Remembering Techdirt Contributors Sherwin And Elliot

from the leaving-their-mark dept

It's been a rough year for our community of tech policy advocates, with us losing two of our own, Sherwin Siy in July and then Elliot Harmon in October. We remembered Sherwin here, and the EFF wrote about Elliot over there.

But what we realized is that both of them had also written here at Techdirt, so we thought we'd use this end-of-year time of reflection to share those posts from the Techdirt archives.

Sherwin appears to have had just one post, but it was a quintessentially Sherwin post that both relished the absurdity of the world, while diligently explaining it:

"Die Another Eh: What Does It Mean Now That James Bond Is In The Public Domain In Canada?"

Elliot also wrote about wayward applications of intellectual property laws. His first post here was about a winner of the EFF's stupid patent of the month "award," which was bestowed upon Ford for having patented a windshield. He then later wrote about another stupid patent with Daniel Nazer, this time "celebrating" Elsevier's patent on peer review.

He also wrote about copyright getting out of hand, including in this post about how current copyright policy creates dangers to research.

Of course, IP isn't the only thing to worry about in tech policy; there's also the chilling efforts to increase liability for platforms. He wrote about the problems with these proposals too, counseling Congress not to force platforms to censor their users, and warning about the inevitable harms of SESTA/FOSTA in several other posts:

• Google Will Survive SESTA. Your Startup Might Not.
• House Internet Censorship Bill Is Just Like The Senate Bill, Except Worse
• Internet Censorship Bills Won't Help Catch Sex Traffickers

These battles obviously continue, and somehow we'll have to fight them without two of our closest and smartest allies. But while Sherwin and Elliot may not be here anymore, their insights will live on.

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Filed Under: elliot harmon, sherwin siy