Designgineering

Mike Loukides hits most of the right notes (pun intended) over at O’Reilly Radar, even if his ending goes a little wide of the mark:

So the notion that creativity can be owned, and that any use of someone else’s ideas requires compensation, is nothing but an attempt to steal all of creativity. Whoever can pay their lawyers the most wins. Anyone smell pirates in the room? I am not willing to sacrifice this generation’s great artists on the altar of Hollywood. I’m not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven’t paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity.

On pirates and piracy→

Trent Walton is one of my favorite developer/designer types. In a class he taught at a recent conference, he challenged people to make good use of the best CSS3 and modern Javascript tools to reproduce movie poster titling with nothing but web interface tools. You’ll have to see the results to believe them. My favorite? Toy Story. New Adventures 2012→

It is even rarer for me to gush with praise for Democrat politicians than for Republicans (rare enough already). But Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) deserves serious praise for being one of the few voices on Capitol Hill who consistently opposed SOPA and PIPA on principle. This editorial at Wired is yet another example of his being right on target:

While some have derided the events of last week as a departure from the way we do things in Washington, I believe last week is an example of the way Washington can change for the better. If more Americans took the time to be informed and call Congress when something matters to them lobbyist and special interest power would be greatly diminished.

So the question is, did Congress learn anything? Will Washington lament last week like it was a bad review that cost it business or will it recognize what happened as an opportunity to learn and do better?

Sen. Ron Wyden: PIPA/SOPA is a Congressional Wake-up Call→