Author Archive | David Post

In an op-ed in Monday’s NY Times, Richard Clarke, former Special Advisor on Cyber-security to President Bush, raised alarm bells about “foreign hackers, particularly from China, [who] penetrate American firms’ computers and steal huge amounts of valuable data and intellectual property.”  Neither Congress nor the Obama Administration, in Clarke’s view, is doing enough to halt […]

Just wanted to let any VC readers who might be interested in studying in Rome this summer about our Temple Law program – I’m particularly excited about this summer’s program, as I’m going to be teaching a new course of “Rome, the Roman Republic, and the Constitution” and I think it’s going to be really […]

I noticed, as I was waiting in line at the security checkpoint at the San Francisco airport waiting to board a flight back east, that there was a “Priority Line” for “uniformed crewmembers” and “First and Business Class customers.”  Excuse me, but what the f*** is up with that?  I have no problem with the […]

[** from Wallace Stevens, NY Law School Class of ’03, The Man With the Blue Guitar — though the original reads “for a moment final”, a nice example of how much meaning can change when substituting the definite for the indefinite article] The folks over at Justia’s Verdict asked me to give them a piece […]

For those of you who might be in and around Philadelphia this coming Tuesday (Jan. 31), I’ll be debating with Justin Hughes of Cardozo Law School at a Temple Law School Federalist Society event about the recently introduced (and even-more-recently withdrawn) copyright legislation (SOPA and PIPA). More details about the event can be found here […]

From Tyler Cowen, via James Grimmelmann: Soren Riis has a really fascinating essay on the rather astonishing recent developments in the world of computer chess [Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) focusing on the the lifetime ban, recently handed down by the organizers of the World Computer Chess Championships, issued against the author of […]

In Sweden, at least – where, according to this article in PC Magazine, the government has just officially recognized the “Church of Kopimism,” whose central tenet is that “information is holy and copying is a sacrament,” and whose sacred symbols are CTRL-C and CTRL-V. I haven’t the faintest idea, of course, what it means, in […]

So here’s the most interesting thing I’ve come across in 2012**. . . As anyone who reads what I write here or elsewhere knows, I am obsessed with trying to understand Internet scale. I am convinced — and it was Jefferson, interestingly enough, who convinced me — that it is simply impossible to understand any […]

Jefferson’s Moose, out in paperback at last! With a (pretty damned interesting) new preface by Larry Lessig. Just want Aunt Betty and Uncle Mack have been waiting for! [Though Oxford U Press’ crack marketing team has made sure that the paperback isn’t available yet at Amazon — which, in any event, is selling the hardback […]

In light of the recent controversy (to which I’ve added my voice, here on VC and elsewhere) about Congress’ flirtation, in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and similar bills, with various Internet-killing schemes at the behest of the intellectual property lobby, here comes the development of a Firefox extension, DeSopa 1.1, designed expressly to […]

The Op-Ed that Mark Lemley, Dave Levine, and I wrote about the egregious intellectual property bills now pending before Congress (SOPA, Protect-IP, and their ilk) was published today in the Stanford Law Review Online, and is available here for those who are interested (i.e., anyone who cares about the future of communication on the Internet).