Michael Weinberg

An array of 3 black, 1 red, 1 white and 1 Blue tshirt with varying images of the Smithsonian Castle, the Smithsonian sunburst logo, and one tshirt that says "Keep Calm and Digitize On"

Today was my last day as Director of the Digitization Program Office @ Smithsonian. After an expansive work career, I am retiring to take up some long-deferred projects. Immense gratitude to all my colleagues in cultural heritage for the work you do. Keep at it. You are needed more than ever.

I need to reread the Copyright Office advisory, because I am wondering if it got to the right result in the very wrong way.

Namely, if software is now something we can just describe with a functional spec, no (c) because purely functional rather than because no authorship?

bsky.app/profile/pche...

§1201 Triennial nerds:

I just manually categorized every comment submitted in every round back to 2000 for a project that we're (hopefully) releasing in a few months. If you have questions about the evolution of those comments, I will never have a more nuanced understanding of them

Join me at Open Hardware Summit in Berlin this May.

Tickets are affordable and you'll come back a little more inspired that a better world is possible.

We're also still looking for sponsors who want to get their products in front of the open source community!

"I have been an avid user of Smartphones since they first came out." is a statement that made complete sense in 2012 and is borderline incomprehensible today

Today's the day! Our Capitol Hill briefing for Fair Use Week is at 11:30am in the Russell Senate Office Building. So excited to bring this group of experts to DC to help share the good news about fair use and balanced copyright!*

today we’re modding a chocolate 3d printer into a hybrid galvo / cartesian fiber laser cutter :3

knowledge-work-plugins/legal at main · anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins Open source repository of plugins primarily intended for knowledge workers to use in Claude Cowork - anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

github.com/anthropics/k...

I sort of want to livestream reading this. But also I have a day job.

gmail: "to set up that filter, just verify your ID on your android phone by clicking through these menus"

my android phone: "these menus do not exist"

gemini: "It sounds like you've run into a classic 'support article vs reality' mismatch [goes on to repeat the prompts from gmail]"

Diversity in Early-Career Tech Policy Roles: Surveying Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities in the Field Public Knowledge is excited to announce, “Diversity in Early-Career Tech Policy Roles: Surveying Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities in the Field,” a new report by Public Knowledge Fellow and Rese...

@publicknowledge.bsky.social is proud to announce the release of our new report, “Diversity in Early-Career Tech Policy Roles: Surveying Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities in the Field,” from Tinuola Adebukola, Public Knowledge Fellow and Research Lead.

publicknowledge.org/policy/diver...

Comment on circumvention, February 17, 2000 Carl Fleischhauer, Technical Coordinator, National Digital Library Program David A. Francis, Chief, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division Library of Congress PREFACE: The following comment is from staff of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division and the National Digital Library Program at the Library of Congress regarding the prohibition on circumvention of technological controls on access to copyrighted works. This comment pertains to the rulemaking regarding circumvention discussed in 64 FR 66139 and in the “Copyright Notices” newsletter for December 1999 (page 3). The rulemaking is associated with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and is intended to determine if there are classes of works whose users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in the user’s ability to make non-infringing uses if they may not circumvent technological measures. COMMENT: The Library of Congress audio-visual-collection preservation team believes that it may be necessary for the Library to circumvent technological controls on access to copyrighted works in order to preserve digital audio-visual works for the long term. Such preservation of audio-visual materials has always been part of the mission of the Library and other legitimate research archives, and the process has always entailed copying. For example, older sound recordings on wire reels and magnetic tape formats have been copied into new formats as the historical wire recordings and magnetic tapes deteriorated or were determined to be likely to deteriorate. The staff charged with the responsibility for preserving audio-visual collections foresees that digital content will also require copying for preservation. For example, as a compact disk begins to show signs of deterioration, the digital signal on the disk must be transferred to other media to avert loss. The Library has not made a definitive study of the copyright protection technolog

I did not realize that the Library of Congress AV Collection Preservation Team filed in favor of a 1201 exemption for breaking DVD encryption

Percy Wyndham (soldier) - Wikipedia

Pretty satisfying when the ridiculousness of someone's facial hair matches the ridiculousness of their career

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_W...

the whole docket is just a reminder of a fundamentally different version of these fights

Dear Government, I'm sure you've gotton hundreds of letters from pitifull crybabies whining about the loss of their puny little freedoms to have access to information. Information is not a given right in the constitution. They have freedom of speech, not freedom of writing. Maybe they are whining because their jobs depend on reverse engineering software to make sure that it is not doing anything unauthorized to their computers. Well boo-hoo. What these people have to realize is that unless tight controls are in place on them by tbe government or large corporations, anarchy will result.

