I recognize that it’s vogue to malign the interests of copyright holders, particularly when various pundits recount anecdotes of sympathetic-sounding new creators who find themselves as defendants in a litigation. Recently, Andy at TorrentFreak published a lamentation on the excess and “hypocrisy” of copyright enforcement in the case of Serendip v Lewis Bond. Mr. Bond, a UK citizen who distributes ...
I was told by a colleague who attended the Section 512 round tables in San Francisco that a consistent response from representatives of the OSPs was that anecdotes about harm to rights holders from piracy or YouTube-style infringement are not sufficient. “We need data,” was apparently an oft-repeated imperative. This is funny because that same crowd loves anecdotes about abuse ...
Increasingly, in the United States, the answer to that question seems to be yes. As Exhibit A, I offer this latest anecdote from Ellen Seidler at VoxIndie, who describes the experience of one indie film distributor who found an entire film uploaded to YouTube by some smug little snot with the handle Free Movies. The film distributor had used its ...
I have a dream that one day my children will be judged not by the content of their character, but by the content they can steal. So, my friend David Lowery, on his blog The Trichordist, has been taking the organization Fight for the Future to task lately, and he most recently caught the organization in a lie related ...
With the inevitability of Donald Trump’s nomination as the GOP candidate for president, I think we can officially declare the “information revolution” a rollicking success, don’t you? When the savants and silicon pioneers of the 80s and 90s predicted that the Information Superhighway would be a great leap forward for democracy, I don’t remember anyone intimating that we would ride ...
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin