patricks

Ever since GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole claimed that Hollywood produced "nightmares of depravity" that coarsened American culture and made "deviancy" mainstream, movie studios and record labels have enjoyed a spectacularly uneasy relationship with the Republican Party.

Copyright has been the exception to that strife: since the late 1990s, Hollywood-backed proposals to expand copyright law--the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Induce Act, the Pro-IP Act--have all been embraced, or at least not opposed, by Republicans.

The controversy over the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, has finally splintered that alliance. … Read more

Patrick Leahy is a Democratic senator from Vermont. The story originally misidentified the state he represents.

Click here for the corrected story.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the sponsor of a controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill, has bowed to public pressure and will yank the most controversial sections from the legislation.

The Vermont Democrat, a longtime ally of large copyright holders, said today he would delete portions of his Protect IP Act that mandate Domain Name System (DNS) blocking and redirecting.

"I'm going to set aside these domain name provisions," Leahy told Vermont Public Radio. "That we'll hold back on, because I've listened to some of the concerns on those. I think there [are] easy answers to it, but … Read more

With about 2,000 parts to choose from, four designers created high-fashion clothing and accessories from a disassembled Lexus CT 200h.

The Lexus Fashion Workshop highlights not only the talents of fashion designers Moss Lipow, Eddie Borgo, John Patrick, and Alejandro Ingelmo, but also the Lexus CT hybrid as a 90 percent recyclable vehicle.

The fashions created from the car parts push the idea of recycling and are part of an upcoming advertising campaign for Vogue.

The collection will be on display at Art Basel Miami Beach, on Dec. 1 and 2, 2011. The pieces will also be available through … Read more

WASHINGTON--For a few hours on Capitol Hill yesterday evening, it was October 1986 again, complete with legwarmers, an Apple IIc, pop rocks, Duran Duran, and cell phones the size of a cat.

The companies sponsoring this night of nostalgia include Google and Facebook, which are hoping to visibly highlight how out-of-date a law enacted 25 years ago today has become in an age of cloud computing, gigabit networks, and terabyte storage.

The law in question is the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a statute written in the pre-Internet era of telephone modems and the black-and-white Macintosh Plus. A coalition of … Read more

Few companies are as closely aligned with the Obama administration or the Democratic Party as Google.

Google managers and employees gave generously to President Barack Obama's candidacy. Chairman Eric Schmidt stumped for the president and is a member of the White House council for science and technology. Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, hosted an Obama fundraiser. Former Google employees now hold high-ranking positions with the administration.

Despite those close ties, Google is now taking a much more bipartisan approach than before. Word coming out of Washington last week was that leading up to a September 21 appearance by … Read more

Angry Birds Seasons lets you play the popular birds vs. pigs game, but with themes that match every season. You can play among jack-o'-lanterns and white-sheet ghosts in the fall; snowmen and Santa-capped pigs during the winter; or brightly colored eggs and bunny hats when it gets close to Easter. You can play whichever season you want right away--you won't need to unlock every level in order to unlock new themed worlds. With that said, the gameplay is no different than you've come to expect with Angry Birds, but maybe that's a good thing--most people love … Read more

Web activist Aaron Swartz was arrested in Boston today, accused of stealing 4 million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jstor, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers, The New York Times is reporting.

It isn't clear why Swartz was allegedly after obtaining the documents, but according to a copy of the indictment, the charges against Swartz by the U.S. Attorney include wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture. If convicted, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and three years of supervised release, according to a Boston … Read more

As part of a plan to discourage customers from pirating films and music, some of the country's largest bandwidth providers announced last week that they will take punitive action against customers repeatedly caught in the act.

So far, most of the attention has been on the potential impacts to Internet users, but now some are asking how the major Hollywood film studios and four top record companies were able to convince the Internet service providers to take part. For years, executives from AT&T and Verizon have argued that enforcing copyright was up to the content creators and … Read more