Tarleton Gillespie, and on a separate note, Net Neutrality Hearing

Some of the media studies students in last semester’s senior seminar may remember looking briefly in class at the blog by Tarleton Gillespie, whose book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture we read in the latter half of the course. I thought I would share his blog, named “Scrutiny,” with the rest of the class as it’s a very good way to familiarize yourself with the different debates and facets of intellectual property rights and copyright law in the digital age. On the right you’ll see a bunch of links some other blogs, including one by Lawrence Lessig, another MS staple worth checking out, who’s leading the creative commons licensing movement and is currently launching a movement to alter the “economy of influence” in Washington (“Change Congress,” the most recent entry on Gillespie’s blog).

Net Neutrality PS: I know linking to three blogs in one entry is probably a bit too much, but I was just exploring some of the blogs Gillespie links to and I remembered having a brief discussion on net neutrality in class a few weeks ago, so I thought I’d just quickily share. Boing Boing posted a story about the public FCC hearing in Boston yesterday regarding recent allegations that telecommunications megacompanies have been filtering customers’ internet and text message traffic.
Apparently, Comcast paid many people, employees and nonemployees alike, to arrive very early to the hearing and take up seats so that opponents would be denied entry. Comcast has admitted it hired nonemployees to hold seats or places in line for their employees, but others allege that most of these guys took a seat, denying hundreds of punctual would-be-attendees and reporters entry.