Embed from Getty Images In a wonderful book called The Battle for Christmas, author Stephen Nissenbaum relates the evolution of this holiday from its pagan roots to the modern Christmas as it came to be celebrated in the United States. He tells us that in agrarian England most labor would be done by December and that it was often a ...

According to Peter Kafka writing for re/code, the fact that Adele has broken all-time records with sales of her new album “25” while simultaneously rejecting streaming services is too much of an oddity to provide any guidance for music professionals vis-a-vis their business models.  Kafka writes the following: “If you are looking for big lessons in Adele’s success selling more ...

In a Thanksgiving announcement, veteran photojournalist Yunghi Kim created ten $1,000 grants to be awarded one time to ten photographers.  The $10,000 kitty fueling this generous gift came from awards to Kim paid by copyright infringers of her work, and she states her reasons for creating the grants thus: “I am doing this to emphasize the importance of copyright registration of ...

Recently, I’ve spent time on Netflix catching up on nearly all the TV series based on various Marvel and DC Comics properties.  By and large, in their own context, these shows are very good; and in some regards, they’re exceptional. Certainly, the overall quality of these programs is consistent with the general renaissance of the small screen that has taken ...

In Part I of this essay, I responded to a post written by Parker Higgins for Techdirt, criticizing him for trying to pack a big, unexamined conclusion into a small article. Asserting, as Techdirtians are want to do, that copyright is the omnipresent saboteur in our otherwise grand, digital machine, Higgins blames copyright’s complexity and length of terms for causing ...

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