The Senate committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation recently held a hearing on the neutrality, or end to end, principle as it will apply to new laws regulating broadband Internet access. Perhaps not surprisingly, Vint Cerf and Larry Lessig both showed up to defend the end to end principle. What struck me was the fact …
Linux kernel creator Linux Torvalds is clarifying his opposition to GNU 3.0 (which is a new version of the license which protects many open source software applications). He offers an interesting perspective that DRM of content is more dangerous than that of hardware because (it seems) people will want to be able to manipulate content …
An attempt to migrate my Blogger posts to WordPress on my site (without backing up) has killed my template as well as some time. Interestingly enough, Google cache and archive.org don’t have backup copies either, so some of my template links and blog features are gone for the moment.
A recent remark from the Microsoft VP of the Windows Media division reveals copyright’s growth into an anti-competitive tool: The intention is to reduce the number of licensors to a manageable level, to lock out “hobbyists” and other entities that Microsoft doesn’t want to have to trouble itself with. Essentially, the licensing of their copyrighted …
John is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin - Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He studies the social impact of media technology law and policy, with a special emphasis on copyright. He also is an instructional technology consultant for DoIT-Academic Technology.
John doesn't update his blog often, and many of the thoughts are probably half-baked. While the web has sort of an eternal memory, the current and future reader is urged not to take all of this too seriously.
Think of this blog as "John thinking out loud."
(For more on this idea and why I blog, please see this category.)