Concurring Opinions is sponsoring a symposium on Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet, organized by Danielle Citron. There are lots of great commentaries in the 22 posts so far; we may well have matched the Boston Review. I continue doing my poor man’s Nicholas Carr impression at these three posts:
An [...]

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Where intermediaries and bots rule, de facto fair use (or at least tolerated use) may end up being whatever slips by the anti-piracy program. Experimenter Scott Smitelli reveals the following:
It is quite possible to thwart the YouTube Content ID system, but some methods mangle the song too much to be used in anything [...]

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Everybody hates a patent troll. But the broader economy of Web 2.0 is not exactly a landscape of virtue rewarded and failure punished. One of the recent put-downs of Paul Allen’s patent lawsuit inadvertently puts that fact into high relief.
Describing Allen’s gambit, Dean Takahashi writes:
[I]t looks like Interval patented [...]

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Here’s a fascinating visualization of soft drink brands, showing how Coke and Pepsi dominate about 74% of the market via a kaleidoscope of brands. The creator of the visual argues that the industry’s concentration is “obscured from us by the appearance of numerous choices on retailer shelves,” which Steve Hannaford “refers to . . [...]

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Having written a long post on the topic, I just wanted to recommend a few pithier takes on the issue:
Bill McGeveran, “the Google defection:”
Google’s defection from the supporters of an open internet changes the political dynamics for the worse, opens the door to creation of a second-class internet for non-corporate content, and tries to [...]

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As more bottlenecks emerge online, we’re going to hear about “new neutralities” beyond net neutrality. For a state of the art discussion of the issue, check out Mark Patterson’s article in the Fordham L. Rev. (”Non-Network Barriers to Network Neutrality”).
Even though search engines are presumably outside the jurisdiction of the FCC, if [...]

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I know that many copyright professors use Titan Sports v. Turner (981 F. Supp. 65 (D. Conn. 1997)) to teach the law of character protection. The plaintiff’s amended complaint “explain[ed] how the [wrestler] Diesel['s] character developed into a fully independent character and ultimately became integral to the story lines of many televised events,” arguing [...]

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From Andrew Thompson, Co-Founder and CEO, Proteus Biomedical, Inc.:
We have historically relied on patents as a way to encourage people to make innovations. As a company, our view is that that system is going away. Emerging economies have much less appetite for it. Businesses will have to respond by making it more difficult to [...]

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The Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines explains why UNITAID’s efforts to develop a patent pool of HIV/AIDS treatments are so important:

Meanwhile, the US health care finance system appears to be getting into a bit of a standoff with HIV/AIDS drug makers:
Without reliable access to the medications, which cost patients in the AIDS [...]

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I was just looking through a series of pamphlets on “situated technologies,” and I found this one on Urban Computing and Its Discontents very interesting. A quote:
Stamen Design’s Oakland Crimespotting . . . is a nifty hack that imports Oakland Police Department crime data into a Google Maps mash-up, and does so not [...]

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After intensively doing the IP law conference circuit for a few years, I’ve spent much of the past year reaching out to scholars in critical internet studies, design, and information science, along with activists in the global justice field. I think it’s been a good way to “re-charge” some of my own scholarship as [...]

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In a recent article called “How to Build an American Job,” former Intel chairman Andy Grove suggests that there is no neat division between “high-value” design and conceptual work and the “scaling” necessary to bring products to market. He calls on the US to “rebuild our industrial commons,” lest we get locked out of [...]

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I just saw a screening of the film “Whiz Kids,” which was a wonderful tour of the lives of three high school seniors in a science competition (the Intel Science Talent Search). And talk about topical–one of the protagonists even takes on a multinational corporation that is despoiling her local water supply! If [...]

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“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,’ Woody Allen said, “I want to achieve it through not dying.” The “Singularity University” is attracting Silicon Valley glitterati who think along the same lines:
[T]he Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life [...]

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I have recently noticed that my iPhone, once slow, is downright glacial post-mass-iPad adoption in the greater NYC area. Daniel Altman, among others, has also noticed the AT&T network slowdown. But it’s not just the iPhone–internet connections I’ve used in both New York and New Jersey seem slower than usual. Is [...]

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Given the recent series of posts on the effects of technology on the brain, I thought I might share a little neuroscholarship. As Geert Lovink writes, “the neurological turn in recent web criticism exploits the obsession with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness,” and I haven’t been immune. My recent [...]

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Glenn Greenwald has recently criticized Mike McConnell for outsourcing internet surveillance to corporations. As Greenwald relates, McConnell “went from being head of the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to [consulting firm] Booz Allen, one of the nation’s largest private intelligence contractors, then became Bush’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then [...]

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“It must be remembered that, while there are an enormous number of possible permutations of the musical notes of the scale, only a few are pleasing; and much fewer still suit the infantile demands of the popular ear. Recurrence is not therefore an inevitable badge of plagiarism.” Darrell v. Joe Morris Music Co., 113 [...]

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I’ve been following the debate over ala carte cable TV pricing, and the recent Fox/Time Warner showdown has got it back in the news. Brian Stelter’s NYT article on the topic reveals some interesting revenue figures in the cable industry:

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Apropos of Rob’s post, here is Nicholas Bramble’s very inventive take on learning via Facebook:
[A teacher at a suburban school had found] videos showing students getting into fights with one another. They posted the videos to their MySpace pages and debated who had the better fighting skills. The teacher also found footage from a [...]

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