I draw your attention to this wonderfully unsentimental yet passionate defense of books by Toby Mundy.  The publisher at Atlantic Books, Mundy offers his personal views on the devaluation of the medium for the thought-provoking site Medium.com.  Specifically, of course, he draws our attention to Amazon and its Wal-Mart-like ability to muscle publishers (and by extension authors) into lowering prices toward ...

People like to quibble about the harm done to the motion picture industry by online piracy. They split hairs over things like whether or not each pirated view represents a lost sale or chime in with arguments that piracy is a form of promotion or a natural market reaction to outdated practices.  If a lot of the arguments for piracy ...

In at least a few posts advocating for the right of the copyright holder to control the use of works for reasons other than money, I have raised hypothetical scenarios in which particularly odious entities make use of works in ways that are uniquely offensive to the soul of the original.  Most recently, I employed such hypotheticals on the subject of ...

For quite some time, too long perhaps, a considerable amount of academic scholarship has trended toward focus on copyright’s negative effects, or at least doubt its positive effects, without adequate analysis of the creative process itself.  When viewing the market, and especially creators, many academic views I have encountered appear to look solely at finished works, how the market interacts ...

I can’t help but be aware of a disturbing harmonic buzz in my head when I read two stories on the same day that point to a particular digital age dichotomy. Remember Sarah Jones? You might have helped her story go viral. Sarah was a camera assistant, who was killed when she was struck by a train during filming of ...

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