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Open-Source Scholarship

by Paul Rapp May 30, 2012

A lot of what we talk about here is how the Internet has brought the traditional companies that trade in copyrights (like the film, music, and publishing industries) to their knees. This is largely because ...

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Can I See Some I.D.?

by Miriam Axel-Lute May 24, 2012

When Kristen Eck of Delaware Avenue, Albany, went to vote on the school budget last week, she took note of the signs saying ID was required. So did one of the people behind her in ...

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Moron in a Hurry

by Paul Rapp May 16, 2012

Trademark law can be a lot of fun. Some of you ancient folk might remember the great QE2 debacle of the late ’80s when Dave and Char Shortsleeve got a nastygram from Cunard Lines, telling ...

The Marrying Kinds

by Jo Page May 16, 2012

In his widely-touted and widely-covered commencement address at Liberty University last week, Mitt Romney emphasized that “marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman,” perhaps with the knowledge that when some people hear ...

Suburban State of Mind

by Miriam Axel-Lute May 10, 2012

Have you visited our lovely suburbs Schenectady and Troy lately? No, I haven’t become a proponent of some weird dedensification plan. I’m just following the classifications that Wendell Cox, author of War on the Dream: How ...

A Good Kickstarter in the Ass

by Paul Rapp May 3, 2012

By now, you all must be familiar with Kickstarter, the crowd-funding site. It (and similar sites like Indiegogo, Sellaband, etc.) allows for bands, filmmakers, inventors, almost anybody, to raise money for a project from the ...

A Tree Is a Tree

by Jo Page May 2, 2012

The last time my older daughter visited, she and her younger sister had a conversation about Shel Silverstein’s renowned book, The Giving Tree. Whether you’re five, 45 or much older, you probably know The Giving Tree. But ...

Bone Headed

by Miriam Axel-Lute April 25, 2012

Cracked.com’s “5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women” did not initially appeal to me, but after seeing it repeatedly recommended, if with warnings about it being “depressing,” I behaved like a predictable social ...

Cloudy With a Chance of Infringement

by Paul Rapp April 19, 2012

I just became aware of a two-part article about what’s wrong with copyright law that ran recently on the business news site Bloomberg.com. It’s by the brilliant copyright scholar (and Google counsel) William Patry, and ...

I Am . . . I Said

by Jo Page April 18, 2012

It is true that I don’t like labeling. I don’t just mean in the racial-profiling, gender-stereotyping, bigoted kind of way. Nobody likes that (well, nobody is supposed to like that, but that’s another column). I ...

Just Say No (To Drugs)

by Miriam Axel-Lute April 11, 2012

You probably don’t expect me to mean that literally. But I do. Let me tell you why. I assure you it has nothing to do with feeling any right to control what you put in ...

Savage Love

by Dan Savage April 4, 2012

I have an awesome relationship with an awesome guy. He loves me and takes care of me. I’m GGG and he’s vanilla. I only draw the line at poop, animals, and children. But he’s never ...

Woolly Bully

by Paul Rapp April 4, 2012

The drapes got pulled last week on one of the most absurd aspects of major media culture—the MPAA’s movie rating system. The MPAA’s Film Ratings Board, the people who attach the G-PG-R-NC17 ratings on mass-distributed ...

Raising Our Equity Grade

by Miriam Axel-Lute March 29, 2012

I adore the Capital Region, as most of you know. But when it comes to racial equity, we flunk. Don’t take my word for it. Take the Urban Institute’s, which ranked Albany-Schenectady-Troy 93rd out of ...

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