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Only weeks after protests over two digital copyright bills demonstrated the political muscle of Internet users, the White House is publicly endorsing new copyright legislation that also would target suspected pirate Web sites.

After the unprecedented outcry against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act -- designed to target offshore copyright-infringing Web sites -- supporters of the bills on Capitol Hill backed down and moved on to other topics.

But the White House today reignited the congressional debate by throwing its weight behind legislation targeting offshore Web sites. "We believe that new legislative and non-legislative tools … Read more

How many people know the recipe for President Barack Obama's family chili? Before today, probably not many. But now anyone on the social-networking site Pinterest can find out how many onions, ground beef, and kidney beans the recipe takes, and then pin it to their own profile if they like.

Obama has added the popular virtual pinboard site Pinterest to his social-networking trove and today his filled-out profile page with eight boards and 44 pins was made public. According to tech news site Mashable, the Obama campaign set up the account a few weeks ago, but there wasn't … Read more

analysis President Bill Clinton's 1997 electronic embargo against Iran, which curbed its citizens' access to U.S.-based software and Web sites, continues to create legal hassles for American Web companies.

In August 1997, Clinton signed an executive order saying U.S. companies and individuals could not provide "goods, technology, or services to Iran" -- a decree that led to unintended consequences such as Utah-based Bluehost giving the boot to Iranian bloggers and opensource software site SourceForge.net denying access to Iranians.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's announcement yesterday, which was designed to complement … Read more

There are many reasons that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, and one is because he was seen as being a trend-setter in finding ways to incorporate new technologies in his campaign.

Now, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Obama is turning to technology's epicenter in a bid to ensure he stays on the cutting edge. The Chronicle reported today that the president's re-election campaign has opened a technology field office in San Francisco, a move that may be unprecedented in politics.

"We learned from 2008 that using the talents and skills of our supporters was … Read more

Spotify got a major endorsement from President Barack Obama today. Obama for America announced that the official 2012 campaign playlist is available on the popular music-streaming service.

The playlist has 28 tracks with an eclectic mix of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Arcade Fire, and, of course, Al Green. … Read more

Ever since GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole claimed that Hollywood produced "nightmares of depravity" that coarsened American culture and made "deviancy" mainstream, movie studios and record labels have enjoyed a spectacularly uneasy relationship with the Republican Party.

Copyright has been the exception to that strife: since the late 1990s, Hollywood-backed proposals to expand copyright law--the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Induce Act, the Pro-IP Act--have all been embraced, or at least not opposed, by Republicans.

The controversy over the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, has finally splintered that alliance. … Read more

President Obama's first "virtual town hall" in 2009 took a legalize-pot detour. This afternoon, his first Google+ hangout with a handful of voters turned to a no less controversial topic: a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright bills.

In response to a question about whether the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act would levy "too much censorship on the Internet," the president stopped short of saying he opposes the legislation.

"I think that it's going to be possible for us" to find a workable approach, Obama said during the event broadcast on YouTube, … Read more

What would you do if you found a bag of white powder tucked neatly into the textbook you just bought on the Amazon Marketplace?

If you're smart, you'd take it to the police like Sophia Stockton, a junior at a university in Kansas who discovered something similar in the pages of a history book called "Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues."

While we're on the topic of narcotics, don't forget to tune into President Obama's Q+A on Google+ Hangout tonight at 5:30 p.m. ET, live from the West Wing of … Read more

John Doerr has been called the "world's wealthiest and most well-connected venture capitalist" by Forbes. The Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner has been an early-stage investor in some of the best-known companies in the tech industry, including Google, Amazon, Sun, and Zynga, and he has 109,000 Twitter followers.

I'm a fairly prolific professional journalist writing for a national publication and covering a wide range of topics from startups to Lego to aviation to NASA and more. I have 6,250 followers on Twitter.

I'm happy with my place in life and how my … Read more