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(Im)Perfect Enforcement
Prohibition wasn’t working. President Hoover assembled the Wickersham Commission to investigate why. The Commission concluded that despite an historic enforce…
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Banking on Our Privacy
Privacy is something we lose actively, not passively. Listen to the verbs of our digital lives: * We browse the web and Google. * We tweet and Twitter. * W…
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Paul Allen: Patent Troll or Patent Savior?
I don’t have a great deal to add to coverage of last week’s big patent story, which concerned the filing of a complaint by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen ag…
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State-Owned Banks as a Way to Rebuild the Housing and Real Estate Markets
The financial literacy of America has improved markedly, nearly to college level, as a result of the global recession that started in 2007. What about state-ow…
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A nation of know-nothings
Tim Egan on the NYT website: "It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy dem…
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The Imponderable Privacy Problem, Again
Emotions ran high at this week’s Privacy Identity and Innovation conference in Seattle. They usually do when the topic of privacy and technology is raised, an…
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Obama on covert manipulation of public opinion
"They don't want you to know which interests are paying for the ads. The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are those with something…
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What dangers lurk within the FCC's "Third Way" Proposal?
The Progress and Freedom Foundation has just published a white paper I wrote for them titled "The Seven Deadly Sins of Title II Reclassification (NOI Remix…
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He still hasn't walked on water
Eugene Robinson's piece in the Washington Post today (plus Todd Purdum's recent VF piece) got me thinking. Is it impossible for any modern President to…
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A strange aversion to confrontational politics
John Judis in The New Republic: "Why has the White House failed to convince the public that it is fighting effectively on its behalf? The principal culprit…
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SkyRiver v. OCLC Ohio College Library Center (CA ND 10-3305) - A case that was waiting to happen.
In an earlier technical life I was in the 'Library Automation' biz, where I designed and built library information systems and public online catalogs, a…
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What the "jailbreak" exemption says about the future of copyright law
I dashed off a piece for CNET today on the Copyright Office’s cell phone “jailbreaking” rulemaking earlier this week. Though there has already been extensive c…