http://madisonian.net a blog about law, tech, culture, and related things Wed, 16 May 2012 20:05:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Following my contrarian post about how to read the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, I thought I would write about the Communication's Decency Act. I've written about the CDA before (hard to believe it has been almost 3 years!), but I'll give a brief summary here. The CDA provides immunity from ... http://madisonian.net/2012/05/16/contrarian-statutory-interpretation-continued-cda-edition/ Salman Rushdie's PEN lecture, posted in part at The New Yorker: Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such ... http://madisonian.net/2012/05/16/rushdie-on-originality-and-censorship/ The economics of the legal profession are so bad .... (How bad are they?)  They're so bad that bright students are advised to ram their heads into solid objects at high speed, repeatedly, for a chance to earn a living for a few years, rather than enroll in law school. ... http://madisonian.net/2012/05/16/ouch-2/ Yochai Benkler has launched a blog, and in his first post he addresses the Carr-Benkler Wager, the long-standing bet that he made with Nicholas Carr about whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized. Benkler's post Carr's response (also posted as a comment to Benkler) They disagree about ... http://madisonian.net/2012/05/15/the-carr-benkler-wager-revisited/ Copyright questions pop up in the most unexpected yet ordinary places.  I got in a cab late last night at the Pittsburgh airport.  As I sat down, the driver, an African-American man who looked to be younger than I am by maybe 10 years, turned down a hip hop track ... http://madisonian.net/2012/05/15/taking-copyright-where-you-find-it/ Hey! Bing is innovating! It has added social to search based on its relationship with Facebook. Oh wait, Google did that with Google+. So is this innovation or keeping up with the Joneses, err Pages and Brins? I thought this move by MS would happen faster given that FB and ... http://madisonian.net/2012/05/11/social-search-its-might-be-around-for-a-bit/ This follows my recent post about Oracle v. Google. At the behest of commenters, both online and offline, I decided to dig a bit deeper to see exactly what level of abstraction is at issue in this case. The reason is simple: I made some assumptions ... http://madisonian.net/2012/05/09/oracle-v-google-digging-deeper/ The jury came back today with its verdict in round one of the epic trial between two giants: Oracle v. Google. This first phase was for copyright infringement. In many ways, this was a run of the mill case, but the stakes are something we haven't seen in a technology ... http://madisonian.net/2012/05/07/oracle-v-google-round-i-jury-verdict-or-not/ Take a look at this cover. Now compare http://madisonian.net/2012/05/04/just-disclaim-hunger-pains-games/ What is it with Brits and busts? Bentham asked that his head be preserved (and his body) as part of the auto-icon. I was listening to Wendy Brown's lecture on Bentham and she reminded me of this oddity. As she explained, Bentham seemed to think that statues were less utile ... http://madisonian.net/2012/05/04/b-is-for-bentham-b-is-for-branson-of-heads-as-odes/