In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch (Paul Newman) sits astride his horse outside the same boxcar of the same train he’s successfully robbed over and over. Frustrated by the railroad owner’s ceaseless but futile attempts to thwart the hold-ups, Butch proclaims, “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing ...
This past summer was all about different kinds of boxes. The theme began with a small box filled with the civilian clothes my eldest son wore the day he left for Navy boot camp; and that was followed immediately by a crescendo of corrugated forms preceding a family move after nearly a decade in our last home. I thought I’d ...
Since the days of Napster, the technosenti have been insisting that the entertainment industry simply needs to stop complaining about copyright theft and innovate. Setting aside the fact that exploitation is not a form of innovation, I like to remind people that with regard to filmed entertainment, the technology for reliable, high-quality streaming is about five years old, which may ...
Attorney and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig considers the current copyright system to be generally antagonistic to contemporary culture. In fact, any number of common assertions about copyright’s supposed obsolescence in the digital age are very likely derivative of something written or said by Lessig, who has devoted a fair amount of energy promoting the value of the remix. In at ...
Every time a Martin Luther King anniversary comes around, the anti-copyright armada is well armed with blogs and articles decrying the indecency that the civil rights leader’s words and recordings are not in the public domain. And never one to miss such an opportunity, even while missing the point, Mike Masnick at Techdirt insists that Dr. King’s “I Have a ...
