shouting loudly

As reported by (a billion news sources including) PC World, Google unit YouTube is beta testing an automated copyright management system. The official Google Blog describes the tool, “Video Identification,” as part and parcel with a number of copyright enforcement tools. Google also (correctly, in my non-lawyerly opinion) argues that this exceeds their responsibilities under [...]

elucidating, and brilliant as always, Lessig is giving us a preview of his work on corruption. Some of his arguments relate strongly to those made by Etzioni earlier, who helped us understand that oftentimes it is dollar for dollar more efficient or profitable to invest money in lobbying than actual innovation.

In light of publicity surrounding a series of incidents in the Boulder Valley School District, high school administrators in Colorado have been publicly defending their right to read students’ text messages in search of incriminating evidence of breaches of school rules. According to the Colorado ACLU letter to the Boulder Valley School District Board of [...]

Here is a letter I just sent to Rep. Albio Sires (D-NJ), my elected representative, with added links: Dear Rep. Sires, I am a voter in your district, and I am writing in regards to H.R. 3773, the RESTORE Act. I urge you not to support this legislation unless it meets two key conditions. First, [...]

Bill has an excellent post on the RIAA peer-to-peer trial, so I am only going to add the following comparison as food for thought. The U.S. being the land of the freedom, and China being the authoritarian country that censors its media – how come the case of the Minnesota woman being fined $220,000 for [...]

In a recent speech at Cornell, Chilling Effects Clearinghouse founder Wendy Seltzer tells universities to fight the copyright bullies.

A recent academic study concludes that file sharing leads to chart churn. Except for the very best-selling artists, albums go from debut to irrelevance much more quickly. As if that were not enough cause for major label concern, the study’s findings also include “a narrowing of the advantage held by major labels” relative to independents.

On Thursday, a federal jury in Minnesota found a woman liable for uploading 24 songs via the peer-to-peer network Kazaa, ordering her to pay $220,000. The volume of online discussion of this case is unsurprisingly large, but I thought it would be worth highlighting some of the coverage, especially from CNet and Ars Technica. CNet [...]

This New York Times story is a good follow-up to our note about Ed Markey’s testimony bemoaning US backsliding in the international broadband rankings.

In a congressional hearing this week, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), chairman of the House telecommunications subcommittee, took the FCC to task over its recent track record of deregulating broadband. Especially since 2001, the FCC has rolled back many of the policies that require those who own the broadband infrastructure to share their lines. Instead, the [...]