On October 6, the CEO of Backpage.com Carl Ferrer, along with former executives Michael Lacy and James Larkin, were arrested in California on charges alleging involvement in prostitution, including conspiracy to commit pimping of a minor. The classified ad site had been under investigation by the California DOJ for three years and on the radar of anti-human-trafficking advocates for at ...
Last week, both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Universal Music Group filed petitions with the United States Supreme Court in regard to what is commonly known as the “Dancing Baby” case. The “baby” in question is about 11 years old now, and for those who might not know how a mundane home video became the focus of a multi-year, federal ...
In a document Public Knowledge has the conceit to call a “report,” the organization now proposes that the US Copyright Office is trapped in a state of “regulatory capture.” Usually, this is a term reserved for a condition that arises when the people who work at a regulatory agency become either culturally or economically too close to the industry they’re ...
Just because the surgeon general serves at the pleasure of the president, that doesn’t mean we think the president is, therefore, the more qualified expert in medicine. We want a president to have views on domestic healthcare in general but not to have opinions about actual medical practice. That would be scary. Yet, solely on the grounds that the U.S. ...
Earlier this month, Rolling Stone published an article by Steve Knopper called Inside YouTube’s War With the Music Industry. I would characterize the article as more of a glimpse than an inside view; but setting that aside, the article contained a quote about the DMCA that caught my attention. Knopper focuses on the fact that several major stars like Taylor ...
