From time to time, one encounters an editorial that so deftly weaves the offensive with the inaccurate that it leaves the reader stammering.  I suppose this was the goal of the latest OpEd from digital futurist Bob Lefsetz, which appeared in Variety last week under the title “Film Biz Can Learn a Few Things From the Music Industry When It ...

Historically, one thinks of piracy and Singapore in the context of the high seas — both in legend and in reality.  Geography shapes history, and the the Malacca Strait has always been a valuable sea line of communication, thus good hunting ground for centuries of armed robbers right up to the present.  And although the various regimes in Singapore have ...

This is a theme I’ve certainly written about before; it is in fact, the theme that started this blog — the idea that the expansion of stuff through communications technology can lead to a reduction in the very benefits meant to be yielded by the expansion in the first place.  CNN’s insistence upon providing round-the-clock speculation about the missing Malaysian airliner ...

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is obsolete, and everybody knows it.  The DMCA was the topic in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on copyright review about two weeks ago, and much has been written about its flaws both from pro and anti-copyright perspectives.  A recent editorial in The Los Angeles Times leads with a headline “Congress should bring copyright ...

In case you missed it, OWS co-founder, now Google software engineer, Justine Tunney is responsible for a petition calling for a coup d’etat that would hand over administrative authority of the United States to the tech industry and appoint Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.  Whether Tunney is trying to be amusing, or she’s deranged, or she’s ...