Looking at Google v. Oracle as a consumer and citizen, common sense insists upon a measure of skepticism in response to the premise that the “future of all software development” depends on Google prevailing in this case. Many of those who say so are the same folks who tend to omit the fact that licensing—especially in B2B relationships—spawns innovation all the time. The underlying ...
Early last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first in what will be a year-long series of hearings (roughly one per month) to review the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Almost as old as the publicly-available internet itself, the 1998 DMCA expressed the best efforts of Congress to predict how the digital market might evolve and to, therefore, strike a balance ...
Because I defend the principles of copyright, I write a lot about the value of creative expression and the author’s right to choose how that expression is used. In this context, then, I think it is within the editorial nature of this blog to respond to Franklin Graham’s public complaints about last week’s Super Bowl halftime performances by Jennifer Lopez and ...
As noted in Part I, there are a lot of moving parts to this story that cannot be addressed in a single post; but the one thread readers should not lose is the fact that this whole dust up started because Google was the first commercial user since the launch of Java in 1995 to refuse a license agreement. Undeterred ...
In 1990, the Port of Portland received a new container crane—the largest available at the time—built by Hyundai Heavy in Seoul. When the crane arrived, balanced across the beam of this massive ship, I was on site because I happened to be working for a small, Seattle-based industrial production company hired to make documentary films about the crane’s rigging and installation. This ...
