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Jaron Lanier and the Web’s “False Ideals”
Jaron Lanier’s Op-Ed in the New York Times today is a classic piece of muddled Lanier writing that allows him to train his sights, yet again, on his favorite bugaboo and strawman: ‘free content.’ And...
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Video Game ‘Cloning’: What Is It Good For?
Cloning of video games is a Bad Thing. Or so sayeth Brian X. Chen and some video game developers (New York Times, March 12th, ” For Creators of Games, A Faint Line on Cloning”). Roughly, the thesis...
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Schopenhauer on the Pernicious Influence of Copyright on Writing
Modern debates on the ‘intellectual property’ front involve several, overlapping, recurring themes. One persistent pair of inter-related concerns is: How are creators, authors, artists, ‘content...
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Hyman Strachman the Pirate AKA Troops Supporter
Hyman Strachman is a pirate. But he doesn’t fly the Jolly Roger, drink rum, hop around on a pegleg with a cutlass tucked neatly into a cummerbund, board ships while yelling “aarrr!” or call anyone a...
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The Copyright Police Catch Up With ‘Hung Up’
Well, I’ve finally run afoul of the copyright police. More precisely, two videos I had uploaded to YouTube–some six years ago–have been taken down. Last night, as I searched for them repeatedly, I...
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Tim Parks Overrates the Indispensability of Copyright Regimes
Tim Parks has an interesting article on copyright over at the New York Review of Books Blog. (Parks concentrates almost exclusively on copyright for literary works and does not mention movies or...
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Copyright Protection for Academic Works: A Bad Idea, But Who’ll Bell The Cat?
Richard Posner has written yet another interesting critique of patent and copyright law; it includes a remark of particular interest to me: At the other extreme is academic books and articles (apart...
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Should Free Software Go Into the Public Domain?
I’ve just finished an interesting Twitter conversation with Glyn Moody (author of Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, still one of the best books on the free and open source software...
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Once More: ‘Intellectual Property’ Breeds Confusion; Drop it
Rarely, if ever, does the term ‘intellectual property’ add clarity to any debate of substance–very often, this is because it includes the term ‘property’ and thus offers an invitation to some dubious...
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Freud On Group Production (And ‘Intellectual Property’)
In ‘Group Pyschology’, (Standard Edition, XVIII, 79; as cited in Peter Gay, Freud for Historians, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 150), Sigmund Freud writes: [A]s far as intellectual achievement is...
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Descartes, The Planned City, And Misplaced Philosophical Desires
In Part 2 of Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences Rene Descartes, as a prelude to his ‘clearing away’ of prior philosophy, writes: [T]here is...
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Apple’s ‘Code Is Speech’ Argument, The DeCSS Case, And Free Software
In its ongoing battle with federal law enforcement agencies over its refusal to unlock the iPhone, Apple has mounted a ‘Code is Speech’ defense arguing that “the First Amendment prohibits the...
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