Category: Other Topics
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Educating Leaders who Tackle the Challenges of their Time; Lessons from the Past: Book Review: First Class, The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School
One of last year’s CITP lectures that is still fresh in my mind is Brad Smith’s talk on “Immigration, Education, and the Future of Computer Science in America.” In his presentation on developing a process for educating the next generation of computer scientists in U.S. high schools and colleges, Mr. Smith noted that in the…
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Internet Voting Snafu at USRowing
USRowing, the governing body for the sport of rowing in the U.S., recently announced the discovery of likely fraud in one of its leadership elections. Further investigation into this region’s voting resulted in the determination that fraudulent ballots were cast in the Mid-Atlantic election that directly affected the outcome of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Director of…
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Open-Source 3D Printing and Copyright Reform: It’s Time to Revisit Personal Use Copying
Last week, I attended MSU’s Fifth Annual Conference on Innovation and Communications Law, where I saw a wonderful presentation by Joshua Pearce, an engineering and material sciences professor from Michigan Tech, on “distributed open-source digital manufacturing” (a.k.a. open-source 3D printing). The hardware Joshua presented is called RepRap: RepRap takes the form of a free desktop…
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A Response to Jerry: Craig Should Still Dismiss
[Cross-posted on my blog, Managing Miracles] Jerry Brito, a sometimes contributor to this blog, has a new post on the Reason blog arguing that I and others have been too harsh on Craigslist for their recent lawsuit. As I wrote in my earlier post, Craigslist should give up the lawsuit not just because it’s unlikely…
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Dear Craig: Voluntarily Dismiss with Prejudice
[Cross-posted on my blog, Managing Miracles] Last summer, Craigslist filed a federal lawsuit against the company Padmapper (and some related entities). Padmapper.com is a site that, among other things, allows users to view Craigslist postings on a geographical map. It is a business premised on providing value added services to Craigslist postings — with some…
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Copyrights, Fundamental Rights, and the Constitution
There was a lot to take issue with in Scott Turow’s recent op-ed in The New York Times. Turow, who is currently President of the Authors Guild, took to The Times to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, which brought physical books manufactured and sold abroad within the protective…
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Internet Voting Security: Wishful Thinking Doesn’t Make It True
[The following is a post written at my invitation by Professor Duncan Buell from the University of South Carolina. Curiously, the poll Professor Buell mentions below is no longer listed in the list of past & present polls on the Courier-Journal site, but is available if you kept the link.] On Thursday, March 21, in…
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The District of Columbia Claims Copyright on the Law
Update: They released the unofficial version of the DC Code under a CC-0 License. Josh Tauberer has the backstory. Copyright exists to incentivize people to create new works. The federal government is not allowed to copyright things, because they don’t need the added incentive, and it would be bad if they started charging for access…
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Now Available in Print and eBook: "Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring"
I am happy to announce that my new book, co-authored with Muzammil M. Hussain, is now available in print (Oxford University Press, Amazon, Google Books) and eBook (Kindle). In April of last year, I presented some of our initial findings and described the methodology in a presentation at the Center for Information Technology at Princeton.…
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"What we've got here is failure to communicate"
Since the historic snow storm, “Nemo,” deposited a NOAA-certified 40 inches of snow on my hometown of Hamden, CT, I have been watching from afar to see how the town and its citizens are using a combination of digital technology, the traditional telecommunications network, and mass media to communicate in the aftermath of the storm.…