Adam Thierer's Blog, page 174

Software Patents in Business History

Reading the 2002 edited volume, From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing, I came across an interesting history of the first software patent—a business history, as opposed to a legal history. I hadn't seen this anywhere before, so I'll recount it here.

Luanne Johnson, president (now co-chair) of the Software History Center, tells the story of Martin A. Goetz at Applied Data Research (ADR), a Princeton, New Jersey company founded in 1959 to sell computer programming services.

In...

NYT "Room for Debate" on Verizon-Google

The nice folks at the New York Times "Room for Debate" feature asked me and a group of bright lights to discuss the Verizon-Google agreement on network neutrality regulation, as it stood at various points in the day.

Read the comments of Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, David Gelernter, Ed Felten, Jonathan Zittrain, and myself. Much of my comment owes credit to Tim Lee's excellent paper "The Durable Internet."

We're all over the place, folks . . .

What Do Prince and H.R. 1586 Have in Common?

Give up?

Both have adopted highly unconventional names in their lifetimes. In Prince's case, it was the adoption of a symbol to protest Warner Brothers' artistic and financial control of his output.

Following suit, H.R. 1586 has adopted the name, the "______Act of____," apparently because of the haste with which the Senate wanted to pass the bill last week.

The Senate's substitute amendment on this $26 billion spending bill had a placeholder bill name, and it could not take time to replace the ...

Net Neutrality & the First Amendment

There are few things I find more annoying in the Net neutrality wars than the silly assertion by groups like Free Press and other regulatory radicals that "Net neutrality is the Internet's First Amendment."  It's utter rubbish as I have documented here many times before.  But now Sen. Al Franken is running around sputtering such nonsense, as he did in this recent CNN.com editorial, claiming that "Net neutrality is foremost free speech issue of our time."   The folks at CNN invited me to...

The Great Privacy Debate on WSJ

I have a piece on Internet privacy in the Wall Street Journal today. It's one side of a "debate" on Internet privacy and tracking. I say be careful what you give up if you thwart online tracking—personalization, free content, and other goodies may go by the wayside.

My "opponent" is Nicholas Carr, whose identity and arguments I didn't know as I wrote, nor likely did he mine. His is a good piece that lays out the many legitimate concerns with online tracking. Must be nice to be the...

book review: Cyber War by Clarke & Knake

While on vacation last week, I finished up a few new cyber-policy books and one of them was  Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake.  The two men certainly possess the right qualifications for a review of the subject.  Clarke was National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism during the Clinton years and also served in the Reagan and two Bush administrations. Knake is an...

Sunlight Before Signing Disappointment

The Obama administration seems to be working to pull defeat from the jaws of victory on the president's "Sunlight Before Signing" campaign promise. Whitehouse.gov sometimes posts bills as "pending" before they get out of Congress, when it's premature to ask the public for a final review.

The problem is particularly acute today, as I note in a Cato@Liberty post:

H.R. 1586 is a "shell bill" that Congress has been batting back and forth, and it has covered various subject matters in its busy...

Join Us for pii2010 "Privacy Identity Innovation 2010″ Conference in Seattle 8/17-19!

If you're as fascinated as I am by the interplay of privacy, identity and innovation, I hope to see you at the pii2010 conference in Seattle, August 17-19! Organized by the folks who've put on the top-notch Tech Policy Summit since 2003, and co-sponsored by The Progress & Freedom Foundation (among others), this event offers a truly unique perspective on privacy—not just another policy food fight, but a true roll-up-our-sleeves, in-depth seminar on what to do about privacy, especially through ...

How to Make a $200 Million Movie

Economize!

Uncle Jack from Futuristic Films on Vimeo.

HT: Bob

The Net Neutrality Frankenstein

At ten A.M. Pacific this morning, CNET News.com asked if I could write an article unraveling the legal implications of a rumored deal between Google and Verizon on net neutrality. I didn't see how I could analyze a deal whose terms (and indeed, whose existence) are unknown, but I thought it was a good opportunity to make note of several positive developments in the net neutrality war this summer.

Just as I was finishing the piece a few hours later, another shocker came when the FCC announced ...