Philately: Who Needs It, Part 2
May 24Another sign that the Randian aversion to free content is weakening: the entire text of Mary Ann and Charles Sures’ memoir Facets of Ayn Rand now appears to be online. The Sures’ book was incidentally the subject of my second blog post ever.
Another Mechanism Is Possible
May 01Oh jeepers! Without the use of IP protection, wouldn’t recording artists be unable to meet the high costs of producing an album? Gosh.
Aragorn! Anarchy! Action!
Mar 17The copyright orcs at the Saul Zaentz Company were trying to shut down a pub named after The Hobbit, but thanks to enormous internet backlash, including Hobbit actors Ian McKellen (“as if it were possible to control the way Tolkien and his characters have entered the culture”) and Stephen Fry (“what pointless, self-defeating bullying”), as [...]
The Girl With the Xeroxed Tattoo
Mar 06Warner Bros. is “ditching its drama pilot about a crime-solving girl hacker who teams up with a male police detective,” because Sony Pictures is “threatening legal action over similarities” with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Attempts to decrease the similarities by “turning the white male cop into a black female lawyer and giving the [...]
Programmable Reality
Feb 22Progress is a matter of the real world becoming more and more like the internet. That has the virtue of sloganesque pithiness and the vice of being subject to obvious counterexamples. But I think it captures an important truth. Anarchism, for example, in effect calls for the open-source abundance, multiplicity of choice, and non-hierachical flatness [...]
Who Copies the Copymen?
Feb 01DC is producing a prequel to Watchmen. What Alan Moore thinks about it. Why Alan Moore’s reaction is hypocritical.
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