View image | gettyimages.com With the release this month of Netflix’s first official feature film Beasts of No Nation, the rental-turned-streaming service continues to prove itself a fierce competitor in the filmed entertainment industry—not only as a producer of award-winning projects, but as the preeminent, game-changing distributor having a dramatic influence on both traditional distribution models and viewer habits. This ...
The recording industry last week filed suit against a new music platform called Aurous. With a Spotify-like interface, the app is designed to search, retrieve, and play music files, whether they’re stored on legal platforms or on BitTorrent sites around the world. And according to early reports, the primary function is the sourcing of pirated media on BitTorrent sites, leading ...
View image | gettyimages.com Among the premises commonly stated to argue that we must “rebalance copyright for the 21st century,” we find two widely spread and oft-repeated generalizations, both of which are false. The first generalization is about access, which proposes to speak for the consumer and implies—or explicitly declares—that copyright acts as a barrier to the diffusion of cultural ...
I feel a little bit bad picking on Washington Post tech writer Caitlin Dewey as much as I have already, but it’s probably not as much as I would if I read her column with any purposeful frequency. Unfortunately, given the subjects I write about, people like to send me links to her articles. And I read them. And then ...
“That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.” – Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters – I saw this quote posted on Facebook the other day, and I hope it’s properly attributed because it expresses something I had been thinking about shortly after I and ...
