Tag Archives: writing

All of my Deeplinks blog posts

posted on 18 January, 2017 also tagged ,

After five amazing years, I’m done (for now) at EFF. It’s impossible to boil the experience down into numbers, but here’s a big one: 215 Deeplinks blog posts bear my name as author. Here they are, collected in one place for posterity. After the first hundred and the second hundred, I picked out some of […]

Choochoobot in Source’s #botweek

posted on 28 April, 2016 also tagged , , , ,

I wrote about some of the things I learned from @choochoobot’s development (and popularity) for Source for its annual #botweek. It’s a little strange writing about programming projects, because I still feel very inexperienced, but I think there are some easy lessons to pull out here. People do not behave rationally around emoji. A large […]

Mark Twain’s ghost haunts copyright history

posted on 5 March, 2016 also tagged , , , ,

After years of toying with the idea, Kash finally convinced me to write up the bizarre copyright story that started seven years after Mark Twain’s death, when his ghost reportedly dictated a new novel, via Ouija board, to Emily Grant Hutchings. His publisher said: well, if Twain wrote it, we own it. So the more […]

NYPD denies records of copyright communications it had previously acknowledged

posted on 21 February, 2016 also tagged , , , ,

A few media outlets reported last summer that the NYPD, in its continuing efforts to crack down on the sometimes-annoying costumed characters in Times Square, had asked Disney and Marvel to initiate copyright action there. Disney and Marvel didn’t bite. I requested the communications (or records thereof) under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, and […]

Interminable copyrights and the (future) history of journalism

posted on 8 November, 2015 also tagged , ,

Over on Techdirt, I wrote a short piece about how uncertainty surrounding ridiculously long copyright terms is likely keeping newspapers from the 1920s onward out of major archives. We’re very likely in the midst of a sea change in journalism, but future generations may not be able to study what we’re producing and exploring as […]