Who’s up for some late-night technology policy banter?

Take a look at Jonathan Zittrain’s appearance on the Colbert Report, where he discusses his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. You can also hear a more academic discussion of the book on the Hearsay Culture podcast, which I posted about earlier this week.

The US-China Economic and Security Commission held hearings today on access to information and media control in China. There’s more than a little scepticism about promises of openness being more talk than action.

IP blogging hero Ron Coleman also came right out today and essentially called China’s recent IP reform announcements a PR effort, which are unable to have any real effect because:

The problem is that China has opened to free enterprise, but it has not opened to the rule of law.

The Myth of the Great Firewall Paradigm
Scepticism, of course, works both ways. Rebecca MacKinnon also wrote an interesting post today about the Chinese Internet Research Conference. She recounts Kokman Tsui’s contention that “our use of the Great Firewall metaphor leads to blind spots that obscure and limit our understanding of Internet censorship in the People’s Republic.”

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Bain Capital has bought a 53 million stake in the social networking site LinkedIn. This would bring the total valuation for LinkedIn to just above $1 billion. Bain invests in and sell companies, so its involvement is an additional sign that LinkedIn may be headed toward a sale. 

So, why now? And does this raise potential privacy concerns?

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Last year I wrote a brief analysis of why sports venues benefit by restricting ticket resale. It is hard to think of any other instance, perhaps other than land ownership, where the resale of your asset can be restricted or outright denied. Further, anything which makes honest people hide from police as if they were criminals probably erodes the force of law to our collective detriment.

Anyway, an Israeli firm, Ticket2Final, has proposed a novel online idea to sell chances to win the right to buy championship tickets at face value. They partner with the league that will hold the championship, and during playoffs they use economic models (which sounds like odds making) to set prices for customers to essentially bet on their team making the championship. If they do, they can buy tickets from the league at face value.

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Keep reading: it keeps getting stranger. But there may be something to like here, too.

On Thursday, Judge Alex Kozinski, the Chief Judge for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, called on Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to convene an ethics panel to investigate his own conduct. Judge Kozinski was presiding over a high-profile obscenity case when it was disclosed he had a collection of lewd photos and videos on a publicly accessible Web site, alex.kozinski.com.

Kozinski is perhaps one of America’s most colorful jurists. He has a fan club site, and in 2004 he was voted #1 male Superhottie of the Federal Judiciary. And here are the details of his “super hottie mustard” (pictured right).

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A giant legal dope slap seems headed from Barbie to the makers of The Bratz.

As you may know, Mattel accused the manufacturer of the Bratz line of dolls, MGA, of essentially stealing the idea for the Bratz from Mattel. The Bratz are estimated to generate 2 billion dollars of revenue for MGA annually.

The case hinges on a designer named Carter Bryant, who defected from Mattel in 2000 to MGA where he has since earned around 30 million in royalties. Mattel claims he developed the line while working for them, Bryant denies it.

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Jonathan Zittrain had been serving as Oxford University’s Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, until this week, when he agreed to return to Harvard Law as its newest tenured Professor. A ‘95 grad of Harvard Law, Zittrain co-founded Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which makes him a key thinker about the kinds of topics I write about here.

He recently provided a brilliant hour-long interview about his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, which is now available for free download or listening as a podcast.

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In a sizable decision for Quanta Computer Inc. in Quanta v. LG Electronics, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled to uphold the doctrine of patent exhaustion, which states that once an entity licenses its patent rights to another, it no longer has control over how the purchaser uses it.

The case involved LG Electronics of South Korea and customers of Intel products. LG licensed the patents to Intel, but then claimed royalties from Intel customers who used Intel and non-Intel products together. In essence, LG tried to double-dip.

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Do you ever wonder who owns the rights on blog comments?  Would a blogger need to seek permission to republish your comment elsewhere?  Can you take comments back? Amend them? Publish comments they inspire?

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North Oaks, Minnesota, population 4,500, has sent Google Maps a big message:

“Go away, and don’t come back.”

You see, in North Oaks the roads are privately owned by the residents. So when the Googlemobile toured North Oaks and photographed people’s homes from the street, it was technically trespassing. That’s what the North Oaks City Council claimed in a letter sent to Google, which requested that the company remove the images and destroy the files or potentially be cited for violating the city’s trespassing ordinance.

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