Back in the Napster days, I had an assistant named Greg, who remains one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever been lucky enough to call a friend. I remember giving him a hard time one afternoon when I realized he was using the file sharing app to download music. With a slightly self-aware grin he said to me, “Yeah, but ...
If you say anything publicly critical of the Internet, there’s a good chance some technobrat on Twitter will call you a Luddite. The simple irony is that the word Luddite in this case is being misused, which is something the would-be accuser might discover for himself were he to look it up on the Internet. In this excellent article on ...
The ongoing debate over copyright in the digital age is clouded by so many layers of new-age malarkey and overblown, political banner-waving that it’s easy to lose sight of the behavioral realities behind all the self-serving theories of bloggers, legal scholars, corporate interests, and futurists. Take a very common activity like watching movies online via torrents or other sites that ...
“The Pirate Bay is speech.” This is a quote from one of the gurus perched on the mountaintop of techno-utopianism, John Perry Barlow, who appeared yesterday as a member of a panel discussion held at CES2013 in Las Vegas. The subject of the discussion was “A pro-artist/pro-innovation approach to copyright,” although the panel did not include anyone representing any counterpoint ...
In response to the tragedy in Newtown, CT the idea was raised by news commentators and in the blogosphere that the names of people who commit heinous crimes should be de-publicized in order to deny them even a posthumous fame we believe to be a constituent of their twisted motives. It is hard to imagine, though, that even if we ...