In my Boston Review piece on SOPA, I mentioned a sad story about a drawn-out copyright lawsuit’s effect on an entrepreneur. I should have also brought up a whole book on the problem of IP overenforcement, Jason Mazzone’s Copyfraud. Important on the day it was published, it’s particularly salient now that Congress is considering expanding [...]

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A few years ago I tried to express some anxieties about the rise of a remix culture that valued technology and novelty over timeless content. Those worries resurfaced while I was reading Rob Horning’s recent reflections on his own defensively reactionary tastes:
[T]he key issue is to think about why we choose novelty over immersion. [...]

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America’s bias toward “negative” conceptualizations of rights is on full display in Vint Cerf’s opinion piece in the NY Times entitled “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right.” Cerf states:
[A] report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur went so far as to declare that the Internet had “become an indispensable tool for realizing [...]

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Katharine Gelber offers a thoughtful review of The Offensive Internet in the Australian Review. (David Levine conducted an interview with the book’s editors, Martha Nussbaum and Saul Levmore, available here.) I contributed an essay to this volume, and I found both the other essays in it and the conference it was based on very [...]

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I really enjoyed this OTM story on Ian Bogost’s game, CowClicker. The game allowed players to click on a cow, which would moo. It was as easy as hitting the broad side of a barn door with a snow shovel. So far, so Pavlovian. But, as Janet Murray explains, the game changed [...]

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After being burned by an utterly unusable New Yorker archive I purchased a few years ago, I’ve been wary of magazines’ efforts to market archival access. Apparently, magazines are very careful about granting access, too: the Vogue archive will cost $1575 per year for access. A post on the archive by Joshua Gans [...]

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This is an interesting story on a gallery exhibition of “24 hours of photos uploaded to Flickr.” It reminds me a bit of the Bright Eyes album “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn,” but in reverse: the very act of printing them all out seems to turn the creative efforts of millions into a [...]

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I apologize for being away from Madisonian for so long. Two new health law preps will do that to a guy! Luckily, one of them is on the law of health information technology, so hopefully that will be a new angle for blogging.
As someone who’s done many skeptical pieces on [...]

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Musician Jonathan Coulton made over $500,000 last year by cutting out the middleman and selling his songs directly online. (The zombie ballad “re: Your Brains” is one of his classics.) The NPR Planet Money team featured a debate on whether Coulton’s success was a fluke, or presaged a new golden age for [...]

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A small corner of the world of search took another step toward personalization today, as Bing moved to give users the option to personalize their results by drawing on data from their Facebook friends:
Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This [...]

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Two items of note on this topic recently. First, the NYT reports on NHTSA’s lazy approach to IP overreach by automakers:
For years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has declined to post on its Web site reports from automakers about problems with their cars and about specialized warranty extensions that could save consumers [...]

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J.C. Penney was on top of the web world last holiday season, showing up at #1 for dozens of retail search queries on Google. Type “dresses,” “area rugs,” “bedding:” you’d get Penney’s items as your first search result. Had the venerable retailer become a “Wikipedia” of online shopping, reliably providing the “people’s choice?” [...]

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There will be an online symposium on the new book Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property at Concurring Opinions this Tuesday to Thursday (Feb. 1 to Feb. 3, 2011). This book, edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, is available for free download here, and can also be purchased here. [...]

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A recent article on Kinect hackers mentions the ease with which the new Microsoft game platform can drive real world devices:
When Kinect appeared on store shelves, Adafruit Industries, an online seller of DIY electronics kits, offered $1,000, then $3,000, to the first person who could analyze Kinect’s innards and share the information with developers [...]

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Don’t worry, it’s not another prolix post from me, just commentary on Jack Goldsmith’s Seven Thoughts on Wikileaks and Lovink & Riemens’s Twelve theses on WikiLeaks. (And here’s an FAQ for those confused by the whole controversy.)

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As the EU antitrust probe of Google begins, it’s a fitting time for a documentary about the role of search in society. I’ll be appearing one on CBC Radio on Dec. 5; here’s some background on the program, called “Engineering Search: The story of the algorithm that changed the world.” It “tracks the [...]

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Two interesting items in the global press today. First, a harrowing account of copyright enforcement in Argentina:
On the list of countries with the most draconian laws on authors’ rights, Argentina occupies 6th place. . . . The restrictive nature of the intellectual property law number 11.723 brought things to a head. Until that [...]

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Media studies experts have demonstrated that cheap copy drives local news “it bleeds/it leads” programming decisions. It’s a lot easier to send a reporter to a crime scene than it is to investigate local corruption. The same dynamic explains a surfeit of reality TV:
One of the things that I think is core [...]

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I’ve been interested in the problem of self-reinforcing dominance lately. I’ve written a good deal about this in the area of search engines, but I’ve had less to say of late because I’ve felt that personalization makes it very difficult to study them. But I may be wrong about that; Ben Edelman has [...]

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I recently gave a talk called “Search, Speech, and Secrecy: Corporate Strategies for Inverting the Network Neutrality Debate.” We had a spirited discussion, and I learned a good deal from the audience. I proposed more monitoring and regulation for internet intermediaries, but some in the audience would not accept my old analogy [...]

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