On Monday, I was up early and first heard about the Las Vegas shooting on the radio in the car. It was still dark, and the winding road thick with fog, lending an eerie mood to the sound of Scott Simon’s voice on NPR reporting what little was known about this latest incident in what is now an epidemic of ...
The implication that copyright is fundamentally a tool of censorship is a favorite theme among its critics. They rarely miss an opportunity to ring this particular bell when the chance presents itself; and most recently, Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica, reported that Sirius XM filed a DMCA notice to have an archive of interviews between Howard Stern and Donald ...
Photo by enriscapes As alluded to in yesterday’s post, the 2016 shock to what we might politely call political orthodoxy provided a boost to mainstream news subscriptions. “The [New York Times] added 276,000 net digital-only subscriptions in the final three months of 2016, the best showing since it implemented its paywall in 2011. In the weeks immediately following Mr. Trump’s election ...
As a follow-up to my last post, I see that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has (not surprisingly) also accused the News Media Alliance (NMA) of petitioning the incoming administration to “weaken fair use doctrine” and, by extension, threaten press freedom itself. Granted, in contrast to Mike Masnick’s ad hominem style on Techdirt, when EFF obfuscates, they usually write a more ...
In an effort to conflate president-elect Trump’s rhetoric on censoring the press with copyright protection, Mike Masnick at Techdirt accuses the News Media Alliance of seeking to “whittle down” fair use. He further says this will only leave journalists vulnerable to the kind of censorship Trump has threatened by amending libel laws. There are too many holes in Masnick’s post to address ...
