You often hear it repeated that "ignorance is no defense" to breaking the law, but it may actually be working in one copyright infringement lawsuit. Ray Beckerman has the details on a case where the RIAA is suing a teenager who claimed "innocent infringement" as a way to get the [...]

David Carr, over at the NY Times, has a good column pointing out not just how silly NBC's efforts to block all websites from showing the Olympics opening ceremony before it broadcast the (long delayed) ceremonies itself was, but also how it didn't make much sense. Comparing it to the [...]

We've never quite understood Nicholas Negroponte's position when it comes to the $100 Laptop/OLPC/XO (whatever it's called these days). While the idea behind creating a super cheap, super durable useful computer for children in developing nations is good, Negroponte has always approached the idea as one where only he should [...]

We've pointed out in the past why it doesn't make much sense to treat "intellectual property" as "regular property," since it ignores some very important differences between the two. James Bessen and Michael Meurer, who wrote the recent book Patent Failure have always taken a slightly different approach. While they [...]

While not enough people recognize it, the real purpose of copyright law is to provide an incentive for the creation of more content. The government felt that there was a market failure, where not enough "content" would be produced without a limited monopoly, and thus, copyright was born. However, that [...]

There have been a few stories over the past few years about the fact that hybrid cars (or just plain electric vehicles) are somehow "too quiet." The complaint is that pedestrians and bikers who are used to judging the safety of a road by vehicle noise are now somehow in [...]

It's no secret that I tend to think folks who worry about plagiarism quite often blow the issue out of proportion. Luckily, over the last few years, we've seen more and more folks start to recognize that plagiarism isn't always so bad. In fact, quite often, the plagiarists do something [...]

Slashdot points us to the latest absurd patent to get approval from the USPTO. IBM has been granted a patent on the concept of storing your packaging preference information on your customer card. Yes, basically, the act of storing whether or not you like paper or plastic bags on your [...]

There's a class of folks (you know who you are!) who are well known in any kind of written forum/blog/email list etc. It's the infamous "Grammar Nazi." There are nice Grammar Nazis -- and we appreciate those -- and then there are the obnoxious Grammar Nazis who like to imply [...]

I've gotten way behind on my series of posts on intellectual property. I plan to pick it up again shortly. There's a big post I've been working on that I just haven't had the time to complete. However, one of the upcoming posts in the series is going to focus [...]

Romenesko points us to a good one for the "dumb criminal" series. A NY Times delivery carrier has been accused of defrauding the paper of over $300k by sending in fake newspaper subscriptions with the "bill me later" option checked. Apparently, he got paid based on the number of papers [...]

A bunch of folks have sent in this report from Variety about a study talking about what a big deal unauthorized movie downloading is in France. Specifically, it points out that movie downloads are "reaching box office levels." Except... that means they're basically counting every download as a lost sale, [...]

Sony, as a company, has had something of a split personality on issues having to do with unauthorized file sharing. The content side of the business is obviously very much against it. But the consumer electronics side of the house recognizes how it can be quite beneficial towards raising the [...]

If you watch the way Congress acts some of the time, you could easily mistake them for kindergartners at times, with the way they have petty grievances and blow attacks on each other totally out of proportion. Both parties engage in these silly petty spats from time to time, so [...]

Much has been made of John McCain's status as a self-proclaimed "computer illiterate." Juxtaposed with his rival, the Blackberry-wielding, iPod-listening Barack Obama, McCain's inexperience with all things digital have raised concerns that he is out of touch with normal Americans. Although McCain is reportedly attempting to use computers more often, [...]

For as far back as I can remember, there have always been folks who insist that micropayments are the solution to the "free" content question. That is, they believe that the solution to "free" content is to set up a system where content can be accessed for such a low [...]

Ray Beckerman, as you may already know, is a lawyer in New York who not only has defended numerous people against RIAA lawsuits, but also runs the Recording Industry vs. The People blog, where he chronicles what's going on in these cases. While I believe he sometimes pushes the envelope [...]

Almost five years ago, we wrote about a project in Burlington, Vermont to bring fiber optics to residents there. The idea was that, rather than a traditional "municipally-owned" network, this would actually be owned by the residents themselves. The article focused on the work of economist Alan McAdams, who (it [...]

The Google-sponsored Lunar X Prize has received plenty of attention. Similar to the original X Prize for a privately built manned spaceship, the focus of the Lunar X Prize is to get a privately built spaceship to the moon with a robot (so, unmanned), then have that robot travel 500 [...]

The crusade against the almost non-existent in-flight phone call menace continues. First, we had the FCC insist that it would not lift the ban on in-flight use of mobile phones, in part because of worries from people about having to sit next to someone yapping away. Then, a few months [...]

It's almost cute when long-time newspaper columnists with almost no grounding in basic economics try to come up with plans to "save" the newspaper industry. It almost always ends up demanding some form of collusion, government bailout or a complete suppression of basic economics. Sometimes all three. We've seen ideas [...]

Last week, we wrote about how the massively successful opening of The Dark Knight showed (once again) how little an impact "piracy" has on movies. But don't tell the movie industry that. The LA Times is running a bizarre article with movie industry folks claiming that their anti-piracy efforts are [...]

The news that The Rolling Stones have ditched EMI for rival Universal Music is being painted in the press as the latest blow to EMI since it was taken over by a private equity firm. It's already lost Radiohead and Paul McCartney, and other artists like Coldplay have complained about [...]

Not so long ago, the BBC did a scare-mongering show about the supposed "threats" of WiFi radiation on children. Never mind the fact that it was later pointed out that the program used horrendously bad science, that actual scientific tests have shown the fears to be totally overblown (the amount [...]

It's been almost four years since we first wrote about textbook publishers freaking out over file sharing of textbooks, and it appears that not all that much has really changed in the interim, other than the fact that it's actually becoming a little more common for students to find scanned [...]