Connected Conversations Politics, technology, et cetera

The day the music died - oink (2004-2007)

Imagine a site where you could download any album, old, new and even pre-released!, for free and in just seconds. Until last week, an invitation-only site called Oink was such a site. Oink was shut down last week by police in both the UK and Amsterdam. What was oink? Was it […]

The extreme view on digital music

I hate music labels, and their abuse of the courts gives law a bad name in my opinion. Yesterday, Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, testified in a file-sharing case. On the stand, she was asked whether it was wrong for consumers to rip their CDs onto their […]

Finding a new windmill to tilt at…

Scott Reents sent me an email with just a single link, and man did it bum me out.

Lawrence Lessig is a famous constitutional law scholar who teaches now at Stanford Law School. For the last ten years, he has led the charge to redefine copyright in the Internet age as the founder of Creative […]

Can’t mention itunes in a google ad?!?

Google won’t permit me to use the word itunes in an ad I wrote to promote weiksner.com! Now, if google wants to sell exclusive rights to the word itunes, that seems like their decision to make. But does the law really prohibit me from advertising an article that talks about itunes? Isn’t […]

Update: good guy wins, Viacom loses

In a post last week (Chutzpah!), I wrote about the travails of Chris Knight. Chris ran for a seat on his local school board and lost. More notably, he made a funny campaign ad that was appropriate by VH1 for one of its shows. When Chris uploaded the ad on youtube, Viacom […]

Chutzpah!

This is why law suits look like government-supported coersion. This is theatre of the absurd: viacom is threatening the producer of a video that they ripped off without permission in one of their own shows. And who has the presumption of guilt now? Get the blow-by-blow in Christopher Knight’s own words and […]