This is simply breath-taking: Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can’t be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders. These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum. Nesson [...]
Among my missions in this life is the chore of explaining networking in general and the Internet in particular to policy makers and other citizens who don’t build network technology for a living. This is enjoyable because it combines so many of the things that make me feel good: gadgetry, technology, public policy, writing, talking, [...]
Jeff Jarvis is an intelligent man with a sentimental populist side. He’s writing a book praising Google, and sharing his thoughts as he goes along. Today’s entry goes off the deep end with this dismissal of intelligence: The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and [...]
I like Andrew Keen, occasionally. He makes an interesting observation about Larry Lessig in Internet Evolution: The cold Net neutrality war is about to get very hot. Lessig may be crazy, but he isn’t stupid. He knows that Obama will probably win the election and that a Democratic president and Congress are much more likely [...]
Seth Finkelstein’s latest column for the Guardian examines Jimbo Wales’ efforts to expand his empire outside Wikipedia: In general, we are poorly served by slogans such as the “wisdom of crowds”, which often stand for nothing beyond finding a few popular selections by various types of polling. It may work well for entertainment sites, and [...]
Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, is admired and revered by all sorts of left-wing progressive people. Unfortunately, her daughter Rebecca isn’t one of them. FacebookTwitterDiggItTechnoratiDel.icio.us
I have to congratulate Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton for the courageous stand he’s taken against Scientology. Nick is standing tall and refusing to take down the video of a rambling and incoherent Tom Cruise doing $cieno-babble, while the rest of the Internet has been cowed by threats. The Scientology empire will sue, so their [...]
Intelligent Design is a deceitful critique of Darwinian descent with modification that attempts to undermine the commitment of science to find natural causes for natural phenomena. Its apparent goal is to have public school science classes teach Divine Intervention as an alternative to natural causes. One of the favorite complaints of Intelligent Design advocates is [...]
A dead Malaysian ran up a $218 trillion cell phone bill and people are mystified: A Malaysian man who paid off a $23 wireless bill and disconnected his late father’s cell phone back in January has been stiffed for subsequent charges on the closed account, MSNBC has reported. Telekom Malaysia sent Yahaya Wahab a bill [...]
Writing in The Guardian, the esteemed technologist Seth Finkelstein offers a clear and concise picture of Wikipedia’s delusional alternate reality: One of Wikipedia’s major public relations successes has been in misdirecting observers into a narrative of technological miracles, diverting attention from analysing its old-fashioned cult appeal. While I don’t mean to imply that everyone involved [...]
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