photo by tomasmikula Because today is the five-year anniversary of “Blackout Day,” the day millions of users were suckered into doing the internet industry’s bidding for no good reason, the always-relevant BuzzFeed offers us a missive published by the organization ReCreate Coalition called “12 Things You Can Do Because Congress Protected Internet Freedoms,” by which they mean backed off the passage of ...

Once again the MPAA has announced a profitable year for American motion pictures, and once again some of the usual suspects have seized upon this announcement to declare the studios hypocrites for ever saying that piracy causes real harm to the industry. Certainly, it’s easy enough to keep writing this same, careless article all the time. Cory Doctorow cobbled together ...

In yesterday’s post, I referred to the Android-based service called Google Now, which is about as close as your mobile device comes (so far) to reading your mind and anticipating your wants and needs.  By gathering data from contacts, emails, destinations visited, searches made, etc. the algorithms applied by the Now service essentially learn a user’s interests and then prompts ...

Veteran film and TV producer Martha De Laurentiis was on Capitol Hill yesterday to take part in an event called Meet the Producers, presented by CreativeFuture in conjunction with the Creative Rights Caucus.  Specifically, De Laurentiis has been motivated to speak in opposition to the false belief that piracy doesn’t cause harm to real people.  As the executive producer of ...

Last month, I shared some thoughts on the subject of piracy as a tool for promotion, and I won’t repeat all that here.  Suffice to say, I’ve never understood why this particular argument has ever be taken seriously—other than the obvious reason that it offers a plausible sounding rationalization. But, even without thinking too deeply about the matter, just the ...

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