The other major problem with the MPAA's line of reasoning is that distribution of an illegally digitally copied DVD movie is near impossible. They file size is somewhere between 1 and 5 GIGABYTES OF DATA. This means that even if one had one's own web server, with a fancy, incredibly fast Internet connection of, say, 10,000,000 bits per second (or 1.25 megabytes per second) it would still take an average of 45 minutes to download a single movie. Now you might say, "Well, 45 minutes isn't really a whole lot of time.", to which I would add, "But less than .1% of Americans connected to the Internet have this type of connection." Much more common are the so called "Cable Modem" or "DSL" broadband Internet services. These can provide a user with upwards of 200,000 bits per second of download speed. At this rate, it would take about 37.5 HOURS to download a pirated DVD movie. The kicker here is that only somewhere between 10% and 20% of Internet users have this fast a connection. By far the most common kind of Internet connection is the so called "56k" modem. A "56k" modem can provide download speeds of up to 53,000 bits per second, though it is most often lower than this and can dip as low as 28,800 bits per second. Even at it's maximum rate of download, it would take a "56k" modem approximately 5.25 DAYS to download a pirated DVD movie. Why would anybody want to do this when, if you are really bent on illegally copying a movie, you can got to the local video store, spend $5 to rent a movie and copy it onto a $2 blank VHS cassette. Adding in travel time to and from the video store, and if you actually wanted to watch the tape while you where copyng it, this would take less than 3 hours and only cost you $7

In my opinion DeCSS cannot possibly be used to infringe copyrights because NOBODY is going to put a 5 Gigabyte movie on the internet, I wouldn't even save one on my hard drive. DVD's take up to much space and have the ability to take up to 17 Gigs! Please stop this unfair treatment of people who simply want to be able to use their LEGALLY BOUGHT DVD's on their computers.

DVD will be no different. If anything, DVD is even less accessible. Consumer DVD recorders are far beyond the horizon, and any storage method in the forseeable future would result in the abuser spending MORE money for a copy of the tape. At 4 or 5 gigs per video, each video would cost a pirate: Assumed 200$ for a 20 gig hard drive, 5 gigs per digital video, (5 / 20) * 200 = 50$ per movie. Compared to 10-15$ to buy the official DVD, this is somehow a threat?

real blast-from-the-past math from the 2000 1201 proceeding:

A+ headline, especially when paired with the maxim that the answer to all questions in headlines is"no"

How Close Can AI Get To Writing A Techdirt Post? I’ve talked on Techdirt about just a few of my AI-related experiments over the past few years, including how I use it to help me edit pieces, which I still write myself. I still have no intention o…

I really appreciate that @masnick.com continues to experiment with AI in public
www.techdirt.com/2026/02/18/h...

Over the past decade, the Open Source Hardware Association has certified thousands of pieces of open hardware from almost 70 countries. Join @michaelweinberg.org at #FOSSBack, where he will be sharing their learnings. 

Learn more: 26.foss-backstage.de...

Join us: tickets.plainschwarz...

Three-panel image showing AI-generated PCB library workflow: left panel shows ESP32-P4 pinout table with 104 GPIO pins plus exposed ground pad, center panel shows EAGLE XML output with QFN104 package definition including segmented paste mask coordinates, right panel shows the rendered footprint in EAGLE with red and yellow pads surrounding a windowed solder paste grid on the exposed pad. Flowchart showing AI-driven PCB library generation pipeline: datasheet PDF input flows through pinout extraction, AI spatial reasoning for X/Y coordinate calculation, DFM rule application for paste mask segmentation and logical pin grouping, XML code generation, and finally saving as .lbr file into EAGLE or Fusion 360, producing schematic symbol and PCB footprint outputs.

Look Ma, No CAD... We fed datasheets to Gemini Deep Think and it spit out production-ready EAGLE .lbr files... paste mask segmentation and all. ESP32-P4, MAX44009, LT3652, ES8311.

Turtles All The Way Down (Sec. 103) There are a bunch of things going on in Section 103. One of the most interesting to me is the introduction of layers of copyright. What happens when a work is built on previous material? Section 10…

The next stop in our tour of the Copyright Act is Section 103, which is where the Copyright Act considers secondary works. What happens when a work is built on previous material? Section 103 provides the answer.

On December 2, 2025, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a trademark to Defendant (Reg No. 8,051,746) under Class 6 (which includes metal structures such as the metal hooks being sold by Plaintiff):

Plaintiff has design patents for a pretty generic-looking hook design. Defendant got a trade dress registration(!!) for a substantially identical design and used that registration as the basis for an Amazon takedown request. Plaintiff seeks, inter alia, cancellation of the registration.

"The world is too on fire for anyone to meaningfully oppose us."

Oy.

holyshitballs.

MyMiniFactory bought Thingiverse

"In this one paragraph introduction to your grant application, please summarize information relating to the following five points" is not a recipe for a short paragraph

39 survey responses so far! 💪🎉 Can you help me get to a nice round 50?

If you, a colleague or connection work with cultural heritage #3D data in the #UK please share or complete this survey: forms.gle/Wn7mtVM5ZnzU...

#H3DAR #GLAM3D #museums #galleries #archives #libraries

I'm going to be pretty disappointed if the Berlin Opera decides to cut porcupine racetrack from their performance of My Fair Lady tonight

there is beauty in including "rest assured that your application is receiving the attention it deserves" in an application confirmation review email

Ron Wyden Only Talks Like This When The Spies Do Something *Real* Bad No, I don't know what they did. But I have a lot of experience with the senator

@wyden.senate.gov's record of warning that there is deep and constitutionally-serious dirt being done by the intelligence agencies in secret is unblemished. The vaguer he is, the filthier the dirt is. This is the vaguest I've ever seen him