This Thursday, my cow-orker Fred von Lohmann (who successfully argued the Grokster case in the Ninth Circuit) and Siva Vaidhyanathan (author of The Anarchist in the Library) will go to Cornell University to take on Alec French (Senior counsel, Government Relations, NBC/Universal), Cary Sherman (President, Recording Industry Association of America), Avery Kotler (Senior director, Business and Legal Affairs Napster) and Fritz Attaway (Executive VP and general counsel, Motion Picture Association of America) in a debate. — Read the rest

David sez, "Yale Law School is hosting an amazing conference this weekend on the "Global Flow of Information" that will vascillate wildly between insanely theoretical and the benignly abstract. James Grimmelmann of LawMeme is leading the liveblogging of this extravaganza, which includes talks by Yochai Benkler, Siva Vaidhyanathan and Jamie Love. — Read the rest

Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of the brilliant copyright/tech book The Anarchist in the Library, has a guest-editorial on Engadget today about "tethering" — using technological measures to ensure that all the aftermarket goodies (coffee for your coffee-maker, music for your iPod) come from the same company that sold you the original hardware. — Read the rest

I've just finished reading Siva Vaidhyanathan's excellent new book The Anarchist in the Library, a discourse on the real culture war: the fight between open systems for exchanging knowledge and closed systems that see knowledge as a marketable commodity. The best part of this book is that it repudiates technology as a tool for making policy, calling for deliberation instead: in other words, copyright strictures should be created by courts and lawmakers, not DRM. — Read the rest

The new Mindjack has a great editorial on the theory and practice of the DMCA, one that exhaustively convers the history and consequences of one of the worst, oscially damaging American laws since Jim Crow.

For those of us teaching cybercultural issues, an area of content is also blocked: the realm of problematic digital copying itself.