As a follow-up to my last post responding to Public Knowledge’s allegations of “regulatory capture” at the US Copyright Office, I thought one of their accusations deserved its own post.  When copyright law is discussed as a broad principle—either in a practical or philosophical context—critics such as PK, Techdirt, the EFF, and Fight for the Future seem to view copyright ...

In a document Public Knowledge has the conceit to call a “report,” the organization now proposes that the US Copyright Office is trapped in a state of “regulatory capture.”  Usually, this is a term reserved for a condition that arises when the people who work at a regulatory agency become either culturally or economically too close to the industry they’re ...

Back in June, ArsTechnica hosted the online debut of a short film called Sunspring. Directed by Oscar Sharp and featuring the actors Elizabeth Gray, Humphrey Ker, and Thomas Middleitch, the film was made for the Sci-Fi London film festival according to guidelines for the 48-Hour Film Challenge, and it placed in the top ten out of hundreds of entries.  What ...

Just because the surgeon general serves at the pleasure of the president, that doesn’t mean we think the president is, therefore, the more qualified expert in medicine.  We want a president to have views on domestic healthcare in general but not to have opinions about actual medical practice.  That would be scary. Yet, solely on the grounds that the U.S. ...

As noted several times on this blog, it takes a lot of highly skilled people to make a film or TV show, and these people generally do not own any copyright interest in the works they help make or any equity in the production companies.  Motion pictures and television production is a project-to-project business. Crew members and performers are not ...