Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Smells Like Free Culture (Donna Wentworth). Legal Affairs has an amusingly over-the-top look at the student-led Free Culture movement, casting Larry Lessig in the role of Kurt Cobain/Karl Marx: AT SWARTHMORE COLLEGE, the crowd is mostly students, and maybe a few professors and interested outsiders. It's a typical turnout for a public lecture by a well-known law professor. But there is something different and a little odd about this group. Swarthmore doesn't have a law school, so the audience includes no young men in suits that still have the label attached, and no young women with high-heeled shoes so new the soles aren't scuffed. And there is something else, something funny about the T-shirts. Everywhere you look, there are T-shirts with slogans, not logos. No "Tommy Hilfiger" and "Ralph Lauren" here. Just shirts with references too obscure to parse. What is "Downhill Battle"? Or "Grey Tuesday"? One kid has a shirt with the picture of a skull and crossbones on it, and written boldly across it are the words "Home Taping is Killing the Music Industry." Look closer, and you'll see, in tiny type, "(And it's fun)." Fellow ILAW alums will know what I mean when I say I feel this scene isn't complete without Yochai. Link thanks to Frank and IP News blog. [Copyfight] 9:29:08 PM    comment []

Food and Festivity. Ruth Reichl, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, responds to listener-inspired holiday cooking concernsfrom how to prepare wild turkey, to how to find a good butter babka recipe. [WNYC New York Public Radio] 9:12:44 PM    comment []

Inventing a Crisis. Contrary to what the privatizers are saying, we don't have to destroy Social Security in order to fix it. By PAUL KRUGMAN. [NYT > Opinion] 9:12:39 PM    comment []

More on the Value of Liberal Arts Majors. Reader Dulani Jeetander writes: I thought the earlier NY Times article missed the point regarding training in the liberal arts. This article shows the other side of all those well trained (and paid) engineers and computer scientists who despite their facility with equations have a hard time communicating. [Leiter Reports] 9:08:04 PM    comment []

From BNA, the news that OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF USERS HATE POP-UP ADS Around 95 percent of web users react negatively to pop-up advertisements, web usability expert Jakob Nielsen says in an article on the most hated online advertising techniques. Nielsen said most studies focused on how successful ads were in driving traffic but few, if any, took into account the user experience of online advertising. 10:38:53 AM    comment []