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Category Archives: paper ideas

new research on motivation and money

14-Jan-07

I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but those who were interested in my past post on intrinsic motivation might be interested in this study on the psychology of money, from Science late last year. Apparently even the mere mention of money can make people less helpful- “Reminders of money, relative [...]

misc. links before I go to my 8am class (ugh)

10-Jan-07

Matt Asay says every open source firm should hire a skilled, creative lawyer ASAP. I disagree; every open source firm should hire a skilled, creative lawyer, in late 2009. :)
Tim Lee and Derek Slater point out that there is a huge, vibrant infrastructure around handling your mp3s, and nothing comparable for DVDs, because of the [...]

Banning Laptops in Classrooms- a Student View

30-Nov-06

[Cross-posted from First Movers; comments off here but on over there.]
In the Contracts and Civ Pro classes I just finished yesterday, laptops were banned and ’strongly discouraged’, respectively. At the beginning of the semester, I described this as understandable but ‘regressive and damaging’, so I thought it was fair to revisit this, especially since Prof. [...]

two good reads

20-Nov-06

Things I spotted while putting off my real work:
Biella Coleman, talking about bringing free software perspectives to other domains. I used to get irritated when people said ‘oh, this is just like open source!’ but I’m getting more positive about it. Our discourse is so saturated with the notion of the market that an alternate [...]

why DRM and our copyright system don’t play nice together

10-Oct-06

[Originally posted at First Movers. Comments should be made there.]
[Update: !@#@!#@!ing POS WP text editor.]
Disclaimer
Keep in mind that IANAL, and I’m still learning the limits of some of the things I’m talking about, so my legal claims may not be 100% accurate, though I stand behind the moral and legal intuition behind them. Also keep [...]

ponderings on other economies

02-Oct-06

On the same day he spoke with Chris Anderson about the implications of Long Tail for alternative means of producing IP, Lessig blogged ‘on the economies of culture‘. The fine folks over at Tech Liberation Front have posted recently on how markets don’t need money, and more recently on the gift economy.
I’d love to have [...]

NetTrust: security and online identity verification

29-Sep-06

I’m interested in the problem of online identity, in part because of its relationship to trademark. Trademark theoretically verifies identity and source, but as anyone who has seen a phishing email knows, trademark is becoming more and more meaningless in that respect. (Many of the arguments I’ve seen for ‘we need stronger trademark’ really are [...]

Taking assumptions and flipping them completely

27-Sep-06

[Crossposted from First Movers. Comments over there.]
This note from the latest Harvard Law Review is exactly the kind of internet law writing I’d like to be able to do- taking something we take almost for granted (cybercrime is bad!) and turning it completely on its head (cybercrime isn’t bad, it is a healthy irritant that [...]

On Killing Spammers, and Other Methods of Setting Legal and Moral Precedent

23-Sep-06

I was reading one of my course books last week (probably Civil Procedure) and one of the minor notes mentioned a British case (early in the development of the jury system- 1200s? 1300s?) where a judge ordered the death penalty for a defendant despite a hung jury. The king responded by… literally hanging the judge. [...]

What happens when statistics and masses replace institutions?

18-Sep-06

[Reposted from First Movers. Law and other fields are beginning to see what free software/open source has seen for a while, as more and more skilled people move to the web and begin to give away their knowledge, displacing established (read: knowledge hoarding) institutions along the way. Clay's post, linked within, made me write about [...]