Category Archives: Uncategorized

Five out of the six candidates supported by IPac won yesterday, including most critically, Rick Boucher. Continue reading →

The New Yorker’s November 1 editorial on the upcoming election is by far the most thorough and compelling explanation of why we should vote for John Kerry. Continue reading →

The WiredCD is here, bundled in the November issue of Wired. Amazing, beautiful, so amazingly cool. Here’s a great interview on Talk of the Nation with Chris Anderson and Kathleen Hannah of Le Tigre. Continue reading →

Sorry for the silence re HR 4077, but it took sometime to get this cleared. Anyway, as you may have read, Hatch’s plan was stalled by a couple Senators placing a “hold” on his effort to do as I reported before. Here’s McCain’s statement, and a letter from Consumers Union and Public Knowledge. Continue reading →

I’m here at home talking about Ted Nelson‘s ideas. Continue reading →

Dave Weinberger has a great story on copyright abuse, this one involving (a) god. Continue reading →

And neither did we.
EFF and CIS received news of a huge victory yesterday in the Diebold case. In an opinion released yesterday, the Court held 512(f) of the DMCA could be used affirmatively against the company for its baseless claims of copyright infringement brought against the Swarthmore students who posted memos from Diebold on the net. These are the same amazing students who then launched the Free Culture Movement. Continue reading →

What particularly strikes me in reading over the comments (not that I’ve been able to read carefully all of them) is the challenge of managing uncertainty. It is uncertainty that pervades the topics that I’ve touched on in my postings and that have provoked many of the comments. I started with IP, where the underlying uncertainty is that we just don’t know the social value of creating enforceable legal rights in intellectual property. In the case of physical property, we know or think we know that something like the present definition of rights, including such limited exceptions to private property… Continue reading →

Interesting comments, as usual; and since this is my last day as Larry’s guest blogger, I think I’ll limit myself to responding to comments. (Unfortunately, I can’t respond to all–and of course some comments are responded to very well by other commenters. I am impressed by the quality and interactive character of many of the comments.) One commenter corrected my statement that the Copenhagen Consensus had ranked global warming last on the list of the world’s ills. For one thing, the list is very incomplete (more on that below). For another, what the conferees were asked to rank were solutions,… Continue reading →

My posting on the Copenhagen conference, and its downgrading of global warming, provoked a neat hostile comment: you (Posner) criticize these economists for opining outside their fields, but isn’t that what you do all the time? Well, yes, but here’s my defense: you don’t have to be an expert in a field to criticize the experts, provided you know enough about the field to understand what the experts are saying and writing, to be able to spot internal contradictions and other logical lapses, sources of bias, arguments obviously not based on knowledge, carelessness in the use of evidence, lack of… Continue reading →