As the deadline approached for public comments to the Copyright Office in anticipation of its review of Section 512 of the DMCA, TorrentFreak reported yesterday morning that 50,000 “citizens” chimed in to protest DMCA “abuse,” apparently enough to “crash” the government’s servers.  Assuming the crash did occur, it’s probably an endorsement for Copyright Office modernization, but to the matter at ...

Yesterday, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker announced the official launch of the Digital Economy Board of Advisors, presenting seventeen volunteer professionals described in a press release as a “diverse group.”  And while it’s true that this diversity does represent the full spectrum from tech industry power players (YouTube & ATT) to tech industry startups (Lyft & Handy), Secretary Pritzker did not ...

In a story that appeared Monday in The Guardian, writer Danny Yadron projects a hypothetical, but not technically unrealistic, future scenario in which we imagine our driverless car hijacks a run to the grocery store, transporting us instead to a police station because face-recognition software resulted in our being wanted for questioning in an investigation.  The eerie itself, Yadron reports, ...

The February nomination of Dr. Carla Hayden by President Obama to the position of Librarian of Congress was apparently cause for excitement among many of the usual suspects who write in opposition to copyright.  Because the Copyright Office operates within the purview of the Library of Congress, and the Librarian has final say in key proceedings, some pundits are anticipating ...

If a man overhears two women at the local coffee house advocating some point of view he doesn’t like and he then announces out loud that he hopes someone rapes and kills them, the management will toss him out on the street.  In such a scenario, patrons will applaud the ejection, and nobody in his right mind will suggest that ...

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