Hear hear.

This is absolutely one of the most lucid explanations of why Net Neutrality is a problem that I have read — perhaps unsurprising, considering that the author, Tim Berners-Lee, can justifiably kick off the post with the statement “When I invented the Web…”
An excerpt:
Net neutrality is this:
If I pay to connect to the Net with [...]

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Wishing I knew more about German copyright law

…because that would put me in a better position to evaluate this:
WBG, a German publisher, today decided to drop its petition for a preliminary injunction against the Google Books Library Project. WBG (whose legal action was supported by the German Publishers Association as an industry model) made the decision after being told by the Copyright [...]

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Forthcoming…

Just a piece of happy personal news for those among you who don’t talk to me much:
I signed my first publishing contract yesterday!
The piece, which I wrote last week, will be out next week (how’s that for turnaround?). I’d give more details, but I remain hesitant to attach my name to my blog from [...]

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Linkages

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the digitization symposium that Michigan held in March, and in fact went back and watched a bunch of the archived webcasts over the weekend. So it was interesting to note while scanning through my blogroll today that Tim O’Reilly has expanded points made in the keynote address [...]

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The Cool and the Creepy

I just read the Fair Use comic book, Bound by Law? put out by the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain (research for my job; maybe it has some perks after all), and it’s really excellent. It’s a great primer on why and how the whole IP rights system is basically [...]

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On the other hand…

The Senate made a laudable decision yesterday.
This seems to imply that there is at least some sanity somewhere in government…

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This makes me sad.

Sigh.
[Update: ...and this is a good explanation of why it makes me sad, as expressed by Robert McChesney (of Free Press) and Lessig in yesterday's WaPo.]

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For you Wiki junkies out there…

If you haven’t already seen it, there’s a really fascinating conversation going on at Edge about whether Wikipedia represents a negative manifestation of the “hive mind,” whether meta-everything is really the best direction for web (and perhaps epistemological) development, and a multitude of other social-computing-type issues.
It’s all building off a long essay, “Digital Maoism: The [...]

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