Josh Bryan

I’m not a dancer and really shouldn’t be too critical, but this is really a pretty sad display:

I just finished Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. This is a well written and historically grounded argument about the intellectual property (IP) “wars” being waged between IP distributors, the “Big Media”, and pro public domain advocates. He contends that there should be a limit to the rights afforded IP owners and creators. He also believes that those limits and regulations should be structured in away as to provide an effective incentive to creators in innovators to produce IP, but at the same time they should not afford monopolies to any single distribution industry or technology.

Our current laws do not accomplish this. I was a music performance major in college before switching to computer science. I have worked as a musician, teacher, film projector operator, and computer programmer. In all of my career, all of my money has been made through either the creation or dissemination of intellectual property. It is in my best interest for my IP property to be protected, but it has also been my observation that it seems that the biggest beneficiaries our current IP protections were the distributors. Lessig provides a historical perspective about why the law and market forces have established this system, and how this system once was, and could be again, different.

I have always been an active supporter of open source software, and the creative commons approach to content creation. I have argued for OSS from a technical perspective (security, reliability, vendor neutrality, etc.), and a strictly social-lefty standpoint (collaboration, community, greater good, etc.), but this is the first time I have seen the legal and economic argument laid out this completely and strongly. This is definitely a must read for anyone in the business of intellectual property.

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…)

I just saw this article, Macworld: News: EFF sues AT&T over U.S. wiretapping program, and found it interesting. Even though I beleive the organizations really at fault here are the NSA and other Bush administration entities, I’m glad to see that some groups have the rights of the people in mind. Now if we can just get congress to act with equal enthusiasm.