Science Addiction

A dormant blog by Devanshu Mehta

Month: September, 2006

September 4, 2006

A Great Cory Doctorow Speech at USC

SciFi writer, activist, “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net editor, EFF evangelist and now US-Canada Fulbright Chair at the University of Southern California recently gave a talk to people at USC that covers many topics ranging from digital freedoms to science fiction that is “truly worth listening to”:http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/audio/060830_doctorow.mp3 [MP3]. Of course, the greatest Cory Doctorow speech of them all is his “talk at Microsoft about why DRM is bad for business, bad for people, bad for artists and bad technology”:http://researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.asp?rid=3302 (streaming video). The “text of that talk is also available”:http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.html online.

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September 1, 2006

If Making Ramen Was Like Playing a Guitar

Wired columnist Jennifer Granick has a great article about how she “started thinking about what it would be like if there were an RIAA for ramen”:http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71688-0.html?tw=rss.columns which leads her down some very interesting paths.

They’d form an association — say, the Ramen Industrial Alliance of Asia, or RIAA — and announce a clampdown on the proliferation of infringing noodle shops. Their arguments would echo the music industry’s. “The chefs who created ramen deserve to get paid for their creation,” they’d say. “These noodle shops are taking profits away from the creators, while peddling an often-inferior product to an unsuspecting public that believes they are getting real ramen.”

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