“That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.”  – Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters – I saw this quote posted on Facebook the other day, and I hope it’s properly attributed because it expresses something I had been thinking about shortly after I and ...

A few posts ago, I reported that the major lobbying muscle in the Internet industry backs a patent “reform” bill (HR 9) called the Innovation Act. I argued in that post that while this reform claims to eliminate nuisance “patent trolls” from clogging up the system with dubious claims, what it really does is eliminate competition from the market.  Because, ...

View image | gettyimages.com My apologies in advance for the length and nearly stream-of-consciousness nature of the following: While there appears to be consensus that we are rapidly innovating our way toward a future without work — or at least work as we have known it — we find myriad predictions and theories as to what this actually means, most ...

A feature story for this week’s New York Times Magazine is titled The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t.  In the article, writer Steven Johnson concludes that neither the economic nor the cultural losses in the creative industries, which were predicted to result from the digital revolution, have come to pass.  Just as lesser pundits have previously declared in blogs and industry PR ...

For someone who clearly doesn’t like Hollywood, Emily Hong, policy wonk for New America’s Open Technology Institute*, is determined to pitch an over-the-top narrative about AG Hood v Google that is so divorced from reality that I don’t think Luis Buñel would know what to make of it.  Reposted on Slate, her title and basic plot, which portrays Google as ...