So, what happened this past week is that a jury found that the former owner of a now-defunct music site called MP3Tunes was liable for copyright infringement because he ignored the fact that users were uploading illegal copies to his cyber-locker based site.  Safe harbors contained within existing copyright law are designed to protect website owners from this kind of ...

When the 1991 Gulf War put CNN on the map, that was the beginning of the end.  Ted Turner’s experiment in 24 hour news had found a spectacle — a popular and relatively safe war — that defined the model for how a network can fill a round-the-clock broadcast, even without news to report, and certainly without depth or context.  ...

Ownership is the subject of “On the Media’s” recent broadcast from WNYC, and the show’s producers talked to a variety of voices about the ever-shifting tensions between intellectual property rights and disruptive technologies.  One segment featured a conversation with Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics, and the theme was a familiar one — the inevitable disruption of manufacturing by 3D ...

“To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a “mummified” form.” – Alfred Jarry – Legal expert and blogger Terry Hart and I had the chance to meet in DC this week, and we were ...

Yesterday, on Capitol Hill, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing to discuss the Internet Radio Fairness Act, a bill largely backed by Pandora Media, Inc. and opposed by a growing number of musicians and songwriters.  In fact, I recommend Chris Castle’s excellent synopsis of the message taken to The Hill by a handful of songwriters.  If you want legal ...

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