The driver's license for the Internet idea sounds terrible at first, until I remembered they already have it. In New York State, it's your actual driver's license. I used it to get my ObamaCare. If you think about it, it would be good if you had one ID that got you onto the IRS website, or your health insurance, or driver's license, or even to vote. We're going to need that, in fact we already do. I don't think it's any more controversial than having a Google or Facebook ID. At least the government is somewhat accountable to us. The companies are only accountable to their shareholders (and the government of course).#

I often get asked what I think of there being a guy who claims to own podcasting. This is what I think.#

I wish he had been around to help when we were getting his idea off the ground. He could have helped us with his inventiveness, to try to figure out how to get people to do it. He also could have helped us figure out how to make it happen without any single company owning it, so that users would be free to listen to podcasts whenever and however they wanted.#

I wish the EFF, who is defending podcasters against this lunacy would argue reality instead of the way they're approaching it. The reality is that podcasting couldn't exist until blogging and RSS already existed. So it couldn't have happened before 2001, when Adam and I were hanging out in his suite at a Manhattan hotel and eating pastrami at the Carnegie Deli.#

See, I was actually there when podcasting was born. This is one of the rare times when you can find the moment when the idea sprang into existence. It was a result of some weird chemistry between Adam and myself. He had a nutty idea that everyone was wrong about how media on the Internet would work. I thought he was an airhead, a hairdo, not too bright. It was only when I got the Aha! to it, that I saw how it could work, and how incredibly simple an idea it was. He had to explain it about eight times before I got it.#

From there it took three years for us to figure out how to get other people to see it. That's how these things go. People resist new ideas. #

The guy who claims he owns podcasting did none of the hard creative work and evangelism it took to make this thing happen. That he wants to reap all the financial rewards is unbelievably greedy and unfair. It also is ignorant that technology is developed, not invented. Esp something built out of such simple building blocks -- MP3, HTTP, XML, blogs and RSS. That and a few hundred brilliant people who saw the idea early and ran with it, and mostly got $0 for their work (myself included). #

That would be how I would like to see the EFF pursue this. Let's aim bigger than fixing podcasting. Let's teach the courts how tech works. Let's go big.#