Increasingly, in the United States, the answer to that question seems to be yes. As Exhibit A, I offer this latest anecdote from Ellen Seidler at VoxIndie, who describes the experience of one indie film distributor who found an entire film uploaded to YouTube by some smug little snot with the handle Free Movies. The film distributor had used its ...
This is an argument that’s been around for quite a while. I first stumbled upon it in 2013, found it again in the recently published report by Berkeley and Columbia researchers, and I understand it came up again in round-table discussions held last week at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals regarding Section 512 of the DMCA. The premise is ...
I have a dream that one day my children will be judged not by the content of their character, but by the content they can steal. So, my friend David Lowery, on his blog The Trichordist, has been taking the organization Fight for the Future to task lately, and he most recently caught the organization in a lie related ...
With the inevitability of Donald Trump’s nomination as the GOP candidate for president, I think we can officially declare the “information revolution” a rollicking success, don’t you? When the savants and silicon pioneers of the 80s and 90s predicted that the Information Superhighway would be a great leap forward for democracy, I don’t remember anyone intimating that we would ride ...
Take all the best qualities of the web and imagine for a moment that the boundaries of intellectual property ownership are respected and upheld–at least on the major, legal platforms. Imagine, for instance, that YouTube still exists, but that one would not have typically used the platform to stream an unlicensed recording of a popular song by a popular artist. ...
