Stuart and Jonathan have both commented on the legal analysis in today’s City of Arlington v. FCC opinion from the Supreme Court, about which I have nothing to say. I want to direct your attention to footnote 1 in Justice Scalia’s opinion for the majority. He has just introduced one of the parties, “CTIA-The Wireless […]
Author Archive | David Post
More on the GOP and the Internet
Back last fall, I suggested (here, and here) that there appeared to be some movement among the Republicans to take on the mantle of “Internet freedom/innovation” as a political position, both because it is an issue on which the Democrats, with their hands deep into Hollywood’s pockets and vice versa, are very vulnerable, and because […]
Some Important Thoughts About Internet Governance
David Bollier and John Clippinger have an extremely interesting short essay on “The Next Great Internet Disruption: Authority and Governance” that is well worth reading. They start from Reed’s Law: When we look back on the past twenty years of Internet history, we can more fully appreciate the prescience of David P. Reed’s seminal 1999 […]
Colin Davis, R.I.P.
British conductor Colin Davis died this past Sunday, age 85. Davis was an extraordinarily gifted musician – to my ears, the greatest conductor of the last 30 years* (the one possible exception: James Levine). He holds a special place in my affections because he “taught” me what conductors do, and how important they are. In […]
Note to Trademark Office: This is Not Trademarkable
ATX Brands LLC, which owns Bikinis Sports Bar and Grill (in Bikinis, TX), has obtained a federal trademark for the mark “Breastaurant” in connection with “restaurants and bars.” [I was hoping that this Yahoo story got it wrong somehow – but I checked at the Trademark Office site, and indeed, the term has been registered […]
Bribery? Extortion? Political Speech?
Here’s an interesting case: Someone posts a video on YouTube showing State Rep.Tarah Toohil (R PA) as a young woman smoking what appears to be a bong and about to kiss a woman sitting nearby. Rep. Toohil acknowledges that she is the young woman in the video, but in a video response says “I am […]
The Supreme Court’s Small (But Helpful) Step Towards Copyright Sanity
The Court’s opinion in the Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley case, which came out on Tuesday, has some interesting fodder for those looking for glimpses of how copyright law is evolving these days. The case centered on a hyper-technical question involving three interlocking statutory sections in the Copyright Act (I blogged about it in some detail […]
That Troublesome First Amendment, Michigan Edition
On January 18, 2013, the Circuit Court in Wayne County preliminarily approved a settlement in a class action charging that McDonald’s had sold non-“halal” Chicken Mcnuggets that had been advertised as “halal.” A local activist named Majed Moughni was unhappy with the settlement terms (which required McDonalds to pay some money to two local Dearborn […]
Hypercard Redux
[NOTE: This brief essay comes from my friend and colleague David Johnson [from whom I first learned about Hypercard on our old Mac SE, many years ago)/DP] Why we need an Open Source Hypercard By: David R. Johnson Livecode has launched a kickstarter campaign to raise the funds needed to allow it to re-engineer their […]
Copyright Nonsense
In my Copyright Law class, I’m teaching a fairly well-known (in copyright circles) trilogy of cases from the 9th Circuit on the permissible scope of copying of computer software (MAI v. Peak Computer, 991 F.2d 511 (1993), Triad Sys. v. Southeastern Express 64 F.3d 1330, (1995), and Wall Data, v. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dep’t, […]
Uber Regulation
A nice discussion by Larry Downes, over on Forbes.com, about the trials and tribulations of the Uber ride-dispatching service and what it says about the relationship between regulation and innovation.
Jefferson Lives!
Lots and lots of nice, and nicely-wrought, Jeffersonian echoes, to my ears, in Obama’s speech today. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional – what makes us American – is our […]
Copyright Unbalanced
Back in November, I made mention of a new book from the Mercatus Center on the Great Copyright Debate(s) — Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess — in which I had contributed a chapter (on the SOPA debacle). I’m told that today – the second anniversary of the SOPA “Internet blackout” — the publishers are […]
Facebook, Governance, and Virtual Representation
Governing Online Spaces: Virtual Representation David R. Johnson, David G. Post, & Marc Rotenberg “The introduction of this new principle of representative democracy has rendered useless almost everything written before on the structure of government . . .” Thomas Jefferson, August 1816 Facebook recently terminated its commitment to hold a vote on all policy changes that received […]
Annals of Crime
The estimable Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post has written a wonderful article about the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case (the subject, originally, of Joe McGinniss’ “Fatal Vision,” and, more recently Errol Morris’ “A Wilderness of Error.” It’s an extraordinary case — The McGinniss book, which I read when it first came out some 30 years […]