After reading an article on the misuse of patents, I’ve finally decided to write an overview of how I think intellectual property should work. Many of these ideas are probably borrowed or modified from other sources (notably Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture), so I can’t claim true originality.
Patents
Even with the changes to the patent system [...]
I stumbled across an article today that makes me wonder what kind of world some people really want. In this article, a librarian refused to divulge confidential records to the police without a subpoena. As a result, she is facing disciplinary action for “a blatant diregard for the Police Department”.
Maybe I’m wrong, but [...]
This article was originally spurred by the generally negative portrayal of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in the novel Digital Fortress. As a long-standing fan and member of the EFF, I must admit that I was more than a little taken aback at some of the characterizations of the organization. The members of [...]
Network neutrality is one of the key factors leading to the current wild success of the Internet. The basic idea of network neutrality is that all traffic is treated equally, so that there is no effective difference between my grandmother sending an email, my friend connecting to a P2P network, or my using FTP [...]
… didn’t you know? Big Content is now trying to tell us that DRM isn’t only about stopping those evil pirates, but it’s also a safety measure to stop us poor dumb content-consumers from being turned into pirates ourselves!
So it’s not about legislating their way to a viable market that couldn’t possibly exist without [...]