For your consideration: In this article reposted from Jacobin on Salon.com, Gavin Mueller aims to place Internet piracy of intellectual property in context to 17th and 18th century piracy on the high seas. Aside from overly romanticizing classic pirates in my opinion, it’s a well-written piece, although I do find its thesis a bit unclear until the final paragraph. Bottom ...
Last week, when I logged onto Facebook, two stories were near the top of my feed. The first was about the plot of at least four U.S. soldiers who had plans to carry out acts of domestic terrorism, including assassination of President Obama, and who had killed a fellow soldier and his girlfriend in order to stop them from ...
Rick Kelly, in this article on TechCrunch, takes techno-centric paranoia to the next level when he fires away at legislation nobody has yet proposed to regulate future possible applications of 3D printers. Strangely, Kelly cites some of the very serious potential hazards — like the ability to make a functioning firearm! — with this technology but proceeds to dismiss any ...
During the SOPA battle, I continually tried to argue that it was fine to distrust media conglomerates but that it was not rational to simultaneously turn a blind eye to the political influence of Silicon Valley. Last week, a handful of Democratic representatives sent a letter to the DNC requesting a new plank in the party platform. The language was ...
This is a piece I wrote as a guest post for The Copyright Alliance. It got the folks over at TechDirt into a lather, but I suspect that’s because it wasn’t read or read very carefully by most of them. Not only have Copyright and Free Speech coexisted peacefully for the entire history of the Republic, but I would ...
