Category Archives: good code

Here’s a demo of San Francisco’s implementation of Ranked Choice Voting — permitting people to vote for their first choice in an election, but then allowing their preferences to count if the first choice loses. As many have observed, this would make it easier for people to vote for their first choice (e.g., a 3d party candidate certain to lose), without having that vote increase the likelihood that their third (or 100th) choice wins. Continue reading →

Philadelphia is considering adding WiFi boxes to all street lights, making the whole city WiFi alive. What I like best about this idea is how the link to street lights suggests how we should think about this resource:
(1) Is it free? No, just as street lighting costs money, it will cost money to put Wifi boxes on street lighting.
(2) Is it free. Yes, like lighted streets, and air conditioned city hall, you won’t have to pay to enjoy the resource.
(3) So it is free and not free: yes, as all great public resources are.
And as with all great public resources, this will benefit Philadelphia in ways we cannot begin to imagine. Let the city provide a platform, and watch the entrepreneurs find a million ways to make it valuable. Did anyone have any clue about all the ways the GPS would be used once Ronald Reagan set it free? Continue reading →

P2PCongress’ plan to provide access to easy P2P distributed archives of Congressional hearings is both useful and a killer example of non-infringing use. Others?… Continue reading →

Siva’s got a great piece in Salon on the INDUCE Act. Just remember, he was a guest blogger here first. Continue reading →

So many reasons to love Amazon and Google, but here’s another. Robert Greenwald‘s film, OutFOXed, has been out for a week. It is the #1 ranked DVD at Amazon, and the first relevant “Murdoch” on Google. Continue reading →

So the New York Times ran a magazine piece about Robert Greenwald‘s latest political documentary, OutFOXed. Stanford’s CIS and the great folks at Fenwick & West have been advising Greenwald (pro bono) about how best to exercise his fair use rights in making this critique of FOX News.

This clip gives you a sense of the issues we faced. And so you’ll see how relieved I was to read Dianna Brandi’s (VP for legal affairs at FOX) comment in the Washington Post: “People steal our footage all the time…. We generally sort of look the other way.”

I take it she’s referring to the fair use by others of FOX’s footage, and if so, then bravo FOX. Fair use, of course, is not stealing, even though lawyers who know better like to use that false description as often as they can. (But if she really means FOX footage is being stolen, then that’s awful. Get better locks, Fox.)

I actually knew nothing about FOX News before working on this film — not much time for network news, and I had only ever heard Bill O’Reilly once, on Fresh Air. And while I came to the project with low expectations about any news network, I was still astonished. As you’ll see when you buy the DVD or host a MoveOn.org house party, there’s a lot to be amazed at. The most powerful is an amazingly unFAIR and unBALANCED clip with Jeremy Glick and Bill O’Reilly. Not unlike (but much worse than) the exchange Georgetown Professor David Cole described. (Washington Post).

As the Times article describes, Greenwald’s style for distributing documentaries may be the beginning of something new — political criticism, using interviews and clips, making a strong political point, distributed through DVDs and political action groups. (See some other examples here). On what theory does he, and others, have the right to use such material without permission? On the free culture theory we call the First Amendment: Copyright law must, the Court told us in Eldred, embed “fair use”; “fair use” is informed by First Amendment values; the values of the First Amendment most relevant here are those expressed in New York Times v. Sullivan. As with news-gathering, critical political filmmaking needs a buffer zone of protection against the overreaching of the law. And if the potential of this medium — now liberated by digital technology — is to be realized, we need clear precedents that establish that critics have the freedom to criticize without having to hire a lawyer first.

Watch the movie. Celebrate the freedom it represents. It is a particularly American freedom that we should celebrate and practice more often. Continue reading →

Thanks to the American Museum of the Moving Image, Presidential campaign television commercials throughout history. Continue reading →

Cory’s speech at Microsoft on the mistake of DRM. (PDF) (thanks Jeremie!) Continue reading →

Not that one should expect that Apple reads blogs, but very cool idea in any case!

Bruce Schneier’s got a new op-ed on warrants as a security countermeasure. Very nice. Continue reading →