Here’s one way the Web is being used by a group of young artists in collaboration with one of the “evil”  big media companies:  MTVu created a challenge campaign called “Against Our Will,” asking students to submit creative concepts to highlight the problems of modern-day slavery.  The winning entry came from students at James Madison university and grew into an ...

Back in the Napster days, I had an assistant named Greg, who remains one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever been lucky enough to call a friend. I remember giving him a hard time one afternoon when I realized he was using the file sharing app to download music.  With a slightly self-aware grin he said to me, “Yeah, but ...

If you say anything publicly critical of the Internet, there’s a good chance some technobrat on Twitter will call you a Luddite.  The simple irony is that the word Luddite in this case is being misused, which is something the would-be accuser might discover for himself were he to look it up on the Internet.  In this excellent article on ...

The ongoing debate over copyright in the digital age is clouded by so many layers of new-age malarkey and overblown, political banner-waving that it’s easy to lose sight of the behavioral realities behind all the self-serving theories of bloggers, legal scholars, corporate interests, and futurists. Take a very common activity like watching movies online via torrents or other sites that ...

“The Pirate Bay is speech.” This is a quote from one of the gurus perched on the mountaintop of techno-utopianism, John Perry Barlow, who appeared yesterday as a member of a panel discussion held at CES2013 in Las Vegas. The subject of the discussion was “A pro-artist/pro-innovation approach to copyright,” although the panel did not include anyone representing any counterpoint ...