“R Street is a free-market think tank with a pragmatic approach to public policy challenges.” — R Street About Page — If one is going to comment on public policy, then one ought to make an effort a) to understand the nature of a given topic; and b) to present facts instead of fiction. In this ...
Photo by author. This week the Supreme Court declined to consider the Authors Guild v Google case, which lets stand the Second Circuit Court ruling that Google’s use of scanned published works for its search tool Google Books constitutes a fair use. Various pundits and advocates have hailed this as a victory for the fair use principle. In fact, I ...
Once again the MPAA has announced a profitable year for American motion pictures, and once again some of the usual suspects have seized upon this announcement to declare the studios hypocrites for ever saying that piracy causes real harm to the industry. Certainly, it’s easy enough to keep writing this same, careless article all the time. Cory Doctorow cobbled together ...
In a recent post, I alluded to a statement by the Copyright Alliance, which emphasizes that Section 1201 of the DMCA supports the development of multiple distribution channels for premium content, giving consumers and producers more choices in the digital market. This section of the DMCA prohibits circumvention of Technical Protection Measures (TPM) used to ensure that, for instance, if you ...
Veteran film and TV producer Martha De Laurentiis was on Capitol Hill yesterday to take part in an event called Meet the Producers, presented by CreativeFuture in conjunction with the Creative Rights Caucus. Specifically, De Laurentiis has been motivated to speak in opposition to the false belief that piracy doesn’t cause harm to real people. As the executive producer of ...
