shouting loudly

Just a quick, 24-hours-overdue thanks to the folks at the Newsweek Dev Team for hosting me last night at their third News/Geek event. I had a rollicking good time, the questions were awesome, and the post-talk celebration was even better. If you want the Powerpoint, it’s here in all its 12.2 MB glory. Further discussion [...]

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.

I’ve been too busy to write a blog post about iTunes reaching a deal with the labels to remove DRM on all their music–a sign of DRM crumbling under market forces alone. Conveniently, Ed Felten wrote it for me.

Lawrence Lessig, the man who’s done more than anyone to publicize the debate over copyright law in the digital era, is returning to Harvard Law School. In addition to being a professor, he’ll head the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. The Harvard press release (first link) explains: He will also launch a major [...]

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 [...]

Here’s another awesome XKCD comic, this one on music piracy, DRM, and the DMCA.

RealNetworks’ recent decision to sell DVD ripping software, RealDVD, has the public asking: “Why not rip DVDs like CDs?” Doing a Google News search today for the software, I got over 200 hits, many from decidedly mainstream sources like USAToday and USNews. Those of us who pride ourselves on some modicum of tech savvy have [...]

Over at Manifest Density, Tom has a couple interesting posts up arguing that the success of Blu-Ray in our marketplace should not be taken as proof that it’s a “better” technology than HD DVD, as many seem to have contended. Megan’s right [as stated here] that I and a lot of my fellow nerds aren’t [...]

In a filing with the FCC (pdf), Comcast claims that, thanks to market competition and blogging watchdogs, there is no need for regulatory intervention to protect net neutrality. The company’s recent discrimination against peer-to-peer traffic is the cause of the hearing. Last August, Comcast denied the charges (which were first documented on… drumroll please… a [...]

The Wired blog Underwire appears ready to declare music-protecting DRM dead in light of Sony BMG’s decision to begin selling some tracks in the unprotected MP3 format. Since Sony was the last holdout among the big four record labels, this is indeed big news; that said, I remain skeptical that the music industry will completely [...]