'Brad Templeton' (born near
Toronto in
1960), son of
Charles Templeton and
Sylvia Murphy, is a software engineer and entrepreneur.
Templeton is considered one of the early luminaries of
Usenet, and in
1989 founded
ClariNet, which uses Usenet protocols to distribute news articles, one of the first commercial examples of
electronic publishing. In his "Net History in Brief" post, he coined the phrase
''Imminent death of net predicted''. He also founded
Looking Glass Software, and was involved in the development of a number of software packages.
He is chairman of the board of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. He created the
Usenet newsgroup [news://rec.humor.funny rec.humor.funny] in
1987 and moderated it from 1987 to 1992.
[1]. To
Commodore users he's probably best known for Power and the
assembler PAL.
Templeton is widely known in the
Internet and legal community for writing about political and social issues related to computing and networks. One of the most frequently-cited works on Internet copyright law is his
''10 Big Myths of Copyright Explained''. He is known on the
rec.arts.comics usenet hierarchy as being one of the few group founders who never went out of their way to run new posters off. Templeton also is the one who coined the term "
spamigation", which means massive
litigations undertaken solely for the purpose of harassing and intimidating the defendants.
On a lighter note, Templeton also created the character of "Emily Postnews" in his Usenet posting "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette", a tongue-in-cheek list of all the things one should not do when using Usenet. The name "Emily Postnews" is a double pun, referring first to
Emily Post, a self-appointed expert on social etiquette and second, to the
postnews program, an early piece of Usenet client software. The full text can be found on Brad Templeton's homepage
here.
External links
★
Brad Templeton's home page
★ http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds2-3/templeton.html
★ http://www.kurzweilai.net/bios/bio0154.html
★
1985 software advertisement featuring Brad Templeton, Jim Butterfield, and Steve Punter
★
Linux Link Tech Show interview (audio), 2005