Rough Drafts

Thomas Macaulay’s 1841 speech to Parliament covers the topic of copyright in exhaustive depth, but Weinberger says it’s eloquent and spot-on.

I signed up for National Novel Writing Month. My goal: To write a novel during the month of November. All considerations of quality, consistency, plot, and character will be tossed aside like so much worthless chaff, in pursuit of one goal: to write 50,000 words, or about 2,000 per day, most days. C

Movie and music moguls are hopping mad over the new technologies that are transforming digital entertainment. Washington is listening. What’s at risk? Your ability to enjoy DVDs and CDs you’ve bought, your privacy–even your control over your PC. Read more about it in my latest article for PC World,

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An almost-live report on the Eldred v. Ashcroft hearings.

Salon rides along with Brewster Kahle in the Internet Bookmobile, a van that’s equipped with a high-speed wireless Internet connection, a powerful printer, and a binding machine. They’re visiting schools, museums, and libraries, printing out hard copies of public-domain books for free. “In a print-o

Winer writes, vis a vis Google News, that “4000 pubs all reporting the same story is 4000 times more boring than one.” You could make the same claim about weblogs, but we’ll let that ride for now. What’s interesting to me about Google is that it can uncover new things — new publishers as well […]

According to a press release from research firm Evans Data, next year 63% of developers expect to be using Microsoft’s .Net, while 61% expect to use Java. Almost all of them will be using Web services in some form (87%, compared to 57% this year).

Winer has a short, simple explanation of what news aggregators are. Now all we need is a similarly clear and simple explanation of RSS. (All I could find were pretty technical pages for RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 (the latter link is not working this morning, however).

Pres. Bush got a court order yesterday to reopen West Coast ports, putting a temporary hold on the labor dispute that’s simmered there for more than a week. The thing that gets me about this is that, first, the Pacific Maritime Association (the shippers) lock out the workers. So it’s an owner-initia

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft today, in order to decide whether the 1998 extension of copyright (to the life of the author plus 70 years) is constitutional or not. Lawrence Lessig is representing the good guys. Transcripts should be available in 10 days; the Supreme Cou

Some researchers at the “Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab” have compiled ten useful tips for making your web site look respectable. (thanks, Tom Negrino)