Monday’s post on Filesharing in Underdeveloped Nations: Let’s Take from the Poor and Give to the Rich linked to the interesting work that Alec van Gelder & Mark Schultz have done on the development of Nashville as a country music center and the lessons of that experience for the less-developed nations of Africa and Latin [...]

Free Press is calling on AT&T to retract their letter claiming that the IETF standards envisioned fee based network prioritized networks.

A 2-week deadlock to decide who was running the show down in Australia ended today. One of the big issues on the table was what to do with the National Broadband Network, the $43 billion project that I discussed here last week.

Liability for accidents should generally be levied against all those who create risk factors. And Phoenix Center examines if this is also the case with software developers. They determined that there are two types of software, an intrinsic variety and an extrinsic variety.

TechDirt is glorying about a Huge Push In Brazil To Legalize File Sharing. I could understand this argument against copyright if it were cast in the form of saying that the transaction costs are too high, and thus put too much sand in the gears of commerce and sharing. But this is not at all the argument – in fact, the Internet is wringing transaction costs out of the system and rendering concepts such as “fair use” increasingly obsolete.

Russ Housley is the Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and he has called out AT&T for what he considers to be misleading comments to the FCC. Housley claims that the IETF never considered fee based network prioritization as AT&T suggests, but that flatly contradicts the explicit language in the IETF DiffServ standard.

Computer and Video Games reported in May that EA Sports, an arm of Electronic Arts, would begin bundling all sports titles with a one time registration key code to access online play. EA feels that the second hand market is hurting new game sales. In order to deter second hand purchase EA has made the decision to force second hand buyers to pay a $10 fee to access online content.

At Business Insider, Henry Blodgett is at his snarkiest in dismissing Microsoft’s forthcoming Mobile Windows Phone 7 operating system as “a fantasy,” with no chance of making a dent in the market. (And when the mood is on Blodgett, he sets a high standard of snark.) Blodgett’s reasoning is simple: Microsoft will charge $15 per [...]

Sunlight Research is sponsoring a Webinar (paid) on the Oracle-Google case on Sept. 8.  Note the business model here – an Internet session put on by a patent expert, complete with background materials distributed in pdf, for a charge, as a commercial venture. Will the Larry Lessig/Tim Wu/Free Press crowd react with horrorified cries of [...]

Proponents of a dumb First In First Out (FIFO) “end-to-end” Internet architecture are typically lawyers and non network engineers who don’t understand the actual usage and context of FIFO in the paper “End-to-end arguments in system design”. That paper actually argued against a FIFO enabled network.