I Discovered Tech Dirt Last Week

I discovered the blog Tech Dirt last week, and I find that I’m getting a huge amount of materials for my Twitter feed from there.  (You are following me on Twitter, aren’t you?) Tech Dirt deals with stories on “government policy, technology and legal issues that affect companies ability to innovate and grow.”  I think it’s a great source of information on copyright and intellectual property.  Here’s a sampling of recent material from the site:

• Comic book writer Mark Waid defends copying, points to the value of the public domain.
• Blockbuster’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing shows that just being big and old doesn’t mean you can dominate the market. (Think about it, Blockbuster should have been able to hold off newcomer Netflix.  But it wasn’t even close…)
• Why does the NY Times rely so often on single anecdote trend pieces not supported by the data?
• Yes, the DMCA is still quite controversial.  That’s the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  And it’s been a hot issue ever since it was passed back in 1998 because it cut back on fair use provisions of digital media.  A great round up of material on this law.

As you can see, these posts come from blog with a lot of intelligence, a modest amount of snark, and that is not in the bag for Big Media.