Drew Stephenson's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the good-news! dept

About a week ago I put a comment under an article about the DOJ abusing its powers mentioning that I was thinking of stopping reading Techdirt as it was getting too depressing. However I kept reading and I'm glad I've done so as this week has seen some much more positive stories, and in a week of worsening recession, continuing corruption and ever escalating global violence, I'm going to focus on the good news.

We've got a new policy for Washington Police about how to handle photographers. It would be nice to see something similar spreading across a few more forces, both in the States and in the UK.

Over 1500 organizations and 50,000 people have signed the Declaration of Internet Freedom. I'm very interested to see how this pans out in the long term. It feels a bit like this could be a test of "The People vs The Vested Interests", the key question being, will this document make a difference?

It's possibly not the done thing to say that one of my favorite posts is an aggregated one, but the collection of links about the future of assisted vision was fantastic and I get the chance to link to my favorite Sheldon comic. In all these little ways, we are becoming closer and closer to cyborgs, and I for one welcome our new robot overlords...

Of course it wouldn't be a good week on Techdirt without a story of someone trying something new and clever on Kickstarter. In another new turn-up I think this is the first time we've seen something like this without the usual trolls and their "it'll never scale / work for everyone / last / work for people without a major label background" arguments. Perhaps the message is getting through?

Staying on innovation in music, the news that an app is being developed to aggregate smart-phone concert footage shows that not everyone in the industry is trying to shut down bootleg content. Similarly the release of The Humble Music Bundle is another example of a company trying new things.

Moving back onto legal matters, and stepping away from copyright to other aspects of IP, we have two more good-news stories. The first is that Judge Posner has decided to give the patent system a kick, and the second is a simple lesson in how to send a cease and desist letter without being an asshole

I used to share a house with a bunch of Norwegians, they were all really good people as were (as far as I can tell) all their friends. So in many ways it's no surprise that Norway continues to show us the right way to deal with terrorism.

I'm going to finish with a story that may not be an obvious candidate for a good news story, especially given some of the comments from our regular critics. However the news that Michael Rossato-Bennett is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund his film Alive Inside just serves to remind me that, despite the problems highlighted in the article, and despite this being an area of life that people still shy away from, there are people doing great work out there transforming lives.

Watch that trailer video again, go on, you know you want to.

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