Author Archives: Timothy B Lee

Ars Technica writes up law professor Eric Goldman’s argument that Wikipedia is doomed. Since 2005, Goldman has been predicting that Wikipedia would start to decline by 2010, and to his credit (I guess) he has stuck by his prediction despite … Continue reading →

Earlier this year, Princeton’s alumni magazine did a glowing profile (I’m guessing all of their profiles are glowing) of Nathan Myhrvold. I learned that he and I have several things in common. Like me, he was once a grad student … Continue reading →

Last year I wrote that Intellectual Ventures is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of our flawed patent system. It’s a firm that literally does nothing useful, its only business is the acquisition and licensing of patents. Not only does … Continue reading →

My Advisor, Ed Felten, has a post examining the problem of metadata errors in Google’s Book Search catalog: Some of the errors are pretty amusing, including Dickens writing books before he was born, a Bob Dylan biography published in the … Continue reading →

Last week I quoted a Wired article that discusses the rise of the MP3 format as a disruptive threat to the recording industry. The story of the recording industry’s decline is complicated because there are actually two different factors at … Continue reading →

Reader Rhayader wants to know what I think of this David Simon story about the decline of investigative reporting Baltimore: There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen … Continue reading →

I consider the Electronic Frontier Foundation to be the most important defender of freedom online. They led the fight against warrantless wiretapping, and they’re far and away the most important organization defending fair use in an age of ever-expanding copyright … Continue reading →

I like my name, but one of the unfortunate things about working in technology policy is that I’m sometimes confused for Timothy Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web. So let me disabuse people of that misconception: I’m … Continue reading →

Reader Dale B. Halling left the following comment that articulates two major misconceptions that one frequently encounters in the software patent debate: There is no doubt that the patent system should be more accessible, less complicated, and less expensive. Inventing … Continue reading →

I’m excited to learn that Ryan Avent has been reading Bottom-Up, and he has a really interesting post examining the implications of disruptive innovation on the growth and decline of cities: When a metropolitan area has an old, successful, established … Continue reading →