Last week, John Updike penned a rather disappointing jeremiad on Kevin Kelly’s article on internet publishing. Updike bristles at the “promiscuity” (inter alia) of hyperlinked, open-access publications:
In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving […]

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I’ve been following the battle over net neutrality for some time now, and I’ve been largely convinced by the advocacy of stalwarts like Siva Vaidhyanathan and Gigi Sohn. On the other hand, some very smart people (like Philip Weiser) have claimed that differential pricing could finally lead to revenue levels that would remedy the […]

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I’m a little behind here, but I haven’t seen this in the IP blawgosphere….
Remember the hysteria over the Jolie/Pitt baby? Apparently People magazine paid over $4 million for exclusive photos. Gawker reproduced a big thumbnail of the People cover, sparking this nasty little exchange.
The dueling letters are notable for a few reasons. […]

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Lately I’ve been worried about the costs of rankings. We all know about the sturm und drang surrounding the USN&WR ranking system, but I think the problem is actually far more general, as these provocative responses to Posner’s efforts to rank public intellectuals show. I explored some of the problems caused by search […]

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Tim Lee has (another) good post, Reverse Engineering and Innovation: Some Examples, over at the Technology Liberation Front. Tim uses three examples (IM, Samba, and x86 cpus) to make three points about the role of reverse engineering in innovation:
(1) “reverse-engineering to accomplish compatibility with a competitor’s closed, proprietary platform is utterly […]

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Geoff Manne just sent me a very interesting press release from Microsoft, excerpts of which can be found below. Essentially, Microsoft and Creative Commons have worked together to create and release “a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licensing information for works in popular Microsoft® Office applications.” This […]

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I’m just finishing up Tyler Cowen’s Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding. The book sympathetically describes both “pure economic” and “pure aesthetic” approaches to assessing the value of culture, and goes a long way towards reconciling the two. It’s an insightful and easy read because the author is both […]

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I’ve recently been thinking about why people buy luxury, trademarked goods. How important is the trademark to the purchasing decision? And is there any way of hedonically pricing the trademark–i.e., figuring out what percentage of the product’s price is attributable to it? Finally, is there any way of using data like that […]

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Read the whole post, but here is a taste:
4. Ex ante, it is hard to predict what will “stick” on the Net. I see positive and uninternalized social value in the level of experimentation which we currently enjoy. Profit-maximizing pricing from Verizon and Comcast would choke this off to some degree.
5. […]

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According to a recent New Yorker article, any scholars who want to “quote sizable passages or to reproduce manuscript pages from those works of Joyce’s that remain under copyright—including Ulysses and Finnegans Wake—as well as from more than three thousand letters and several dozen unpublished manuscript fragments,” must get permission from Joyce’s son, Stephen James […]

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Thanks to Mike for the heads-up on the Crooked Timber discussion of Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, which finally spurred me to read (some of) the book. (Several long train rides didn’t hurt either!)
Benkler’s basic contention is that cheap, ubiquitous internet communication is advancing individual autonomy in a revolutionary way, and will […]

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Hilary Rosen writes:
But for the record, I do share a concern that the lawsuits have outlived most of their usefulness and that the record companies need to work harder to implemnt a strategy that legitimizes more p2p sites and expands the download and subscription pool by working harder with the tech community to get devices […]

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This story in today’s NYT about Seattle glass sculptor/industrialist Dale Chihuly only scratches the surface of the bitterness that surrounds his dealings with some members of the arts community.
The case sounds like another “can you copyright nature” kind of claim, but it seems more accurate to say that the case involves whether the plaintiff really […]

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Every morning my wife and I walk the dog around the block. This morning, down the street from us there’s a Verizon truck and a worker installing fiber to our neighbor’s house. I know that it’s fiber, not only because the guy standing on the ladder, wearing the Verizon helmet, is as cheery […]

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