Tim Wu's The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires is as fascinating, wide-ranging, and, ultimately, inspiring book about communications policy and the information industries as you could hope to find. This is, of course, no surprise: Wu is one of America's great information policy scholars and communicators, probably best known for coining the term "Net Neutrality" (like many great Americans, Tim is, in fact, Canadian — we attended the same elementary school in Toronto, where we enthusiastically traded Apple ][+ software and killed each others' D&D characters). — Read the rest

More scenes from a book-tour: last night I wrapped up this leg of the tour (I'll be back in the US at the end of June for American Library Association and Copynight in DC, as well as an appearance at Red Emma's, co-sponsored by Baltimore Node). — Read the rest

In an audacious new paper, "Homes With Tails," Tim Wu and Derek Slater argue that there's no good technical or economic reason why homeowners couldn't supply their own fiber-optic internet connections that run hundreds of times faster than today's connections:

We call this property model "Homes with Tails," for the fiber would form part of the property right in the home.

Tim Wu's new NYT op-ed, "OPEC 2.0," explores the growing carteliztion of bandwidth and its consequences for America, where we already spend nearly as much on bandwidth as we do on heating oil. Tim's got a newish book out about this stuff called Who Controls the Internet? — Read the rest

My pal Tim Wu continues to say incredibly smart and simple things about copyright, this time coming up with a great working definition of fair use for the 21st century.

Tim's been debating NBC's chief counsel on a New York Times blog, and they've gotten as far as fair use. — Read the rest

Law prof Tim Wu has written a great article on JK Rowling's lawsuit against the fans who are publishing a commercial edition of the Harry Potter Lexicon website, in which he explains, in his customary clear and engaging fashion, exactly why the law is not on Rowling's side here. — Read the rest

Tim Wu, a smart and funny law prof, has a new series up on Slate that he calls his magnum opus — a series of articles examining which laws America doesn't enforce, and why:

This series explores the black spots in American law: areas in which our laws are routinely and regularly broken and where the law enforcement response is … nothing.

Copyright scholar Tim Wu has a great little piece on Slate about the legality of iPhone unlocking. Bottom line: it's legal and it's fun!

Did I do anything wrong? When you buy an iPhone, Apple might argue that you've made an implicit promise to become an AT&T customer.

My pal Tim Wu, a copyfighting attorney and law prof, is working on a new project to help authors retain control over their copyrights instead of assigning them to publishers, academic institutions, and other organizations, to stop copyrights from piling up into huge stockpiles controlled by greedy dinosaurs like the RIAA. — Read the rest

From copyfightin' law Tim Wu and government info liberator Carl Malamud comes these two pieces of news about the future of the American legal code:

Carl sez, "Public.Resource.Org released a gigapixel 'photograph' of 1000 pages of U.S. case law, a volume of what is known as the Federal Reporter. — Read the rest

My friend Tim Wu, a legal scholar at Columbia U, has finally posted his paper "Copyright's Authorship Policy," which I read some years ago in draft. I've been assigning drafts of this paper to my students all year, because I think that Tim's captured something here that I'd never heard articulated before in all the papers about copyright I've read. — Read the rest

My friend Tim Wu has just published an excellent piece in Forbes Magazine about a way to keep our spectrum free, even after the mobile carriers have colonized it: require them to allow any of us to "attach" things to their networks. — Read the rest

Tim Wu, a copyfightin' net-neutrality-advocatin' law prof at Columbia, has posted a draft of a new, stunning paper on net neutrality as it might apply to mobile carriers. In "Wireless Network Neutrality," Wu demonstrates the way that the wireless carriers have adopted the same bad practices that led to landmark action against the wire-line phone companies in the middle of the 20th Century. — Read the rest

Tim Wu — copyfightin' Columbia Law prof — writes in with this new project:

Project Posner is a free and fully searchable database of Judge
Richard Posner's 2100+ opinions. It is one of a very tiny handful
of free legal case searches on the internet right now.

My friend Tim Wu (presently guestblogging at Lessig) has a great essay on why "network neutrality" matters — that is, why it's a bad for the Internet for the cable companies and Bells to charge money for "priority" delivery of some companies' packets. — Read the rest

A brilliant analysis piece on Gonzales v. Google by Tim Wu in Slate:

Google and other search engines argue—with some justification—that preserving search records is important to making their product the best it can be. By looking at trillions of search-result pages, Google, for example, can do things like offer a good guess when you've spelled something wrong – "Did you mean: Condoleezza Rice?"

On Dave Farber's Interesting People list, a gang of luminaries like EFF's Cindy Cohn, Julian Dibell, Seth Finkelstein and Tim himself have been hashing out the debate over Google Print this weekend — it's fascinating reading, and Tim has provided links to the best of the debate:

So what are the Authors Guild and the publishers complaining about?

My friend Tim Wu is a legal/regulatory scholar who writes amazing, lucid papers that frame debates about hard regulatory questions in ways that totally blow my mind (and clarify my thinking). His Copyright's Communications Policy changed the way I think about copyright forever. — Read the rest

Ernie Miller sez, "I've started a new audio show on IT Conversations, where I'll be discussing issues of law and technology with many of the leaders in the field. You can stream the audio or download it either directly or via RSS enclosures in MP3 or AAC format. — Read the rest

Over on Lessig's blog, Tim Wu has enumerated 10 reasons that the Supreme Court is likely to hear the Grokster case:

1. These is a stated legal conflict on the Sony standard as between the 7th and 9th Circuits;
2. The 7th and 9th Circuits disagree (albeit in partially in dicta) on the relevance of willful blindness to secondary liability;
4.