80 pounds’ worth of malicious compliance in two Pelican cases. A Feature, Not a Bug Apple CEO Tim Cook rang in 2019 with his annual shareholder letter, fulfilling his legal requirement to warn his investors about the risks the company saw on its horizon. One of Apple’s leading risks for 2019? Repair. Apple makes a…

2007, 2012, 2017, 2021. — #15yrsago Electric Slide creator foreswears DMCA, embraces Creative Commons https://web.archive.org/web/20070524091805/https://www.eff.org/legal/cases/electricslide/ #10yrsago Year of the Beasts: young adult comics/prose story of the summer when it all changed https://memex.craphound.com/2012/05/22/year-of-the-beasts-young-adult-comics-prose-story-of-the-summer-when-it-all-changed/

2012, 2021. — #10yrsago Sickening profile of Canada’s weapons-grade patent trolls https://www.wired.com/2012/05/rockstar/ #10yrsago Former Warner Music CTO: Of course leaked albums drive sales! https://www.techdirt.com/2012/05/21/former-record-label-exec-ethan-kaplan-duh-course-more-file-sharing-leads-to-more-sales/ #10yrsago Neil Gaiman commencement address explains the artist’s life https://vimeo.com/42372767

Good spaceships don’t have self-destruct buttons. — This week on my podcast, I read my Medium column, “About Those Killswitched Ukrainian Tractors,” in which I am a bit of a buzzkill about that feel-good story of a Ukrainian John Deere dealership bricking $5m worth of tractors stolen by Russian looters: https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8 In case you missed the underlying…

2002, 2017. — #20yrsago Orlando water-supply emphatically not threatened, mostly https://www.cnn.com/2002/US/05/19/orlando.water/index.html #20yrsago RIP, Stephen Jay Gould https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/20/obituaries/stephen-jay-gould-biologist-and-theorist-on-evolution-dies-at-60.html #20yrsago Lessig’s Eldred brief online https://cyber.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcroft/supct/opening-brief.pdf

Even the guy who invented them can’t figure them out. — US health insurance is a dismal swamp of scams and opacity, a system whose patient outcomes are in freefall and whose patient costs are screaming upwards on a line that it asymptotic to infinity. As bad as the whole health insurance system is, drug plans are worse. It is literally…

Your boss? Not so much. — What makes someone “good at technology?” In part, it’s an understanding of the underlying technical principles and industry conventions — what a “power on” icon looks like, say. I have a lot of that. …

2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021. — #20yrsago The annotated ETCON http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/etcon/notes #15yrsago Fair(y) Use Tale: AMAZING video cuts up Disney to explain copyright https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2007/03/fairy-use-tale #15yrsago How the right to attach can keep spectrum free https://web.archive.org/web/20070531165646/http://www.timwu.org/log/archives/134 #10yrsago TSA frisks actual (but likely harmless) mass murdering serial bomber http://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/05/tsa-gropes-kissinger.html

2007, 2012, 2017, 2021. — #15yrsago Why AACS keys will leak faster than they can be patched https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2007/05/18/aacs-updated-broken-again/ #15yrsago Saturday Evening Post poster for Silver Snail comics’s birthday https://memex.craphound.com/2007/05/18/saturday-evening-post-poster-for-silver-snail-comicss-birthday/ #10yrsago Associate editor of Elsevier’s Genomics resigns, vows to devote energies to open access https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/may/16/system-profit-access-research