Spencer Ackerman Spencer Ackerman says he’s tired of arguments like the one I made yesterday about Monsanto. In brief, I said that painting a giant bull’s-eye on the agri-giant and launching all of our arrows in that direction is, perhaps, not a fully-formed strategy. “Monsanto is a despicable corporation,” writes Spencer. “Monsanto’s evil is both […]
Nancy Scola
Nancy Scola is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in Science Progress, Politics Magazine, AlterNet, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
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Getting Beyond Monsanto.
The Associated Press is plainly trying to nail agricultural giant Monsanto for The Associated Press is plainly trying to nail agricultural giant Monsanto for unfair licensing practices that use a variety of tactics to lock small farmers and small seed companies in binding relationships, for better or for worse. Sometimes, Monsanto requires that its modified […]
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Dave Eggers to the Rescue. Really.
Melissa Goldstein points out that at a cost of $16, 320 pages and several months of production time, Dave Eggers‘ latest print project, San Francisco Panorama, isn’t going to provide a road map for the revival of the American newspaper industry. The one-off publication benefits from the work of authors like Michael Chabon, Miranda July, […]
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Counterfeiting and Bootlegging Are Not the Same Thing.
Indiana Democratic Sen. Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh’s commentary on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated internationally and in secret is, as EFF’s Richard Esguerra points out, so completely misguided that you might think he was being disingenuous — if not for the fact that there were probably dozens of other senators, on both sides […]
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Comcastic.
The last few days, a petition asking people to take a pledge against genocide has been The last few days, a petition asking people to take a pledge against genocide has been floating around Twitter. I’ll admit to thinking, “I wonder how many signatures a pro-genocide push would get?” Tweeting against mass extermination feels good […]
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Confusing Us with Their Technical Mumbo Jumbo.
Deputy U.S. CTO Andrew McLaughlin raised hackles just before Thanksgiving by suggesting to an audience at the University of Nebraska law school that moral equivalence exists between an Internet Service Provider blocking what a customer can see and/or do on the Internet and, say, China blacking out Google searches for “Falun Gong.” AT&T was understandably […]
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Benedict Tells Leaders Food Insecurity is a Moral Failing.
At the U.N.’s big World Food Summit in Rome this week, Pope Benedict gave voice to a way of thinking about food that is both seemingly obvious and undervalued in development circles. You hear about the mismatch between the world’s sustenance needs and the amount of readily available food attacked from the market angle — […]
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Supremes Question the Wisdom of Software Patents.
Seasoned observers took the wise cracks heard in the Supreme Court this week as a sign that the nine are doubting the wisdom of business methods patents. Sounds bland, but it’s really quite provocative stuff. U.S. patent practice has evolved so that inventors win monopolies over ways of doing business, even when there’s no tangible […]
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The Front Line in the War on Pirates.
Pirates of the song-ripping, not Somali, variety. Pirates of the song-ripping, not Somali, variety. Cory Doctorow passes along word that a draft version of an international agreement on copyright law has leaked, as have earlier documents from the hush-hush negotiations over what’s called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Officials from the U.S., Japan, Switzerland and other […]
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When Sharing Goes Wrong.
The upshot of the Washington Post‘s revelation that a copy of the House’s ethics committee’s weekly status report was found floating around on a peer-to-peer file-sharing network is that (a) we suddenly know the names of a few more members of Congress on whom Zoe Lofgren’s committee has its sights and (b) the prospects for […]