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 ...
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this post about an amicus brief filed on behalf of several Internet companies seeking a new ruling in a 2004 case with the apparent purpose of changing the legal standard applied to the “Dancing Baby” case. This is in regard to the burden on a rights holder to “consider fair use” before issuing ...
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 ...
In a recent post on Techdirt, Parker Higgins plays a somewhat familiar refrain when he blames copyright for causing a general extinction—or inaccessibility—of various works. Describing a kind of dark ages for researchers, historians, and journalists— whether amateur, student, or professional—Higgins presumes to draw a very big conclusion in a very short post and consequently begs more questions than he ...
Given the way information tends to distort at lighting speed these days—particularly through the filter of tech v copyright referenced in my last post—I’m not surprised to read articles like this one by Ellen Duffer writing for Forbes on a thesis proposing reasons why Google Books is “good for publishers.” And it’s not that everything she says is incorrect so ...
