You may recall that last month, a Pakistani court ordered that the entire site of Facebook be blocked from the country because a German woman using the site had created an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" page, in response to the recent "threats" against South Park's writers, concerning a recent episode of that show. We thought that was a bit extreme, though we got a surprising number of comments from people in Pakistan who strongly agreed with the ruling, and were rather quick with an insult for
We've already discussed how operations like DigiProtect and ACS:Law are operating a rather questionable business of purposely putting content online, tracking the IP addresses of anyone who downloads that content, and then sending letters demanding payment to avoid a lawsuit. While it's not clear if any of these lawsuits are ever filed, many people are frightened into just paying up, even if they've done nothing wrong. And, in fact, it appears that many innocent users are receiving these lette
Back in December, we wrote about a submission from someone talking about the new Sherlock Holmes movie, and how it was possible because of the public domain. The truth turned out to be more complicated, but perhaps a better (and more accurate) example of the same point is the new Alice in Wonderland film. There have been a bunch of different movies based on the famous Lewis Carroll book, which has been in the public domain for quite some time.
Michael Weinberg does an excellent job highlighti
There's a great post about a recent Clay Shirky talk that highlights one of the key reasons why I think so many people have trouble understanding the economics of abundance. In the talk Shirky points out that, as a society, we're not really hard-wired to deal with abundance:
Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity.
Indeed, if you look at all of human history, probably 99.999999% of it has been about dealing with the issues of scarcity. In fact
David Herron alerts us to the news that it's finally occurred to the brain trust at Universal Music that, perhaps, CD prices were too high. They've introduced a "new pricing structure," which effectively means they've lowered the suggested retail prices on many CDs to between $6 and $10. Amusingly, the article quotes an anonymous person at a competitor who doesn't like this at all: "Why does Universal feel the need to get below $10?" Uh, perhaps because the market is shrinking because people
It's no secret that I'm a supporter of allowing more skilled immigrants into the US. The arguments against it make little sense and are usually thinly veiled racism against foreigners. Plenty of studies have shown that skilled immigrants help create new jobs rather than take them away. And barring skilled immigrants from coming into the US just means that they end up working for non-US competitors, rather than helping US companies grow. It's hard to fathom a reason to be against increasing s
It looks like Section 230 protections win out again. Some of the regular critics on this site like to make odd claims about Section 230 -- insisting the Section 230 is quite limited, leaving a site liable if it cannot prove who created the content, or that it simply does not apply, if the site in question "helped" create the content in any way. A new ruling should help clear up those misconceptions. The case involves a car dealer, Nemet Chevrolet, that was upset about negative reviews on Cons
We've had plenty of discussions about Thomas Jefferson's views on the patent system. He is, clearly, the father of the patent system in the US. While he was incredibly skeptical of the idea of granting any monopolies originally, he did come around to accept patents in very limited circumstances, and when he oversaw the patent system, he was careful to make sure that the downsides of such monopolies were limited. Separately, for many years, I've heard the story of how Ben Franklin purposely d
This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com.
Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.You don't often get to see the details of a massive data center. The companies that run them tend to keep things pretty quiet, as they view the datacenter as a competitive advantage. Thus, what happens in Google's datacenters remains mostly a mystery. And yet, it seems that the
In domain name arbitration disputes, it often seems like the big name almost always wins -- but apparently not always. Canadian search engine Groovle (which actually uses Google as its underlying technology) has won a domain name dispute with Google, as the panelists reviewing the dispute said that Groovle wasn't simple enough to confuse people, and people probably thought of the word "groovy" or "groove" more than Google when they saw Groovle. This really is a bit surprising, since it's prett
Reader BakaYaro points us to this article about OPTi, the company that recently won a $21.7 million patent ruling against Apple, where the company's CEO insists it's not a patent troll because it's only suing over patents that it got itself. It seems that Bernie Marren is trying to redefine what a "patent troll" is to mean just someone who buys patents and sues. But the real story shows that OPTi is yet another example of patents harming, not helping, innovation. The company used to produce p
Oh boy. Here's a fun one. You had to expect that there would be more defamation lawsuits about Twitter following the first one involving Courtney Love, but this one is quite impressive, considering of all the twists and turns that must be followed. It involves some company promoting something called "The Cookie Diet" (which appears to be exactly what you would think) suing Kim Kardashian for libel. If you don't keep up with pop culture, Kim Kardashian is one of those people famous for being
