I came across this 1997 piece by Lee Sandlin in a discussion on the WELL, started reading it, and was absorbed all the way to the end. Like the author, I grew up playing WWII soldier with the neighborhood kids, and the enemies were always the Germans or the Japanese — since then (the 1960s), […]
At a holiday party last night, conducted at a fellow public-interest organization, I learned to my shock that my colleagues at this organization have been blocked by their management-information-systems (MIS) manager from using AOL Instant Messenger.
Look, I understand the traditional MIS arguments against chat clients — security, bandwidth, copyright infringement, etc. — but the […]
Veteran tech journalist and commentator Dan Gillmor has announced that he is leaving the San Jose Mercury News to embark upon a citizen-journalism project. You can read more about his plans here.
I’ve been pushing for nearly 15 years the notion that journalism, thanks to cheap computers and the Internet, is something that everyone will […]
The House finished business yesterday without passing the copyright “minibus” bill that included a number of changes to copyright, some of them good, some of them not so good. The “minibus” was a subset of HR 2391, the huge omnibus copyright bill, containing 8 separate bills, and which PK and others vigorously opposed. […]
An interesting op-ed by Jim Clarke in today’s New York Times talks about today’s Supreme Court argument concerning state restrictions on out-of-state wine shipments. One of the arguments advanced in favor of such restrictions is that they make it harder for children to obtain alcohol, and that it is difficult, if not […]
Last night, we filed our reply brief in our case challenging the FCC’s “broadcast flag” decision. The broadcast flag scheme, for the uninitiated, is a copy protection mechanism that allows broadcasters to limit transmission and redistribution of digital TV content to devices “authorized” by the FCC. PK is organizing and financing the […]
After Pennsylvania Governor Rendell signed HB 30, a bill that requires municipalities to ask permission from local telephone companies if they want to provide telecommunications services, much was made of the fact that the proposed free (or low cost) WiFi service in Philadelphia would not be affected. In some last minute negotiations, Verizon, […]
As many of you know, we spend a lot of time beating up on the recording industry and motion picture industry at Public Knowledge. Today, though, I want to heap a little bit of praise on the former. Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed some baby steps in the right direction for
some […]