Edging toward the fully licensed world
I own a lot of books and music CDs — enough to fill many shelves. Here’s just one: They are relatively uncomplicated possessions. There are no limits (other than mine) on who can read my books, or what else I can do with them, shy of abusing fairly obvious copyright laws. (For example, I can’t...
No 2 SOPA
Today I’m in solidarity with Web publishers everywhere joining the fight against new laws that are bad for business — and everything else — on the Internet. I made my case in If you hate big government, fight SOPA. A vigorous dialog followed in the comments under that. Here’s the opening paragraph: Nobody who opposes...
Leveraging Hal
Hal Crowther remains my favorite essayist, regardless of whether or not I agree with him. (And on some things I don’t.) Like Hunter S. Thompson, Hal’s writing is beyond enviable and his characterizations often over the top. Here’s some of his latest, addressed to the #Occupy movement: “Go get a bath right after you get...
If you hate Big Government, fight SOPA.
Nobody who opposes Big Government and favors degregulation should favor the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA, or H.R. 3261. It’s a big new can of worms that will cripple use of the Net, slow innovation on it, clog the courts with lawsuits, employ litigators in perpetuity and deliver copyright maximalists in the...
Obama’s circular firing squad
I normally avoid talking politics here, but it’s hard to stay quiet while partisans on the left help with the demolition project that partisans on the right started the moment Barack Obama arrived in the White House. One example: Hillary Told You So in The Daily Beast. Here’s how it begins: At a New York political...
Deficit reduction by spectrum auction?
So I took up David Weigel‘s challenge in Slate: Read the Reid Plan. Read the Boehner Plan. Get Back to Me… and got as far as this stuff in Reid’s plan: (Sorry, I had to take a screen shot because the original is a .pdf and the copied text takes too much work to fix.)...
Long Tale
So Dan Gillmor and I will be on stage later today at the Personal Democracy Forum at NYU. What questions should we be asking the the people we’d rather not call the audience? [Later...] Since I’ve been told that the above (the one-paragraph tweetlike post this used to be) has been misunderstood by a few...
Keep North Carolina’s broadband market free
While arguments over network neutrality have steadily misdirected attention toward Washington, phone and cable companies have quietly lobbied one state after another to throttle back or forbid cities, towns and small commercial and non-commercial entities from building out broadband facilities. This Community Broadband Preemption Map, from Community Broadband Networks, tells you how successful they’ve been...
Terror and Consent: a Book Review
As I write this, the news about protests in Libya is streaming over Twitter. I've been meaning to write a review of Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century for a while because it's given me a new vantage point fro...
Maybe the kids are alright
I’ve been fairly quiet on the developments in Egypt, preferring to let others do the blogging, especially when they know far more than I do. (Ethan Zuckerman, for example.) But I’ve been involved in many conversations, because it’s damned interesting, what’s going on. One of those conversations is with my sister Jan, by email. She’s...
Accidental Lessons: Reflections on the Challenger Tragedy
[This piece was written for Triangle Business (in Raleigh, North Carolina ) and published twenty-five years ago, on February 10, 1986. Since it might be worth re-visiting some of the points I made, as well as the event itself, I decided to dust off the piece and put up here. Except for a few spelling...
