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 ...

In what sounds like an homage to Tom Clancy, Sarah Jeong, a contributing editor to Motherboard, presents us with a cautionary action thriller in which the Chinese government could theoretically disappear one of the most famous and politically significant photographs ever taken. And all because of American copyright law.  You know the photo. It’s the image that comes immediately to ...

“The more speech the merrier,” was the central argument made by Justice Scalia in writing the majority opinion on Citizens United, but that case suggests, at least to many of us, that the mechanism of the speech matters a great deal. Yes, in many ways, money can be speech; but at the same time, I think Scalia conjured an illusion ...

Sometimes one is confronted with an absurdity so self-evident that it defies an introductory sentence.  So, I wrote that sentence instead.  But what’s got me gobsmacked today is a story by Adam Sherwin writing for The Independent explaining that Google insisted the popular music site Drowned in Sound censor images of certain album covers on the grounds that they are ...

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