It is common practice for those of us who discuss the rights of creative workers to talk about asking the generation of digital natives to support or respect the artists, not only by not pirating their works but even going so far as to purchase their works if they truly consider themselves fans. But during a recent conversation that included ...
Copyright critics, particularly those voices murmuring in the halls of academia and legal scholarship, seem to question the purpose of copyright as though the law itself has generative properties. While it is true that copyright imposes one kind of constraint, and that constraints in general tend to be generative in the creative process, copyright’s critics focus a great deal of ...
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, ...
One of the bedrock principles of digital-age utopianism is that the Internet, if left unfettered by pesky rules, will make people free. Encoded into the rhetoric of what I’ll call a post-progressive notion of liberty are recurring themes that reject legal systems, reject statehood, reject private property ownership; and espouse a world view based on the assumption that people interconnected ...
I had to call attention to this article by Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic about Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photo shoot for Vanity Fair. The photo itself is brilliant as is Garber’s analysis of it. Lawrence’s calling the hacking of her private photos a “sex crime” is entirely reasonable. And I am reminded why I care about copyright, why it still ...
