Since the days of Napster, the technosenti have been insisting that the entertainment industry simply needs to stop complaining about copyright theft and innovate.  Setting aside the fact that exploitation is not a form of innovation, I like to remind people that with regard to filmed entertainment, the technology for reliable, high-quality streaming is about five years old, which may ...

Attorney and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig considers the current copyright system to be generally antagonistic to contemporary culture.  In fact, any number of common assertions about copyright’s supposed obsolescence in the digital age are very likely derivative of something written or said by Lessig, who has devoted a fair amount of energy promoting the value of the remix.  In at ...

Every time a Martin Luther King anniversary comes around, the anti-copyright armada is well armed with blogs and articles decrying the indecency that the civil rights leader’s words and recordings are not in the public domain.  And never one to miss such an opportunity, even while missing the point, Mike Masnick at Techdirt insists that Dr. King’s “I Have a ...

“Nor any drop to drink.” It was a year ago this week that I first launched this blog, and when a friend shared the above video the other day, it reminded me why I choose to write about digital-age issues, the rights of artists and creators, and the assertion of the humanistic over the technological:  it’s because I believe the ...

I am presently ensconced in what I expect will become my new morning writing venue — a local coffee house/bakery located just a few miles from my alma mater, Bard College.  Like other establishments of its kind, especially those in proximity to very liberal, liberal-arts colleges, this place is steeped in the atmosphere of social consciousness. All the coffee is ...

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