Christopher Leger

Time Warner Cable, the geniuses who can’t help but rip off their customers, is at it again.

Several small towns across the country are taking matters into their own hands and creating a utility broadband system for their residents. This, being a community-owned utility, offers high capacity for low price – who could have a problem with that? The answer of course is the ridiculous monopoly known as the cable industry, and Time Warner Cable in particular.

Instead of competing with these utilities by offering high quality, low cost service, they are trying to follow the path that made them billions in the 80′s and 90′s – lobby non-savvy legislators to grant them monopolies!

Cable companies are notorious for their poor customer service, so hopefully these legislators have had enough poor experiences of their own to realize what a horrible mistake outlawing utility internet providers would be, however it does not require much of an imagination to see what lobbying dollars can purchase. If you live in North Carolina, or if your state is considering a similar law, please contact them and let them know what you think of a monopoly on the internet.

The fight for a voice at the table by anyone not already an IP rights-holder is heating up. Already, the Obama administration is filled with RIAA and BSA industry oriented officials, and few if any from consumer, education, or hardware oriented backgrounds.

An April 2nd letter sent to the President requests a more diverse group of people developing IP policy. This letter exemplifies the diversity of groups that have an interest in rational intellectual property policy, with 19 different groups as signatories, is substantially more diverse than the IP rights-holders and their tired “us vs. the pirates” mentality.

The American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Center for Democracy and Technology, Computer and Communications Industry Association, Consumer Electronics Association, Consumers Union, EDUCAUSE, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Entertainment Consumers Association, Essential Action, Home Recording Rights Coalition, Internet Archive, Knowledge Ecology International, NetCoalition, Public Knowledge, Special Libraries Association, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and Wikimedia Foundation all are trying to help protect your fair and legal use of intellectual property. Please consider picking your favorite and donating to the cause.

Time Warner recently announced expanding their ridiculously low bandwidth caps to additional markets. Let me be clear, this has nothing to do with infrastructure costs, quality of service, or even additional revenue generation. It is solely about drawing a lime in the sand over what (HD video?) they do not want customers to view, because it impacts their current, monopolistic, business model and replaces it with a business model that does not charge for ” premium services.”

Time Warner is unnacceptably limiting their customers by virtue of their cable monopoly, and will continue to be allowed to get away with it as long as most communities have only one or two broadband ISPs to choose from.

Wikileaks represents the complete freedom of information. Many governments around the world are actively censoring Wikileaks, including more and more “free” and “democratic” governments. This censorship must not be allowed to become the norm and create a real 1984 Big Brother society online.

This is possibly the most inportant fight for intellectual freedom ever, and it is happening with 99% of the world’s population completely unaware. Simply by distributing the knowledge of this plan to as many people as possible, it will effectively stop this censorship in it’s tracks, so please do whatever you can to let people know about the rush to blacklist dissenting thought on the Internet.

With the exorbitant cost of higher education continuing to rise, a new open source textbook venture may save students several hundred dollars per semester, while keeping their curriculum up to the minute accurate.

The company, Flat World Knowledge, will enhance the textbook model with companion study aids and print on demand services, which could greatly add to the student’s ability to absorb the material.

Copyright has absolutely nothing to do with any national security threats, and to suggest that it does undermines real national security issues as well as any faith in fair and open government. The Obama administration has continued the Bush administration policy of holding information regarding ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a trade treaty, outside of the scope of Freedom of Information Act requests “in the interest of national security.”

Please contact

your House representative: here or 202-224-3121 and ask for your representative

Your Senators:here or 202-224-3121

And the White House: here or 202-456-1111
And let them know that secret treaties are not in the interest of the American people, and are in fact counter to anything a representational democracy represents.

A New York Times article by Kevin O’brien manages to contain zero useful and relevant information regarding the brewing net neutrality fight in Europe. The article dismissively pits “basic traffic management” against “illegal downloading.” This binary, useless characterization, as well as the “outcome of the debate” are so intellectually flawed that it makes the reader less informed about what is going on than before reading the article.

The New York Times is in serious financial trouble, and if this is what they send reporters to Berlin for, they may never be able to pull out of this tailspin.

This Week in Tech episode 183 is officially the best TWiT ever.

The panel has a very rational and intellectually honest discussion on a wide range of intellectual property issues, and doesn’t contain any of the business-side, inside baseball, filler that Dvorak or Calicanis bring up.

Honestly, it is the best hour and a half I have spent in a long time, and should be required listening for everyone interested in hearing both sides of IP law.

Lafayette, LA has done more to make its city competitive in the 21st century than almost every other city in the US.

After years of legal battles, Lafayette has their telecommunications utility up and running. Because the utility has, as its core business model, the interest of its customer first, already outperformed, in both speed and price, both BellSouth and Cox Communications, the two companies that also serve the city.

Cities should be ashamed of forcing their citizens into monopolistic choices of inferior products, and do what is best for the citizens, which, in this case, is to – at minimum – open telecommunications to all companies that want to compete, and hopefully add in a high value, low cost utility as well.

Kudos to Lafayette and the handful of other cities in the US that have put their citizens first.

Ars Technica alerted me to a very heartening story about a Harvard Law class defending a Boston University student against an RIAA filesharing lawsuit. These students are the future of the legal profession, and they themselves understand how technology can impact the law, regardless of the tactics the RIAA use in the future.

The two reasons the RIAA has had the very limited success they’ve had so far is the lack of sophistication of their targets in understanding the law and the lack of sophistication of the judges and defense lawyers in understanding technological impacts on the law. Thousands of technologically  sophisticated students just like these are leaving law school every year, and as they become practicing lawyer and judges, the benefit of an unsophisticated legal system will fade and create a more even playing field.

Please consider donating to the defense fund to defray the enormous costs that a sophisticated legal defense requires.