Yesterday, David Lowery’s The Trichordist published an article by singer/songwriter Blake Morgan—one which the Huffington Post apparently refused to run.  In the piece, Morgan describes meeting with Spotify executives to whom he tried to explain that their product isn’t Spotify itself but is in fact music.  “And by the way,” Morgan said, “stop calling your subscribers ‘users.’ They’re not ‘users,’ ...

You might think that among the most straightforward relationships between a user and a creator of a copyrighted work would be that of a news organization and a photographer—namely that the news organization should license the photographs it uses for any of its stories.  It is also common-sensical that whenever a news organization displays a photograph in a manner that ...

For years, “old model” artists have been told to quit whining.  Every time some well-known and well-established creator has spoken out about the issue of mass copyright infringement online, or the hazards that monopsonies like YouTube pose for all creators, the response from the “new model” gurus has always been nauseatingly repetitive.  These legacy artists should stop clinging to old models; ...

You may have read recently that some of the major studios, most prominently Disney, are alleged to have infringed the patent rights in a certain motion-capture system used to make blockbuster films like the multi-billion-dollar Marvel movies.  Further, an article like this one in Hollywood Reporter by Eriq Gardner might give a reader the impression that a) the patent infringement ...

An important and instructive decision was handed down this week by New York District Court in the KinderGuides case. KinderGuides is a series of children’s books that include adaptations of classic works with some commentary about the authors and the stories.  Publisher Moppet Books has released illustrated, young-reader versions of works from the public domain like The Odyssey and Jane ...

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