Once again, the question arises whether there is any hope of addressing mass online copyright infringement on otherwise legal platforms?  It’s an exhausting problem, more than two decades old, and it isn’t getting better. A recent article by Annie Levin for Observer describes a new campaign by Music Workers Alliance (MWA), in which she sums up the heart of the ...

Justice Breyer, in the waning days of his tenure, wrote an opinion last week that will be of significant help to copyright owners. Historically a critic of copyright, it was Breyer who wrote the convoluted majority opinion in Google v. Oracle, which elided a core copyrightability question presented (the protection of APIs) by shoehorning the question into the second prong ...

Well, here we are again. Fair Use Week. Ninth annual. I still don’t know why this doctrine in copyright law should be observed on the calendar, let alone for a whole week carved out of Black History Month. But in 2013, some anti-copyright ideologues thought it should be a thing, so now it’s a thing. I don’t know. Wear something ...

Neil Young pulls his music from Spotify to protest the content on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, and Nash follow suit. It’s a big story for a week, and some noise about “cancel culture” and Rogan himself lingers, but we’ve mostly moved on. Meanwhile, the economic model for music streaming is still broken. Songwriters make pennies ...

In this episode, I talk to artists’ rights activists Neil Turkewitz and David Lowery about the scope and nature of fraud in the NFT trade–and why NFTs are yet another false promise to help independent artists in the digital age.  Read Neil Turkewitz’s interview with artist bor, a member of the activist group @NFTTheft, and read his follow-up piece about ...