About 25 years ago, when my first child was a little kid, I predicted to a friend that by the time that boy was an adult, higher education in the United States would be in crisis—both financially and culturally. It was clear then that the rate of increase in costs implied a level of borrowing that the market could not ...
In the 1980s, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), led by Tipper Gore and several other wives of Washington insiders,[1] sought to compel record labels to place stickers on albums warning consumers that the songs within contained “explicit lyrics.” Songwriters, including Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snider testified in Senate hearings to oppose the label initiative on First Amendment ...
As many readers already know, another class-action lawsuit was filed on September 8 against OpenAI by book authors Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder, and Ayelet Waldman on behalf of all authors similarly situated. The allegations are almost identical to the complaints in other class-action suits against various AI companies. I won’t repeat what I have ...
Pride month is more than celebratory in a time when book bans are on the rise in the United States, and 26% of the titles banned “have LGBTQ+ characters or themes,” according to PEN America. With politicians like Ron DeSantis determined to make “anti-wokeness” part of the Republican brand, this neologism for hate-speech has taken the form of book and ...
On March 24, the court in Hachette et al. v. Internet Archive wholly rejected IA’s fair use defense constructed on the theory called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). Prior to and since that ruling, various parties have tried to characterize this case as an attack by the publishers against the core function of libraries, alleging that libraries either already depend, or ...
