It remains a popular talking point among copyright skeptics to say that copyright limits free speech. When this refrain was played a little over a week ago on Twitter by ReCreate’s Joshua Lamel, I responded that those who keep saying it are “hair-splitting to the point of pedantry.” Lamel replied with the assertion that everyone agrees with this trope—all copyright scholars across the spectrum ...
I’ve been traveling and am, therefore, late to mention that the hotly-contested EU Copyright Directive passed last week. Not surprisingly, the usual critics have spared little hyperbole referring to the new legislation as the “end of the open internet” and a “disastrous decision.” Meanwhile, many of the copyright proponents I know view the directive as having had the teeth negotiated out of ...
This refrain keeps playing over in my head lately: The EFF and its sister organizations are to cyberlaw as the NRA is to rational gun policy in America. That seems like a pretty harsh thing to say about a bunch of progressives (and one must even include the ACLU in this discussion), but in the context of policy debate, the ...
On Monday, I was up early and first heard about the Las Vegas shooting on the radio in the car. It was still dark, and the winding road thick with fog, lending an eerie mood to the sound of Scott Simon’s voice on NPR reporting what little was known about this latest incident in what is now an epidemic of ...
“I hate Illinois Nazis.” – Jake Blues, The Blues Brothers (1980) I think my first introduction to the complexities of living in a nation with a constitutional right like the First Amendment was in the 7th Grade. Our teacher had the class watch and discuss the film Skokie (1981), a dramatization of the circumstances surrounding the 1977 legal case National ...
