Brad Templeton (born near Toronto on April 20, 1960), son of Charles Templeton and Sylvia Murphy, is a software engineer and entrepreneur. He graduated from the University of Waterloo.^[1]

Templeton is considered one of the early luminaries of Usenet, and in 1989 founded ClariNet Communications Corporation, which used 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 (not the same company as Looking Glass Studios), 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.^[2] 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.

References

External links

• Brad Templeton's home page
• An Interview with Brad Templeton @ acm.org
• 
• Linux Link Tech Show interview (audio), 2005