Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
As part of a revise-and-resubmit process, I’ve been spending much of my summer upgrading my draft book, Intellectual Privilege: A Libertarian View of Copyright. That effort has led me to revisit copyright’s constitutional foundations. I find them very shaky, indeed. This passage (with footnotes excerpted) explains why modern copyright law often fails “to promote the [...]
This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a California video game statute as unconstitutional, holding that it violated both the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution. The California law, which passed in October 2005 (A.B.1179), would have blocked the sale of “violent” video games to those under 18 and required [...]
Here’s some good background and analysis from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) about the history and constitutional issues surrounding the Fairness Doctrine. (Matt Lasar has a summary of it over at Ars). The report, authored by CRS legislative attorney Kathleen Ann Ruane, does a nice job of outlining why, given heightened Supreme Court scrutiny of [...]
Anthony Prestia of Laws of Play, a blog dedicated to covering legal developments in the gaming industry, somehow got some face time with Supreme Court Justice Scalia and was able to ask for his feelings concerning the constitutionality of recent state video game legislation. “In particular,” Prestia says, “I asked him whether as an originalist [...]
Back in 2005, I threw away a book I was writing. Well, I didn’t exactly toss it in a garbage can or take a match to the manuscript; I just abandoned the project to work on other things, including a different book and a big law review article. I’m still mad at myself for never [...]
One of the things I find most interesting about calls to regulate “excessively violent” content on television, in movies, or in video games is the way critics make massive leaps of logic and draw outrageous conclusions based on myopic, anecdotal reasoning. I was reminded of that again today when reading through an interview with Sen. [...]
A few weeks ago, I outlined the amazing keynote address that Harvard University law professor Laurence H. Tribe delivered at PFF’s annual Aspen Summit. Now you can read it for yourself. PFF has just published the transcript of his speech, which was entitled, “Freedom of Speech and Press in the 21st Century: New Technology Meets [...]
The Parents Television Council has a new report out this week about the supposed decline of the TV “Family Hour.” The City Journal has just posted my response to that PTC report here. It begins as follows… Who Killed TV’s “Family Hour”? It’s not who you think. by Adam D. Thierer 7 September 2007 The [...]
I’ve written much about the potential “chilling effect” associated with over-zealous FCC regulation of speech. Some people doubt that the FCC’s regulatory wrath is really so severe that media operators will censor important programs for fear of being fined afterward. But we know that that is exactly what happened with a 9/11 documentary last year [...]
The video game industry’s string of unbroken First Amendment court victories continued this week with a win in the case of Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger. [Decision here.] In this case, the VSDA and the Entertainment Software Association brought a suit seeking a permanent injunction against a California law passed in October 2005 (A.B.1179), [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
