the Journal
- Shafer on the Rise and Fall of Newspapers
- E-Voting in The Hill
- DRM: Not Secure!
- An Obvious Software Patent
- E-voting and the Revolving Door
- Kip Hawley is Stil an Idiot
- Worst-case Scenario
- Libertarianism and Open Networks
- Ezra and Matt on the Decline of the Newspaper
- TPW 22: The Pitfalls of Age Verification
- Gone Phishing in Indiana
- Eminent Domain and Software Patents Again
- Holt Bill Compromise?
- Wireless Accounting Fiction
- TPW 21: The Battle for 700 MHz
- Wireless Whining
- Eminent Domain, Software Patents, and Central Planning
- TPW 20: Wallsten on International Broadband Comparisons
- Julian on Non-Market Cooperation
- Details on Visual Voicemail and Wireless Carterfone
- Welcome Cord Blomquist
- David Pogue Got an iPhone
- Two Cultures?
- No TPW This Week
- Analog Rights Management
- Microsoft Says No Interoperability without Protection Money
- Wu vs. Felten on the iPhone
- Google and Free Software
- TPW 19: Internet Gambling, Frontline Wireless, and E-voting Trade Secrets
- What the Restaurant Business Needs is More Lawyers!
- Watch Binary Addition in Action
- Fresh Monday Content
- Fair Use in Action
- The DMCA and Censorship
- TPW 18: Parental Controls, Immigration and REAL ID, and Google in DC
- DRM Leaves Consumers High and Dry
- The DMCA’s Toll on Innovation
- Google Bulks Up
- Illinois Passes Franchise Reform
- Google’s Confusing Neutrality Proposal
- A 1909 EULA
- Corruption and the Political Process
- More on Derivative Free Software
- Elitist Wikipedia Criticism
- Is Free Software Derivative?
- Craig Newmark, hypocrite?
- Hundreds of Billions?
- Mormon Women for Sale
- This is Going to be Fun…
- Radley Defends Internet Gambling Before Congress
- TPW 17: Collective Licensing, Software Patents, and Google vs. Microsoft
- Curtis on Visual Voicemail and Wireless Carterfone
- A Modest Proposal
- No Evidence?
- What’s the Pro-Software-Patent Argument?
- A Response to Greg Aharonian
- Verizon Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine
- Are Software Copyrights Bad Too?
- Patents and the Software Industry
- Aker on Altruism and Free Software
- Some Obvious Thing
- Explaining the Obvious
- Intellectual Blackmail
- Tim Wu, Regulatory Battles, and Obstructionism
- We Live in the Future
- TPW 16: Wireless Carterfone, Korean Copyright Deal, and Broadcast Decency
- One-Click Gift Giving
- File Sharing’s Funny Math
- Save the Internet from Sloppy Blogging
- Non-DRM DRM?
- ATI and Crippleware
- Spectrum Collusion?
- Software Patent of the Moment: Map Search Engine
- Free Software and Offshoring
- Free Software as Professional Development
- Wu Responds on Wireless Carterfone
- Patents and Tacit Knowledge
- DeLong leaves PFF
- Critiquing Wireless Carterfone
- Microsoft Wants to Have Its Cake and Eat It Too
- TPW 15: Copyright, Slingbox v. MLB, and Social Networking Legislation
- The First Network Neutrality Debate
- Free Trade vs. the Copyright Lobby
- “Cyber War”
- Cheap UAVs
- One-way Commercialization
- Three Eras of Copying
- Making User-Generated Ads Work
- New Model
- More on Wireless Carterfone
- Dude, You’re Getting Ubuntu
- TPW 14: Fairness Doctrine, Wireless Carterfone, and Competition for OLPC
- E-Voting in the American
- The Economics of iPod Repairs
- Jukebox Piracy
- Amazon joins the no-DRM Bandwagon
- A Silly Critique of My DMCA Paper
- Perfect 10 Decision Pretty Good, but Not Perfect
- Common Sense Prevails on Perfect 10
- The Be Very Afraid Tour
- Television Destroys Society, Again
- Happy Big Brother Day
- In Defense of Online Anonymity
- Competition is a Feature, not a Bug
- Microsoft’s Shell Game
- New Euphemism Needed
- House Waters Down Open Voting Requirements
- Google and Patents Again
- Vonage’s “Workaround”
- Redacted
- Abstraction in Action
- Patent Podcast
- Property, Contract, and DRM
- The Digg Incident Was Nothing LIke the Boston Tea Party
- The Law Is an Ass
- Florida Trashes Touch-Screen Voting Machines
- Digg, Network Neutrality, and the Long Tail
- Just a Number
- The Long Tail of Television
- Code Is Speech
- DRM Grieving Process Continues
- Vonage Requests Patent Remand
- Information Wants to be Free, Again
- More DRM-Free iTunes Music
- Supreme Court Smacks Down Federal Circuit
- Vonage Turns to the Court of Public Opinion
- The Pirate Bay in the LA Times
- A Copyright Issue Everyone Can Agree On
- Throw ‘em in Prison
- 174,000 Commandments
- Another Day, Another Patent Troll
- Verizon’s Vexatious VoIP Patents
- Vonage Dodges a Bullet
- Tabbed Windows: Patented!
- Balance of Patent Terror
- Klemens on the Federal Circuit
- Stop Illegal Spying
- Vonage: We Ain’t Got No Work-arounds
- Snippets and Piracy
- Fair Use by Permission is an Oxymoron
- Patents vs. the Rule of Law
- Patently Absurd
- Cyberspace and Information Overload
- The Piggybacking Epidemic
- Loopholes
- Felten on DRM and Security through Obscurity
- Will Europe Follow Our Bad Example on Patents?
- REAL ID Revolt Continues
- New Gig
- The TSA Metastasizes
- Sticks and Stones
- Fly Low
- No Economics
- Network Neutrality Just-So Stories
- XM/Sirius’s Major Competitors Say They Have No Competition
- Free Software and the Big Picture
- When Good Analogies Go Bad
- Official: EMI Goes DRM-Free
- E-Voting Write-up
- EMI to Drop DRM on iTunes
- Blafkin on the GPL and Proprietary Software
- Network Neutrality Recommendations Needed
- Why Musicians should Focus on Music and Leave the Lobbying to Others
- E-Voting Critics as Luddites
- Multiple-language Ballots
- The DMCA Isn’t All Bad (Really!)
- VoIP versus the Patent System
- TLF Readers on Spectrum Commons
- Writers, Programmers, and Patents
- Wu on YouTube’s Safe Harbor
- Is a Spectrum Commons Chimerical?
- Any Resemblences to a Police State Are Purely Coincidental
- Microsoft joins the 21st Century
- Epstein, Monopolies, and Legal Sophistry
- Richard Epstein on the DMCA?
- Egyptian Free Speech in the New York Post
- Soooooo Meta
- When “Reasonable” Isn’t