In 1982, then president of the MPAA Jack Valenti said something really stupid; and today, pro-piracy pundits, some who weren’t even alive in 1982, rely heavily on the late man’s hyperbole to drive a wedge between creators and fans. Valenti said in testimony before Congress, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston ...
It turns out this is Free Speech Week, although I doubt this fact had anything to do with the timing of Facebook’s recent dustup over its decision to allow videos of beheadings on its pages. On Monday, it was reported that executives at Facebook had decided to lift a previously imposed ban on sharing videos that depict actual beheadings committed ...
Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. … The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip. – Ronald Reagan, The Guardian, 1989 The knowledge and power of the Information Age will be within reach not just of the ...
Last week, a report emerged from the London School of Economics claiming that piracy is not harming the entertainment industries. One of my new Twitter pals, Jean-Phlippe Vergne (@pirateorg) sent me a link to the report calling it “scientific” rather than based on “moral claims.” I read the report, and there’s nothing scientific about it, particularly in that it lacks ...
Naturally, I check the stats on this blog and am always curious to see referring sites and related comments. But this week, I’m reminded what an information clusterfuck the Internet can be with the discovery that a post I wrote about malicious editing on Wikipedia is now a cited footnote on a page at its backwoods, idiot cousin known as ...
