Increasingly, in the United States, the answer to that question seems to be yes.  As Exhibit A, I offer this latest anecdote from Ellen Seidler at VoxIndie, who describes the experience of one indie film distributor who found an entire film uploaded to YouTube by some smug little snot with the handle Free Movies. The film distributor had used its ...

This is an argument that’s been around for quite a while.  I first stumbled upon it in 2013, found it again in the recently published report by Berkeley and Columbia researchers, and I understand it came up again in round-table discussions held last week at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals regarding Section 512 of the DMCA.  The premise is ...

“R Street is a free-market think tank with a pragmatic approach to public policy challenges.”         — R Street About Page — If one is going to comment on public policy, then one ought to make an effort a) to understand the nature of a given topic; and b) to present facts instead of fiction.  In this ...

Embed from Getty Images I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms, hosted by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, and I would recommend this user-friendly guide for anyone who, like me, has basically sucked at math their whole lives.  In one segment, du Sautoy describes how a matching algorithm pairs compatible donor sets with ...

Remember when Barack Obama first entered the White House, and he made a deal with the Secret Service to keep his Blackberry?  Admitting to his addiction to the device, the president got the agents to create a secure Blackberry that he could use while in office; and to those of us who were fans of the new president, this seemed ...

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)