Continuations

With SOPA and PIPA shelved at least for the moment, it is time to start thinking about alternatives. It would be a shame if we limited our collective thinking here to slightly different versions of those bills instead of exploring what a different approach to copyright could be that doesn’t try to fight the characteristics of the Internet but rather embraces them, providing value for rights creators/holders, technology companies and endusers. One interesting entry here is Ian Rogers (from Top...

Starting today and for the foreseeable future the “Continuations” at the top of this blog will be covered with a call to Stop Censorship. If you read yesterday’s Tech Tuesday post on networking or are familiar with the history of the architecture of the Internet you know that a lack of global control was a core principle behind the design of TCP/IP. That has been key to the amazing innovations we have seen come from the Internet, including its amazing power for social and political change. Ev...

Yesterday an international police operation resulted in the shutdown of MegaUpload and the arrest of at least four MegaUpload employees in Auckland, New Zealand. This action resulted in a large scale DDoS attack by the group known as Anonymous on web sites including the MPAA, RIAA, DoJ and even the White House. While I don’t have time today for a full scale analysis here are some salient point: 1. The fact that this shutdown and the arrests were possible shows quite clearly that existing laws...

There is an awful bill making its way around congress. I first wrote about this when it was called COICA and was thankfully defeated due to opposition from Senator Ron Wyden. Then it returned as the PROTECT IP act or PIPA. Now we have the house version which is in part called, I kid you not, the E-PARASITE act (scroll to page 3 and you will find the name for Title I). I won’t make an effort here to go into detail as to why this is a terrible idea. In addition to the previous posts that I have...

I am probably not the first to come up with this analogy (and I am on a flight without wifi, so I can’t look it up either) but it just struck me that there are big parallels between SOPA and Prohibition. How? In that the unintended consequences will far outweigh the benefits, especially when it comes to crime. Prohibition didn’t stop the consumption of alcohol. It just drove it underground. In doing so it not only supported the creation of a large infrastructure for illegal activity (e.g. gam...