Josh Bryan

If you have talked to me about intellectual property, you will know that though I certainly believe artists, engineers, and other intellectual property creators should get paid for their labor, I am no fan of our current copyright and patent laws. Particularly, I disagree with the ill conceived DMCA. In recent news, it has been at the center of law suits and “cease and desist” letters filed by the AACS-LA (Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator) regarding a leaked 128 bit key used in DRM schemes for the new HD-DVD format.

The ensuing battle has resulted numerous Internet posts being taken down as well as the temporary take-down of many digg.com posts. This debacle only adds fuel to my belief that DRM will never be ironclad enough to stem truly intentional piracy. Instead, at best it may prevent some accidental copyright infringements, and at worst it will prevent consumers from exercising their fair use rights with the protected content.

Though I won’t post the forbidden “09 F9 ..” number here for legal reasons, I do encourage you to wear all but the forbidden key.

With the large amount of recent news about Intelligent Design (ID) being taught in science classes, I thought I would be weigh in with my own humble opinion about the matter. This tends to be a highly polarizing issue not because of the complexity of the arguments on either side (though some go to great lengths to establish such arguments), but because of the faiths being challenged by either side. Many people who have passionate opinions about either side of the argument tend to believe that by accepting the other side, they are fundamentally giving up their faith in the existence or non-existence of a god (we will make this a generic god as most proponents try to make their argument more palatable by leaving the question of which god up for debate.) (more…)