HP detonates its timebomb: printers stop accepting third party ink en masse
On September 13, owners of HP OfficeJet, OfficeJet Pro and OfficeJet Pro X began contacting third-party ink vendors by the thousand, reporting that their HP printers no longer accepted third-party...
View ArticleSole and Despotic Dominion: how a 20th century copyright law is abolishing...
In the 18th century, William Blackstone wrote the seminal "Commentaries on the Laws of England," which contained one of the foundational definitions of property: "that sole and despotic dominion which...
View ArticleThis NES Classic jailbreak is a perfect parable of our feudal future of...
The hacks are pretty gnarly: you have to dump the game's ROM to your computer, modify it, and then reflash the console. You are legally allowed to format shift your own games, but bypassing "effective...
View ArticleJohn Deere just told the copyright office that only corporations can own...
John Deere has turned itself into the poster-child for the DMCA, fighting farmers who say they want to fix their own tractors and access their data by saying that doing so violates the 1998 law's...
View ArticleTesla's demon-haunted cars in Irma's path get a temporary battery-life boost
Tesla sells both 60kWh and 75kWh versions of its Model S and Model X cars; but these cars have identical batteries -- the 60kWh version runs software that simply misreports the capacity of the battery...
View ArticleSole and Despotic Dominion: my story about the future of private property for...
Reason's December issue celebrates the magazine's 50th anniversary with a series of commissioned pieces on the past and future of the magazine's subjects: freedom, markets, property rights, privacy...
View ArticlePodcast: "Sole and Despotic Dominion" and "What is the Internet For?"
Here's my reading (MP3) of my Locus column, "What is the Internet For?" (which asks, "Is the internet a revolutionary technology?") and my short story for the fiftieth anniversary of Reason Magazine,...
View ArticleDRM and terms-of-service have ended true ownership, turning us into "tenants...
Writing in Wired, Zeynep Tufekci (previously) echoes something I've been saying for years: that the use of Digital Rights Management technologies, along with other systems of control like Terms of...
View Article
