About my Medium posts

image

I am a huge supporter of Medium, because I am a huge supporter of the idea of Medium. 

Founded by a founder of Twitter to be a place where long-form thinking was possible, Medium has become a critical platform for spreading understanding in depth. I like it much more than an op-ed page in a major newspaper (since there’s no 800 word limit and it is more timely). I want to do everything I can to help it succeed.

Medium has now established a paid content section to its publication. That content is content recommended to its paid subscribers. I want my content to be easily available to both those paid supporters of Medium and anyone else. That want has led to this resolve:

I will publish my essays presumptively on Medium (sometimes elsewhere but I am exhausted by the submission process), thereby supporting the subscriber part of the platform (while earning the small bit that publishing earns me). But any article published in Medium will also be available here with a “friends link” — meaning a link that allows you to read the article whether or not you’re a paid subscriber to Medium. 

And all of my articles are CC-BY, meaning you’re free to take them and commercialize them however you want, so long as you credit me. 

On CTIA v. City of Berkeley

We filed our opposition to CTIA’s petition asking the Supreme Court to review the 9th Circuit’s conclusion that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Berkeley’s health and safety warning about cell phones. Here’s a clue to why no court in this FOUR YEAR litigation has yet to agree with CTIA — it’s effectively the same warning that the FCC requires manufacturers to include in every cell phone manual, just applied to retailers, not manufacturers, and no one, ever, has challenged that “compelled speech” by the FCC, including CTIA. You can read the opposition here.

But here’s a pro-tip for anyone trying to understand what this case is about. The issue before the Court has nothing — let me repeat, NOTHING — to do with whether cell phones cause cancer or any other harm to individuals. The issue — and really, the only issue — is whether a local jurisdiction must survive intermediate First Amendment scrutiny before it may require a health and safety warning. 

That sounds a bit law-geek-like, but it is critically important. This is a classic example of what Elena Kagan was describing when she charged conservatives with “weaponizing” the First Amendment. Because the single and most obvious consequence of such a NEW rule would be exactly what conservatives want here — the end of the practical ability for local jurisdictions to regulate through mandatory warnings. This is, as we’ve said from the start of this case, the ghost of Lochner in the guise of the First Amendment. 

You may not like safety warnings. I share a skeptical view about the utility of many of them. But never in the Supreme Court’s history has it applied intermediate First Amendment review to a mandatory health and safety warning. That’s why, in the last case where conservatives were trying to weaponize the First Amendment in this way, Justice Thomas wrote that the Court did  “not question the legality of health and safety warnings long considered permissible.” National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, 138 S. Ct. 2361, 2376 (2018). Yet here is the CTIA asking the Court to create a new First Amendment barrier to something “long considered permissible.”

So if you’re thinking or writing about this case, please — at the very least —don’t become a tool of the CTIA publicity department. I’m happy to defend the substance of the Berkeley ordinance — which simply directs people to the manual if they want to avoid exceeding FCC RF exposure limits. But this cert petition raises an issue much much bigger than Berkeley’s ordinance. Focus on that forest, not on this tree.

Hey “anonymous” (where is trademark law when you need it?), f*ck you.

In my inbox today: 

We are Anonymous hackers group.
Your site CHANGE-CONGRESS.US will be DDoS-ed starting in 36 hours if you don’t pay only 0.02 Bitcoins @ 1D17BLgnrtwTxk6X8gbpn2HfpEJbYV8e6M
Users will not be able to access sites host with you at all.
If you don’t pay in next 36 hours, attack will start, your service going down permanently. Price to stop will increase to 1 BTC and will go up 1 BTC for every day of attack.
If you report this to media and try to get some free publicity by using our name, instead of paying, attack will start permanently and will last for a long time.
This is not a joke.
Our attacks are extremely powerful - over 1 Tbps per second. No cheap protection will help.
Prevent it all with just 0.02 BTC @ 1D17BLgnrtwTxk6X8gbpn2HfpEJbYV8e6M
Do not reply, we will not read. Pay and we will know its you. AND YOU WILL NEVER AGAIN HEAR FROM US!
Bitcoin is anonymous, nobody will ever know you cooperated.

First, re: the “attack will start permanently and will last for a long time”: Do I get to pick? I’ll take “for a long time” over “permanently”.

Second, hey #anonymous, these idiots are hurting the brand. (Raw source here)

Finally and really: how pathetic can you be? Slow down on the Twinkies and stop f*cking up the Internet. 

A tool to get your copyrights back

I was incredibly happy to read that Creative Commons and the Authors Alliance have released a tool (cool URL: rightsback.org) to enable authors to recover the rights they had transferred to someone else. This was a project started a decade ago. It was hard then. I am very proud they have delivered it now. 

Copyright is an incredibly interesting law of property, chock through with weird exceptions and protections. One of those protections is that a creator can get a second chance with his or her copyright. If you created something, and then transferred your copyright to someone else, even though the transfer might say “this is forever …” you have the right to get it back. 

But (surprise! surprise!) it turns out it is INCREDIBLY difficult to exercise that right properly. And many creators find it just way too difficult (read: expensive) to exercise the right. 

The tool that CC/AA have created tries to make it as simple as possible. The tool walks you through the steps necessary to determine whether you have a right, and when you need to file. The tool doesn’t do the transfer, but it does help you see whether you are entitled, and if you are, it simplifies the process of making that happen. 

The purpose of copyright law is to help creators. You wouldn’t know that by looking at the way the law actually works. But where the law clearly benefits creators, we should do whatever we can to support it. 

Wonderful work by two great organizations. If it were my job to do so, I’d suggest you help support them either here (CC) or here (AA). But as I am just a fond supporter myself, I’ll leave that up to you. 

So I’ve had my first “zero-carbon-footprint-you” threat

Jeff Ray writes: 

I wanted to share a vision that I had that if you and your financial backer Mr. George Soros interfere with the 2016 Presidential Election results your carbon footprints and those of your families will be eliminated.

Sincerely…..

I’m sure he’s just trying to make me feel guilty to give up an old charity — buying carbon offsets each year. Thanks for the reminder, Jeff, I’ll take care of this myself. 

Is there a “who’s here” app?

On the theory that if I can imagine it, someone has built it: Is there an app that allows you to grab a list of names and then compares the list with your contacts and produces a list of people you’re likely to know? E.g., you’re going to a conference, and rather than paging through 50 pages of names, it highlights the ones you probably know?