The Hardest Thing to Predict Is the Future

SOPA and PROTECT IP are dead… for now. (They’ll be back. COICA is like a wraith inhabiting PROTECT IP.) Until then, Michelle Schusterman has a terrific graphic about the movie industry’s predictions of doom with each new technological revolution. (Ditto the music industry: the player piano, radio, CDs, the MP3 player, etc., etc.) One reason [...]

Censorship on the March

Today, you can’t get to The Oatmeal, or Dinosaur Comics, or XKCD, or (less importantly) Wikipedia. The sites have gone dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, America’s attempt to censor the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. This is part of a remarkable, distributed, coordinated protest effort, both [...]

Choosing Censorship

Yesterday, the House of Representatives held hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act (it’s being called SOPA, but I like E-PARASITE tons better). There’s been a lot of good coverage in the media and on the blogs. Jason Mazzone had a great piece in TorrentFreak about SOPA, and see also stories about how the bill [...]

De-lousing E-PARASITE

The House of Representatives is considering the disturbingly-named E-PARASITE Act. The bill, which is intended to curb copyright infringment on-line, is similar to the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act, but much much worse. It’s as though George Lucas came out with the director’s cut of “The Phantom Menace,” but added in another half-hour of Jar Jar [...]

How To Encourage Piracy

Major League Baseball has made me a pirate, with no regrets. Nick Ross, on Australia’s ABC, makes “The Case for Piracy.” His article argues that piracy often results, essentially, from market failure: customers are willing to pay content owners for access to material, and the content owners refuse – because they can’t be bothered to [...]

Policing Copyright Infringement on the Net

Mark Lemley has a smart editorial up at Law.com on the hearings at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Viacom v. YouTube. The question is, formally, one of interpreting Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. 512), and determining whether YouTube meets the statutory requirements for immunity from liability. But this [...]

Hacking Bloomberg Law

I had a fun podcast interview with Spencer Mazyck of Bloomberg Law about this summer’s wave of hacking. We talk about who hacks and why, what companies can do about it (treat it like disaster planning), and whether we need to worry about cyberwar. Good fun. I botched the story about Robert Mueller slightly: he [...]

500 Billion Reasons Why A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

Eric Goldman points to a highly enjoyable filing by one David Stebbins against Google, claiming he has won an arbitration award of, wait for it, $500 billion. Even with the tax cuts still in effect, I assume that the government’s cut of this award will help the deficit a good deal. How did Stebbins win [...]

WikiThreats

Saturday Night Live has a great skit on Julian Assange. Any bit that includes the phrase “good-natured birds” has to be awesome, and it is. (Hat tip: Jen Schwartz, who knows her cybersecurity.)

The Haiti Hoax

An impressive fake video is making the rounds of the Internet; it purportedly shows a French government official announcing that the Republic would repay the enormous sum Haiti sent to France in exchange for independence in 1803. The video is hosted at http://www.diplomatiegov.fr/, a domain name very similar to the French Foreign Ministry site, which is [...]

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