On March 18th, Senators Tillis and Leahy of the IP Subcommittee introduced the SMART Copyright Act. The major functions of the bill, as codified in a proposed new Section 514, would empower the Librarian of Congress to approve designated technical measures (DTM) for identifying infringing material via a triennial rulemaking process. For a detailed description of the proposed rules and ...
Once again, the question arises whether there is any hope of addressing mass online copyright infringement on otherwise legal platforms? It’s an exhausting problem, more than two decades old, and it isn’t getting better. A recent article by Annie Levin for Observer describes a new campaign by Music Workers Alliance (MWA), in which she sums up the heart of the ...
In this episode, I speak with Tom Galvin, CEO of Digital Citizens Alliance, about piracy of creative works and DCA’s latest report, issued this month in collaboration with the research group White Bullet. The report, entitled Breaking Bad(s): How Advertiser-Supported Piracy Helps Fuel a Booming Multi-Billion Dollar Illegal Market, reveals that piracy is a highly profitable criminal enterprise and is ...
I haven’t written about enterprise scale piracy in a while. Not because it’s gone anywhere. Quite the contrary, it’s still growing. But it is easy to feel as though all the major points have been covered, that there is nothing much new to say on the matter. Somewhere on this blog, there is at least a post or two responding ...
Most conversations (i.e. arguments) about copyright tend to revolve around artists in the traditional sense—musicians, authors, filmmakers, photographers, etc.—wanting to make a living from their work. To those types of creators, the often dismissive responses from the tech-funded intelligentsia range between feigned sympathy and unvarnished antipathy for any author who would presume to earn her living making “art” in the first ...
