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 ...
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 ...
