It’s almost de rigueur at this point.  Somebody pisses off a group of people who reach for their keyboards and let slip the doggerel of wrath in the form of assault by Twitter.  This holiday weekend, the target of death threats was Alabama football kicker Cade Foster and family, following his poor performance in the Iron Bowl against Auburn.  Foster ...

As Thanksgiving weekend comes to a close, thoughts turn to the subject of American exceptionalism, seeded by those zealous pilgrims who set out from England to establish their New Jerusalem on the American continent. I don’t mean the supposedly freedom-seeking, mythological caricatures with the dumb hats the kids are told about in school, but the flesh-and-blood puritans whose presumptively divine ...

[NOTE:  Since publishing this post, GoldieBlox removed access to its original video and has replaced it with a generic version absent any reference to the Beastie Boys song.] I’d seen this video make the rounds on Facebook but didn’t know that it was at the heart of a new controversy regarding copyrights and fair use.  A promo for the innovative ...

As usual, Terry Hart at Copyhype comes bearing wisdom and footnotes in his follow-up post on the IIPA Report indicating that copyright industries contribute substantially to GDP.  From his post: The reaction from copyright skeptics about the report’s conclusions that copyright contributes significantly to the US economy was, essentially: “Does not.” The spin seems to be that, yes, industries that create ...

College friends shared this story in the New York Times about the Lulu App which is essentially a girls-only, mobile application, used in conjunction with Facebook, for profiling men they know either as friends or as previous dates or boyfriends, so that other women can make informed decisions about a guy before dating or sleeping with him. I sent the ...

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