Who is Brad Templeton

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 and has moderated the Usenet newsgroup rec.humor.funny since 1987. 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.

First EVER .com company

Templeton was the founder and publisher of ClariNet Communications Corp., the world's first ever ".com" company, which was also the net's first and for a long time largest electronic newspaper. Templeton founded ClariNet in 1989 in Waterloo, Ontario with the idea of trying to make money publishing professional information over the net and to the net audience!! Templeton built it up to by far the largest paid subscription base on the net, and then In June of 1997, it was sold to Individual, Inc.

Links

NetFunny.com
10 Big Myths on Copyright explained
Brief Intro to copyright
How I supported EFF and changed the world - Read >> & EFF.org - EFF.org
Brad's home page.
Brad's Top 11 Myths about the Internet.
History of ClariNet - (home page, first ever .com company).
Essays on junk email and spam.
How to fix DNS... break up ICANN - link.
"I remember Usenet" article by Templeton - oreillynet.com.
Templeton announces ClariNet on Usenet 'news.admin' (link to Google groups).
Templeton's net history in brief - link.