Flotsam & Jetsam
Florian Müller demolishes the notion that Google’s conduct with respect to the Java APIs was standard “industry practice”.
Plus, the last line is brilliant:
[T]he fact that there wasn’t another high-profile lawsuit over a hijacked API doesn’t mean anything: there simply wasn’t a need for anyone to bring such a lawsuit because no hijacked API ever reached a level of commercial significance even remotely comparable to that of Android. New types of conduct require new types of lawsuits.
Drew Magary on Gregg Easterbrook (and, by extension, most sports columnists):
As I’ve said here before, Easterbrook is the kind of uppity asshole who attaches a moral lesson to any sports result. Teams don’t lose because they’re lacking in talent, or because the other team happened to play better that day. Teams lose because EGO-DRIVEN GLOREE BOYZ ARE TOO BUSY LISTENING TO THE HIPPITY HOP TO PROPERLY REPRESENT AMERICA ON THE FIELD OF PLAY.
[…]
Never mind that the NFL itself has morphed into a money-gobbling, corporate-whoring, shit-eating behemoth. It’s still incumbent upon the PLAYERS to be ambassadors and moral exemplars for their sport, even though sports don’t need any such representation.
O RLY?
Obama on busting medical marijuana growers:
I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, “Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books.”
Yeah, that never happens.
Dan Wineman:
What if users were treated like thinking beings and not like credit cards with eyestalks?
Paul Graham on intellectual property and, without mentioning it by name, SOPA/PIPA:
When you’re abusing the legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that’s ipso facto evidence you’re using a definition of property that doesn’t work.
Also, this is the most concise diagnosis of the basic problem with music labels and movie studios I’ve read, and it applies equally well to, e.g., investment banks:
[T]he underlying problem with the labels and studios is that the people who run them are driven by bonuses rather than equity.
Paul Graham and Y Combinator are looking to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV:
The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.
(via Daring Fireball)
If both Paul Graham and Horace Dediu think there’s something here, that’s probably a pretty good sign that there’s something here.
Nat Torkington lays the smack down on the Obama administration’s bullshit challenge to the tech community (see also Tim O’Reilly’s posts: 1, 2, 3).
(via Daring Fireball)
