NOTE:  Apologies in advance for the American-centric post, but what follows can only universally apply in the context of U.S. copyright law. Certain prominent figures making proposals for more limited copyright protections like to repeat the slogan, “We are all authors/creators now,” meaning now that we have the Internet and social applications designed to facilitate easy sharing of all sorts ...

The pen may well be mightier than the sword, but pens have been known to unsheathe a sword now and then.  So what about video blogs and guns? In the wake of travesties like this latest shooting at UCSB, I’m sure the question raised at my dinner table last weekend was echoed in conversations around the country.  Why are we ...

In 1997, the Electronic Frontier Foundation bestowed its prestigious Pioneer Award upon an 82-year-old movie star and posthumously to an avant-garde music composer.  The movie star was Hedy Lamarr, the composer was George Antheil; and their collaboration as amateur inventors during the early days of America’s entry into World War II led to a working model for a signal transmission ...

It’s science.  Deal with it. We hear an awful lot about how copyrights on creative works “stifle innovation,” preventing new business opportunities from launching or thriving. And the self-serving advocates of these “new” ideas love to describe those of us who question their proposals as anti-technology, anti-progress, stuck in old models, and so on.  But the idea that a digital ...

It’s a longstanding cliché we parents repeat that our kids can have more fun with a box than with the toy that comes in the box.  It’s still true, and we still don’t trust our own wisdom in this regard because presenting a kid with an empty box for his birthday or some other occasion is a risky bet that ...