N2H2 v. Edelman: A bad day.

A US federal judge today dismissed Ben Edelman‘s lawsuit to ensure that he could conduct research on filtering software.  Ben wanted to be certain that he could conduct legitimate legal research on filtering software without violating the DMCA, other federal laws, and the user agreement from N2H2.  This loss is yet another reason why the DMCA and … Read more

Weblogs in education

Very intelligent, thoughtful post about blogs in education by David Carraher, also a day-one blogger.  I’m still trying to figure out how to use blogs in the classroom for a course I’m teaching next Fall at Harvard Law School on Cyberlaw and the Global Economy.  Mr. Carraher’s insights are good ones for starters.

Why do we read outrageous posts?

Professor Greenspun’s first post to his new blog about public education and politics has lit up a firestorm.  It’s certainly what Charlie Nesson would call a stimulus piece — more hits to his blog today, on day one, than to the perhaps all the blogs we’re hosting in the aggregate.  There’s value in that, somehow.  I’m reflexively … Read more

Proliferation of Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons holds out all sorts of promise.  At present, of course, if you create something on the Web — a blog entry, or an audio file you’ve posted, or whatever — full (c) attaches automatically.  It would be an enormous victory if one could change the default from full (c) protection on the Web to some … Read more

Speech and blogs

Charlie Nesson always says that it’s a great way to teach to have a “stimulus piece” and then a feedback loop.  He’s a master of the method.  Here’s today’s stimulus piece for the IOP session at 4:00 p.m.

Weblogs at our IOP Study Group: Come Join Us

Jonathan Zittrain and I have been leading a Study Group at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government this semester on Civil Liberties in Cyberspace.  Today’s session, (Tuesday, April 8, 2003) at 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., is to talk about Weblogs and their speech implications.  It takes place in the Faculty Dining … Read more

History repeating itself?

One thing I’ve been wondering about from time to time: the copyright implications of news aggregators and the increasingly widespread use of RSS feeds.  I’m told by serious bloggers and technologists who wrote the code — like Dave — that it’s understood that an RSS feed is to be republished and it’s not a big … Read more

Geektivist's Guide

Donna Wentworth suggests that the “next step is a ‘Geektivist’s Guide to Net Politics’ — telling people precisely what to do with their energies.”  I think she’s definitely right in concept, even though we might keep working on the title…