Do You Own What You Buy?
Increasingly, it seems that we no longer own our own stuff.

Is Your Website Yours?
Are we getting used to governments seeking to regulate websites? If I own or rent a server, and pay to connect it to a private network so that other users can access my private machine from their private machines, what is the state’s interest in the distribution of lawful data on such a medium? The regulation of Internet content is a hot topic around the world.

I understand that my real estate needs to be zoned for public good, but must we how we track visitors on private machines be a matter of policy too?

Is Your Computer Yours?
How about the operating system of your computer?  Is that yours? Not if it’s Microsoft Vista,  which you’re only licensed to use. What good is owning a computer if you don’t really own the OS? Is Mac any better?  Not if you put it on a machine Apple didn’t make.

Continued

James Boyd White is a distinguished professor of Law and English at the University of Michigan. In the spirit of Erazim Kohak, his recent talk on Law, Economics and Torture admonishes us against reducing life, democracy or law to mere economics, and to resist this trend when it is presented as inevitable.

Long ago I had the pleasure of taking many courses taught by Erazim Kohak.  He wrote poetically on the need to appreciate the phenomena of nature and life without reducing it to measurable scientific factors. His Embers and the Stars is among the richest, most eloquent, original, and challenging works of philosophy to appear in recent years. Its a gift, which is very much in the spirit of Professor White’s talk.