Sometimes one is confronted with an absurdity so self-evident that it defies an introductory sentence. So, I wrote that sentence instead. But what’s got me gobsmacked today is a story by Adam Sherwin writing for The Independent explaining that Google insisted the popular music site Drowned in Sound censor images of certain album covers on the grounds that they are ...
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 ...
Here’s one way the Web is being used by a group of young artists in collaboration with one of the “evil” big media companies: MTVu created a challenge campaign called “Against Our Will,” asking students to submit creative concepts to highlight the problems of modern-day slavery. The winning entry came from students at James Madison university and grew into an ...
“The Pirate Bay is speech.” This is a quote from one of the gurus perched on the mountaintop of techno-utopianism, John Perry Barlow, who appeared yesterday as a member of a panel discussion held at CES2013 in Las Vegas. The subject of the discussion was “A pro-artist/pro-innovation approach to copyright,” although the panel did not include anyone representing any counterpoint ...
In response to the tragedy in Newtown, CT the idea was raised by news commentators and in the blogosphere that the names of people who commit heinous crimes should be de-publicized in order to deny them even a posthumous fame we believe to be a constituent of their twisted motives. It is hard to imagine, though, that even if we ...
