Category: Uncategorized
-
DMCA Week: Predictions Are Hard, Especially about the Future
My previous post on DVD jukeboxes has prompted an interesting discussion among our commenters. There seems to be a lively difference of opinion about how useful a DVD jukebox would be, what it would look like, and who would use it. Personally, I had envisioned a high-end video device that DVD collectors would buy to…
-
Wikipedia as a Public Good
My post about Wikipedia and public goods prompted an interesting response from Judd Antin at Berkeley’s School of Information. He makes a number of sharp points, but let me focus on this response to the idea that free-riders don’t hurt Wikipedia: This completely depends on what your goal is. On the one hand, sure, once…
-
DMCA Week: A second orphan works problem?
The orphan works problem in copyright is real and serious. Several congressional hearings and a Copyright Office inquiry that drew hundreds of thoughtful comments—not to mention countless articles and blog posts—attest to that fact. This attention is heartening, and while orphan works legislation seems to have died this year, I’m optimistic that the next Congress…
-
DMCA Week: Where's My DVD Jukebox?
A difficult challenge in thinking about public policy is understanding which innovations have not happened as a result of bad government policies. For example, it’s generally believed that the Bell phone monopoly stifled innovation in the telecommunications sector during the 1950s and 1960s. But if we had been assessing things from the standpoint of the…
-
DMCA Week, Part I: How the DMCA Was Born
Ten years ago tomorrow, on October 28, 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law. The DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, which became 17 USC Section 1201, made it a crime under most circumstances to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to” a copyrighted work, or to “traffic in” circumvention tools. In the…
-
Maybe "Open Source" Cars Aren't So Crazy After All
I wrote last week about the case for open source car software and, lo and behold, BMW might be pushing forward with the idea- albeit not in self-driving cars quite yet. 😉 Tangentially, I put “open source” in scare quotes because the car scenario highlights a new but important split in the open source and…
-
An Illustration of Wikipedia's Vast Human Resources
The Ashley Todd incident has given us a nice illustration of the points I made on Friday about “free-riding” and Wikipedia. As Clay Shirky notes, there’s a quasi-ideological divide within Wikipedia between “deletionists” who want to tightly control the types of topics that are covered on Wikipedia and “inclusionists” who favor a more liberal policy.…
-
The Trouble with "Free Riding"
This week, one of my favorite podcasts, EconTalk, features one of my favorite Internet visionaries, Clay Shirky. I interviewed Shirky when his book came out back in April. The host, Russ Roberts, covered some of the same ground, but also explored some different topics, so it was an enjoyable listen. I was struck by something…
-
Vote flipping on the Hart InterCivic eSlate
There have been numerous press reports about “vote flipping.” I did an analysis of the eSlate, my local voting machine, including mocked up screen shots, to attempt to explain the issue.
-
Robert Laughlin's Unwarranted Pessimism
Monday’s edition of the Cato Institute’s daily podcast features an interview with Robert Laughlin, a Nobel Laureate in physics who wrote a book called The Crime of Reason about the ways that national security, patent, and copyright laws are restricting scientific research and the pursuit of knowledge. While I was in DC a couple of…