Over at Hit and Run Dash reports on a recent surge of interest in modifying domain registration rules to allow people to keep their personal information out of the Whois database. I guess I have nothing against making this official, but is this actually an issue? There are already a million hosting and registry services […]

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I want to share with you a penetrating insight about our relationship to media… in case you missed it when Marshall McLuhan had exactly the same insight 45 years ago. Addendum: While I’m not wholly out of sympathy with Ezra’s paean to Google in reply to the column above, it’s worth saying that knowing how […]

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Competition is stiff for the title of “stupidest argument against libertarianism,” but Michael Gerson may just have grabbed the brass ring. In The Washington Post, he writes: But Second Life is more consequential than its moral failures. It is, in fact, a large-scale experiment in libertarianism. Its residents can do and be anything they wish. […]

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Solveig Singleton at Tech Liberation Front comments on that Steve Levy column about mash-up artist Girl Talk I linked last week. While she’s certainly right that it seems like a bad idea to riddle copyright law with a tangle of ad-hoc exceptions (is this actually what’s being proposed?) her take seems unfair in a variety […]

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Via Boing Boing, I find this howler in an article on a joint MPAA/RIAA effort to get Congress and the executive branch more serious about cracking down on the scourge of piracy: “Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property […]

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An excellent post at Obsidian Wings explains why the structure of upcoming spectrum auctions will importantly influence the development of wireless services in coming years. Follow-up here.

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A federal court has ordered the popular site TorrentSpy to begin logging user activity, which the Motion Picture Association of America would dearly like to inspect. The article linked above bills this as a victory for the movie industry, but that’s doubtful in the broad sense. If it’s public knowledge that MPAA lawyers are watching […]

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I’ve been remiss in failing to link to Tim Lee’s excellent New York Times op-ed on software patents, but at least my sloth means I can simultaneously links his sharp response to some early criticism. The latter post makes a perceptive Hayekian point which, alas, suggests it should be difficult to get a sound empirical […]

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The music industry’s international trade group, IFPI, has just released a list of ten “inconvenient truths” about file sharing, and as Ars Technica’s analysis notes, it’s just kind of amateurish and embarrassing. It reads like a whiny Usenet flame, and alternates between the true-but-uninteresting and the massively unpersuasive. As with Paris Hilton at the MTV […]

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Tim Lee links an essay on the fretting over the “business model” for music distribution online when so much content is being given away free: This is your worst nightmare. People who can follow their dream on sweat equity. Who with their computer and the money from their day job or mommy and daddy can […]

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