About two weeks ago, movie star Jim Carrey was in a libertarian lather over California Governor Brown’s signing the new state law mandating vaccinations for nearly all children. Carrey posted an indignant tweet accompanied by a photograph of a young boy with autism — a photo he used without permission. Carrey later apologized for his misappropriation of the child’s picture, ...

This doesn’t happen often, but I’m glad to say that I feel compelled to counter-balance my last post about Reddit with a measure of praise for CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman, who announced yesterday that Reddit intends to adopt new policies for content that may be hosted on the site. That last post, largely based on commentary from Sam Biddle ...

The site that calls itself “The Front Page of the Internet” may be about to collapse. Not because of censorship or any legislative act or any aggressive move by litigious corporations, but simply because serious people will abandon them. The recent ouster of CEO Ellen Pao in response to her efforts to clean up some of Reddit’s more puerile and ...

View image | gettyimages.com Last month, a good friend of mine — an attorney who works in intellectual property and believes in its value — shared a brief post from BoingBoing by Cory Doctorow criticizing efforts by the auto industry to enforce the copyrights on software, now intrinsic in any contemporary vehicle, in order to limit consumer choice in the marketplace. In ...

Did you rainbow yourself on the day the Supreme Court upheld marriage rights for same-sex couples?  I did. Though I assumed Facebook had only provided the filter in order to conduct one of its studies in online behavior.  According to this story by J. Nathan Matias, writing for The Atlantic, data scientists at Facebook have not analyzed the trends in ...

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