Politics and Law

Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, is taking issue with a description of how a discussion with one of his aides led the late Aaron Swartz to campaign against Hollywood-backed copyright bills.

At an event in San Francisco last weekend, Peter Eckersley, Swartz's former roommate and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's technology projects director, told an audience that the late activist created the advocacy group Demand Progress after a fruitless meeting with one of Leahy's aides.

Aaron Cooper, who works for Leahy -- the author of the Protect IP Act -- as the chief intellectual property … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- A fruitless Capitol Hill meeting to discuss digital copyright legislation prompted the late activist Aaron Swartz to launch the Demand Progress advocacy group, his former roommate said at a gathering here last weekend.

Swartz was so frustrated with congressional willingness to break the Internet on Hollywood's behalf that he created a group to channel online outrage into political activism, said Peter Eckersley, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's technology projects director.

Eckersley said Swartz had met with Aaron Cooper, who works for Protect IP author Patrick Leahy as the chief intellectual property counsel for the Senate Judiciary … Read more

The Federal Communications Commission's chairman, Julius Genachowski, wants to see gigabit speed broadband services in all 50 states by 2015.

At a meeting of U.S. mayors in Washington, D.C., today, Genachowski called on municipal leaders and service providers to deploy gigabit speed broadband in at least one community in each of the 50 states in the next two to three years. Genachowski said that by participating in the "Gigabit City Challenge" communities would turn themselves into innovation hubs that would create valuable jobs for its citizens.

Genachowski has been a big proponent of faster broadband … Read more

Al Gore has just purchased a big chunk of Apple stock by exercising his Apple stock options.

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Gore exercised options on January 15 to buy 59,000 Apple shares at the price of $7.475 a share.

That means Gore paid around $441,000 for his load of Apple stock. With the shares trading just under $500 this morning, Gore's investment is now worth around $29.5 million.

Of course, Apple stock has been falling recently, although that could turn around next week if the company releases good results … Read more

It was one year ago today that an unprecedented outcry against the Stop Online Piracy Act proved to Washington officialdom that sufficiently irritated Internet users are a potent political force. After Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist and other major sites asked their users to contact their representatives, the deluge of traffic knocked some Senate Web sites offline, and votes on both bills were indefinitely postponed.

The massive public outcry that, by some counts, involved more than 10 million Internet users concerned about the proposals' impact on free expression has turned the protests into a cautionary tale on Capitol Hill. Aides now worry … Read more

During a press conference earlier today unveiling his proposals for new gun-control regulations, President Obama said he will ask Congress for $10 million to fund a study by the Centers for Disease Control on the impact of video games and "media images."

It's a reasonable enough request. Gaming industry groups have said they'd welcome serious scientific research into the issue, though it's entirely unclear what the results of that research will lead to. And after what happened in Newtown, Conn., everyone -- from video game makers to movie producers to local news outlets to gun … Read more

A politically ambitious Justice Department official who oversaw the criminal case against Aaron Swartz has come under fire for alleged prosecutorial abuses that led the 26-year-old online activist to take his own life.

Carmen Ortiz, 57, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts who was selected by President Obama, compared the online activist -- accused of downloading a large number of academic papers -- to a common criminal in a 2011 press release. "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar," Ortiz said at the time. Last fall, her office slapped Swartz with 10 additional … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Peace appears to be breaking out between mobile Internet users and regulators.

During the three-day Innovation Policy Summit here at CES, members of Congress, FCC commissioners, industry representatives, and consumer groups found little to disagree on, whether the topic was incentive auctions for more broadband spectrum, retiring legacy copper networks in favor of native IP, sharing government spectrum in the 5 GHz band for high-speed Wi-Fi, or the continuing threat of international efforts to turn Internet governance over to repressive national governments so they can destroy it.

Some minor skirmishes broke out, of course, but the conversation this week … Read more

Ahead of a meeting between Vice President Joseph Biden and video game makers, one of the trade organizations representing game developers put out a statement today saying it "does not seek to impede more scientific study about our members' products."

In a letter to Biden the International Game Developers Association's Daniel Greenberg wrote that the organization would "welcome more evidence-based research into the effects of our work to add to the large body of existing scientific literature that clearly shows no causal link between video game violence and real violence."

Greenberg also urged Biden to … Read more