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:
I wrote a piece for Techdirt about how a shift from the “permisionless”—but paid—DVD rental business to the permissions intensive movie streaming has prevented Netflix Instant from having anything like the selection of old-fashioned Netflix.
For the third year in a row (see 2012, 2013) I’ve put together the April Fools’ Day edition of EFF’s EFFector newsletter. I feel like the tide has really turned against online April Fools’ jokes, but to my mind this is something different. There’s no trying to trick people, no ha-ha-this-is-the-opposite-of-what-we-normally-do, no lame fake acquisition, just jokes. What’s wrong with jokes?
I’ve just finished reading Robert Spoo’s book “Without Copyrights,” an academic look at the history of American publishing in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when American copyright first did not apply at all to works first published abroad, and later applied only with strict manufacturing and notice requirements. The first half of the book documents the interesting practice of copyright-like trade courtesy among publishers, through which those businesses kept the costs of books relatively stable, paid authors through voluntary payments, and internally punished defectors from the system.
Inspired by the cover of Newsweek’s now notorious return to print, I made a couple of bitcoin masks for mysterious Satoshi cosplay. In case it’s not obvious, that’s the bitcoin B on its side—a great look.
In order to serve its purpose at all, encryption and secure communications software has to be single-mindedly dedicated to protecting and promoting its user’s interest. In the real world, that dedication can be subverted in a handful of ways. Broadly speaking, these failures can come from with technical problems, or from the developer’s interest being misaligned with the user’s.
The New York Times launched a major redesign last month and, as is the way with these things, got a bunch of angry comments from pitchfork-wielding Times readers who wanted to be able to print articles with a single click instead of two. And though public editor Margaret Sullivan claims to have sifted through though thousands of comments, my one little nitpick hasn’t been addressed.