Techdirt

We've certainly been somewhat harsh on Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC program in the past -- not because we don't like the idea of helping underprivileged kids building technology skills, but because o...

Trent Reznor is making it awfully difficult for me to finish the presentation I'm giving about him next week at MidemNet, because he keeps on doing stuff that should be mentioned in that presentati...

An anonymous reader called our attention to a comment reposting some fantastic thinking on the dangerous trend of believing we can own, sell or steal ideas. The comment was in response to a post on...

Way back in 2002, Wal-Mart decided to enter the online DVD rental business, launching an almost exact replica of Netflix. Of course, Wal-Mart quickly discovered what almost every other player in th...

We're seeing plenty of stories of old school journalists pining for the "good old days" (that never really existed), and that's exactly what the Wall Street Journal recently published with a ridicu...

Joe Mullin is back to let us know about the latest patent insanity, starting with a post about a whole bunch of patent infringement lawsuits based on patents held by Scott Harris. You may recall Ha...

Reader Darren sent in a link to an "opinion" piece in the UK's Independent by Stephen Garrett, a managing director of a TV production house that apparently makes some popular UK TV shows (he names ...

There's a moral panic style study being released that claims that many teens "display risky behavior" on MySpace. Of course, when you look at the details, it's not quite so fear-inducing at all. Ba...

theodp writes "Astronaut Dave Bowman may have found the HAL-9000 more believable had the Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer been equipped with the technology described in IBM's new paten...

Over the past few days there's been a lot of attention paid to the news that the RIAA has ended its relationship with MediaSentry, the highly controversial firm that the RIAA used to try to find th...