After a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a number of blogs and articles appeared with headlines announcing that it is now a federal crime if, for instance, your kid uses your Netflix password. While that kind of headline is good for traffic and buzz, it’s also typically exaggerated and misleading—at least insofar as this recent decision is concerned. ...
“… last week a former Google lawyer at the DOJ anti-trust division against the recommendation of the US Copyright Office rammed through a 100% licensing rule that effectively brings the last of the “free” songwriters under the consent decree.” — David Lowery at The Trichordist — “The Department of Justice’s position is arrogance at its worst. The decision fails ...
Last week, Hillary Clinton released her Initiative on Technology and Innovation, brief, which reads a bit like a missive from the Internet Association and does very little to clarify her own views—possibly because she doesn’t have any—on the role of copyright in the digital age. My general criticism of the whole brief is that it seems to view “technology” as ...
Last week, I stumbled on a tweet by a staff member at the Electronic Frontier Foundation warning California citizens to “take action” in protest against the passage of Assembly Bill 2880. The linked article on the EFF website written by Ernesto Falcon begins by asserting in its headline, subhead, and first paragraph that California will be venturing into brand new ...
I was told by a colleague who attended the Section 512 round tables in San Francisco that a consistent response from representatives of the OSPs was that anecdotes about harm to rights holders from piracy or YouTube-style infringement are not sufficient. “We need data,” was apparently an oft-repeated imperative. This is funny because that same crowd loves anecdotes about abuse ...
