Archive for December, 2005

Laying the Ashdown on Hatch

Sunday, December 18th, 2005

Earlier this week, I was infuriated by this article by Makan Delrahim. It's filled with false dichotomies and ad hominem attacks on Mark Cuban and Senator Orrin Hatch's political foes. It's also factually inaccurate on several counts. I was pleasantly surprised to see Senate Candidate Pete Ashdown defend himself in an ...

Blogging a dead horse

Sunday, December 18th, 2005

I know I already complained about her article, but Susan Cheever's misunderstanding of copyright law is just driving me batty. She literally maps the entirety of property law onto copyright law and uses this half-suited metaphor to guide her highly moralistic judgements. In a December 12 Newsday piece entitled "Just Google ...

TPMs and Metaphors: the DMCA debate

Monday, December 12th, 2005

I'm currently working on a paper for Klaus Krippendorff's class, Social Constructions of Reality. It's a discourse analysis of the debate surrounding 17 USC ยง 1201. The central conclusion is that one of the most interesting and important threads of the debate is the wrangling over the metaphor of locked-down property. ...

RIAA madness

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

Not that we need more proof that the RIAA is mad, but apparently their latest target is now suing software and websites that provide song lyrics.

DRM Links

Tuesday, December 6th, 2005

Here are a couple links from Dan, my traveling writer friend: The lead singer of OK Go sounds off in this New York Times opinion piece about why copy-protected CDs are a bad idea. Also, a writer for The Register suggests that the EFF shouldn't be involved in the Sony rootkit legal ...

EFF disses, avoids DMCA rulemaking

Thursday, December 1st, 2005

The EFF has publicly dissed the Copyright Office's triennial DMCA rulemaking, refusing even to participate. This is a reasonable reaction to the three-branch monte, "where's the fair use" shell game that is the triennial rulemaking. Read the brief report (pdf). Additionally, read a more thorough critique: Catch 1201 (shameless plug).