So, I don’t engage very often via Twitter, but once in a while, I respond to something that catches my attention and then usually regret spending time responding to the responses.  Last week, I noticed that Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda—the face, voice, and tweetdeck of anti-Article 13 activism in the EU—posted an odd tweet, and I replied …  Because, ...

When a media conglomerate is the subject of a news story, we expect the news organization owned by the parent company to acknowledge that relationship in its reporting.  So, when ABC News reports a story, positive or negative, about the Disney Corporation, it is standard practice that the reporter remind viewers that she is talking about her ultimate employer.  Unfortunately, ...

Now that the holiday shopping season is officially underway, it seems like a good time to talk about counterfeit products; and it may surprise some readers to know that consumers have almost no meaningful protection against the tens of thousands of counterfeiters operating online.  At best, a counterfeit product will merely be disappointing; at worst, it will set the house ...

As many readers know, the EU has been considering various proposals to better protect copyright owners in the European digital market.  In all cases, proposed legislation focuses on large, for-profit platforms that reap substantial revenues by exploiting copyrighted works without license or compensation.  And as usual, the large, for-profit platforms have sought to describe these proposals in hyperbolic terms—as threats ...

In July of 2016, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit alleging that Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is unconstitutional.  More recently, in September, Cory Doctorow announced the EFF’s “Project Apollo” vowing to “end DRM within a decade.”  I personally tend to think of such high-drama tilting at windmills as mostly a fund-raising strategy for EFF, ...

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)