parker higgins

Amazon was the target of some well-deserved criticism this week for making the anti-customer move of suspending sales of books published by Hachette, reportedly as a hardball tactic in its ongoing negotiations over ebook revenue splits. In an excellent article, Mathew Ingram connects this with other recent bad behavior by Internet giants leveraging their monopolies. Others have made the connection between this move and a similar one in 2010, when Amazon pulled Macmillan books off its digital shelves.

A new paper called “Do Androids Dream of Electric Free Speech?” argues that legal scholars could benefit from looking more to science fiction works when writing about concepts like copyright, censorship, and privacy. It’s an interesting paper, and spends time going into some theories of why sci-fi is relevant as well as examining the issues that the genre explores. From the article:

My short audio project Supreme Court Clouds (2014) has gotten a little bit of media attention (largely on the back of my, y’know, real observations about the Supreme Court and technology.)

I spent a lot of the last week shaking my head at the commentary on the Supreme Court and its (lack of) technical expertise. Much of the criticism came in response to the oral arguments in Aereo, and broke down in two areas: it either misunderstood the nature of Supreme Court oral arguments and their transcripts, or mistook familiarity with a handful of Silicon Valley products with actual tech savviness.

I’ve been playing a lot of Mini Metro, a (still alpha) transit-planning puzzle game. It’s been recommended to me a dozen times by people who know how I feel about transit maps, and that element of the game is really great, but it’s also just a lot of fun to play.

Have copyright maximalists ever written dystopian science-fiction about a future where free culture wins?

Here’s a supercut of audio from April 22, 2014’s Supreme Court argument in ABC v. Aereo featuring every use (in order) of the word “cloud.” The video track is from Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds” (2002).

So this is a pretty neat thing: artists and retrocomputing enthusiasts have worked together to uncover a collection of previously unknown works by Andy Warhol from 1985, pieced together from files on aging floppy disks. The coolest bit, I think, is the recovery effort was kicked off when the artist Cory Arcangel watched a video demo of Warhol using an Amiga to paint Deborah Harry, and on a hunch went digging for more from that era.

I attended the ABC v. Aereo oral arguments in the Supreme Court Tuesday and had a great time overall. Lots of people have written about the case and the arguments—Ali Sternburg, my line-standing buddy, has eight takeaways that are excellent—but one largely unmentioned line from the broadcasters’ lawyer really drove me up the wall. In the very last few minutes of the case, the attorney Paul Clement said this about Aereo: