shouting loudly

The irony of this is so delicious that it makes my mouth water: The Los Angeles Times reports that the MPAA is accused of pirating a movie (pretty much by their own definition). The MPAA admitted Monday that it had duplicated “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” without the filmmaker’s permission after director Kirby Dick [...]

A federal policy of network neutrality would prevent broadband service providers from determining which webpages and applications are delivered at top speed and which are stuck in the slow lane–or blocked completely. Follow this link to a FreePress Action Alert. Also, call or write your congresspersons. Additionally, I have written a policy paper in Ed [...]

In my original post on Google v. DoJ, I’d intended to include a link to this NYT story as well as the two CNet pieces. Unfortunately, my standby source for such links–the NYT Link Generator–failed to produce a usable permalink. (Props to Nelson Pavlosky for telling me about this site, which is generally awesome.) Here’s [...]

The Free Culture club at Franklin & Marshall college arranged a massive act of civil disobedience yesterday in honor of Ben Franklin’s birth. Over a thousand people sang “Happy Birthday,” which is still under copyright, without paying a dime. That’s right: singing “Happy Birthday” in public, without paying, is illegal. And some people think we [...]

Props to Google for refusing to roll over and comply with a creepy Department of Justice subpoena demanding a sample of their search logs and a sample of their index of web pages. In contrast, add MSN, Yahoo, and AOL to the ranks of the expeditiously obedient. DoJ is seeking to defend the patently unconstitutional [...]

FBI to NSA: why are you dropping all this useless data in our laps? “We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism – case closed,” said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. “After [...]

President Bush has signed into law legislation that makes it illegal to anonymously “annoy” people on the Internet. Yes, it is as vague as it sounds. If writing a satirical blog post under a pseudonym is considered “annoying,” you could potentially go to prison for up to two years. We have our own Sen. Arlen [...]

Here’s a short piece at BoingBoing about how Spielberg’s Munich probably won’t be considered for the British Film Academy awards because the DVD sent out for review won’t play on the award voters’ DVD players.

As I noted before, Steve Jobs’ stubborn refusal to play ball put a cramp in major music labels’ shortsighted attempts to jack up online pricing. Now, Elliot Spitzer (who’s running for Governor of New York this year) appears to have called the labels on their anticompetitive behavior. See the story on CNet. This has happened [...]