In this episode, I talk to artists’ rights activists Neil Turkewitz and David Lowery about the scope and nature of fraud in the NFT trade–and why NFTs are yet another false promise to help independent artists in the digital age. Read Neil Turkewitz’s interview with artist bor, a member of the activist group @NFTTheft, and read his follow-up piece about ...
In the first Matrix movie, the character Cypher announces that he wants to be plugged back into the network. A few scenes later, we see him dining at a fine restaurant, fully aware that everything he is experiencing is a simulation, and he doesn’t care. The question presented by this sequence is an ontological crossroads at which we now seem ...
Naturally, I join the outrage directed at any school board that would presume to ban a book—let alone because they don’t want students to confront the traumas of history—but I am almost as offended by the self-proclaimed defenders of culture in the anti-copyright crowd. How dare the McMinn County Board of Education ban Maus? But at the same time, how ...
In a recent post entitled What Kind of Writer Accuses Libraries of Stealing?, Maria Bustillos stakes out a wide swath of moral high ground in defense of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). CDL is a theory that libraries are allowed, within the boundaries of U.S. copyright law, to scan physical copies of legally obtained books and then loan the digital copies ...
By now, even people who don’t follow copyright and crypto stories may have read somewhere that a crypto group called Spice DAO purchased a rare copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune for €2.66 million and then announced its intent to make the work publicly available, produce an animated series, and promote derivative works. The group also floated the notion of minting ...
