With the passing of John Perry Barlow last week, a number of articles and social media comments by internet activists offered variations on the theme that we have Barlow to thank for the internet as we know it. In general, they mean the internet that has thus far been allowed to function as a self-governing industry. While it is certainly ...
So, maybe you heard, or didn’t—or you don’t really care—that Playboy is suing Boing Boing (parent company Happy Mutants, LLC) for contributory copyright infringement. There are a couple of serious points to make about this case, but I want to address the funny part first because it actually informs the not funny parts. The funny began when I read TorrentFreak’s* article ...
I guess it’s pick on Andy at TorrentFreak week. (Sorry, Andy. ) But a recent blog of his titled No Level of Copyright Enforcement Will Ever Be Enough For Big Media begs a response. Citing TF’s decade of experience covering the piracy battles, Andy repeats a familiar narrative that because piracy will never stop, and because pirates will continue to ...
TorrentFreak recently reported a story about Australian music technologist Sebastian Tomczak receiving several copyright claims on a work he created and uploaded to YouTube. The work itself is ten hours of white noise he recorded using the noise generator built into the audio application Audacity. Tomczak’s interest, as described by Andy at TF, is “listening to continuous sounds of various ...
(republished by permission) The biggest story of 2017? To my mind, there is no contest — the broad emergence of an awareness that the irresponsibility masquerading as Internet freedom represented a threat to global societies and to cherished aspects of our humanity, and that a course correction was badly needed. While recognition of the fact that rewarding lack of accountability would likely ...
