I saw it again the other day. In a sarcastic tweet that flew by. A familiar theme. Without naming names, it said something like this: As if creativity didn’t exist before 1709. There was no Shakespeare. For one thing, this is the kind of pugnacious statement that I can’t believe ever informs the copyright debate. Because I don’t know anyone who ...

My initial response to the prospect that Gawker Media might go down in flames as a result of its legal woes was somewhere between ambivalence and satisfaction.  I’m not generally sympathetic to the proposition that invasions of privacy are inherently protected by freedom of the press, particularly when the invasion involves “information” as useless to the public as a sex ...

Last week, I stumbled on a tweet by a staff member at the Electronic Frontier Foundation warning California citizens to “take action” in protest against the passage of Assembly Bill 2880.  The linked article on the EFF website written by Ernesto Falcon begins by asserting in its headline, subhead, and first paragraph that California will be venturing into brand new ...

I was told by a colleague who attended the Section 512 round tables in San Francisco that a consistent response from representatives of the OSPs was that anecdotes about harm to rights holders from piracy or YouTube-style infringement are not sufficient.  “We need data,” was apparently an oft-repeated imperative.  This is funny because that same crowd loves anecdotes about abuse ...

Increasingly, in the United States, the answer to that question seems to be yes.  As Exhibit A, I offer this latest anecdote from Ellen Seidler at VoxIndie, who describes the experience of one indie film distributor who found an entire film uploaded to YouTube by some smug little snot with the handle Free Movies. The film distributor had used its ...