Last week, Hillary Clinton released her Initiative on Technology and Innovation, brief, which reads a bit like a missive from the Internet Association and does very little to clarify her own views—possibly because she doesn’t have any—on the role of copyright in the digital age.  My general criticism of the whole brief is that it seems to view “technology” as ...

The recording industry last week filed suit against a new music platform called Aurous.  With a Spotify-like interface, the app is designed to search, retrieve, and play music files, whether they’re stored on legal platforms or on BitTorrent sites around the world. And according to early reports, the primary function is the sourcing of pirated media on BitTorrent sites, leading ...

First, for those lucky enough not to know, “revenge porn” is the term used to describe the practice (usually by disgruntled ex-boyfriends) of distributing nude or sexually explicit images of people via the Internet without permission.  Once out there, as we all know, images and videos can end up anywhere, copied and redistributed by anyone; and this includes websites designed specifically ...

Mike Masnick, editor and founder of Techdirt often writes like a smug frat boy, substituting scorn for ideas, and is frequently careless about fact-checking. This may be be why his mantra sounds sillier every day, as he bangs on about all that is wrong with just about anyone who believes copyright still plays a role in the digital age.  Seriously, ...

First of all, name if you can the serious competitors of any of the following: Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Google. Go back ten years, name the biggest sites on the web, and you might notice that some of those names are either gone or really quite small compared to the dominant sites today. It isn’t even necessarily sinister, but it is a fact that the ...

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