On the heels of the YouTube Music Awards, David Lowery, on his site The Trichordist, calls on artists to hold YouTube accountable for some of the content it allows on its site.  In particular, Lowery makes the point that it is young kids who tend to use YouTube for music more than almost any other service, and that for this ...

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been rightly taken to task in this Vanity Fair article by Alyssa Bereznak for his recent declaration of outrage that the NSA has been spying on his company.  The collective spit-take could be heard clearly around the blogosphere.  Despite Schmidt’s own efforts to keep his private life private, the CEO is among the leading voices who ...

Author and cartoonist Tim Kreider neatly and wryly sums up everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the digital-age economy in this editorial that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times.  Kreider covers many bases, including a nod to the oft-overlooked factor in the economic calculus of the male author — that money is merely the conduit between the ...

In 1982, then president of the MPAA Jack Valenti said something really stupid; and today, pro-piracy pundits, some who weren’t even alive in 1982, rely heavily on the late man’s hyperbole to drive a wedge between creators and fans.  Valenti said in testimony before Congress, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston ...

It turns out this is Free Speech Week, although I doubt this fact had anything to do with the timing of Facebook’s recent dustup over its decision to allow videos of beheadings on its pages. On Monday, it was reported that executives at Facebook had decided to lift a previously imposed ban on sharing videos that depict actual beheadings committed ...