shouting loudly

Professor Lessig is presenting on Institutional Corruption today at the Kennedy School as his first public appearance at Harvard since his return a few months ago. Professor Lessig likes to introduce three ideas to frame his talk today: 1) influence, 2) independence and 3) responsibility. Relying on his framework of the four modalities of control [...]

By now I’m sure we’ve all heard about Congressman Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) outburst during President Obama’s Health Care speech on Wednesday.  After Obama claimed that his bill would not cover illegal immigrants, Republicans en masse erupted in murmuring.  That’s common during a joint session of congress.  Then, after they’d quieted down, Wilson took the opportunity [...]

Lawrence Lessig, who is quite nearly my idol, is trying to enlist would-be campaign donors in a strike for change. The idea is that campaign donors will go on strike; we’re not to give money to candidates for federal office until and unless those politicians commit to publicly funded campaigns. I’ve been thinking about this [...]

Thanks to Alex Curtis at Public Knowledge for the stimulus bill content filtering update. The good news is in the headline: No on content filtering, yes on open network requirements. He also posted a PDF of the relevant section. See the highlighted portion on page 9 for the nondiscrimination requirements.

While I’ve been on the road, I missed this very awesome interview on the Colbert Report: The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Lawrence Lessig Colbert at ChristmasColbert Christmas DVD Green ScreenBill O’Reilly Interview Props to EFF for the link.

Here’s a great article by the Times exposing how text messages are incredibly overpriced and discussing one Senator’s investigation into the subject. Text messages may cost you and me $.20 per, but they cost the carriers almost nothing to send, says Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. Here’s a [...]

This week is the 10th Anniversary of the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Title I of the DMCA is the most controversial and important part of the act. In a great post over at Freedom to Tinker, David Robinson has a great post on how the DMCA was born. He relies heavily on [...]

Today, Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced HR 5353, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (pdf). For more, see SaveTheInternet.com or CNet.

Robert Reich’s latest book, Supercapitalism, is a fantastic analysis of the current relationship between corporations, citizens, and politics. I put Supercapitalism on my wish list after Prof. Lawrence Lessig’s glowing recommendation. While I make no pretense of being such a gifted writer as either of these scholars, here I attempt to summarize the book and [...]

In my last report on this story, I put little thought into a minilink to an article by CNet’s Anne Broache, which frets that proposed net neutrality bills probably would not prevent Comcast’s ongoing peer-to-peer blockade. I no longer agree; I think even the weaker of the two bills on this count, if properly enforced [...]