Many copyright scholars refer to England’s Statute of Anne (1710) as the “first authors’ copyright law,” but I quarrel with that summary. In that year, and for many decades to follow, English “rights” for authors were too intertwined with the Crown’s authority to sanction publication of works for us to think of the Statute of Anne as affirming copyright rights ...

As of today, the social media platform BlueSky has grown to about 25 million users, which is still a fraction of the 600 million on X, but the recent spike at the former is attributable to people abandoning the latter. After Elon Musk acquired and rebranded Twitter, fired the accountability team, reinstated Trump, and then devoted both X and personal ...

Now that the December 3rd deadline has passed for Internet Archive to file for cert with the Supreme Court, the copyright case litigated by book publishers Hachette et al. is closed. The Second Circuit decision will stand, finding that IA’s legal theories were without merit—theories I have discussed in multiple posts and will not rehash again here. I have also ...

I haven’t posted here since before the election, and admittedly, it has been difficult to resist escapism and simply stop giving a damn. That the United States (and with it the democratic world) is now in jeopardy is not in doubt. Rather, the questions for the moment are the order in which institutions will begin to break and what the ...

It may be true that “democracy dies in darkness,” but it can also be wiped out in blinding light. If Donald Trump is reelected, it will have been 20 years after the launch of Facebook and 18 years after the launch of Twitter—less than one generation for the “greatest invention for democracy” to be the proximate cause of the death ...