It was encouraging to see our most prominent millennial Member of Congress, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recognize the link between a healthy democracy a professional class of journalists. On Friday, presumably in response to the startling number of layoffs at BuzzFeed, @AOC tweeted this: True to form, Mike Masnick of Techdirt replied: It is ironically quaint at this point to see ...
Not long after I wrote a post suggesting there is little difference between naive human engagement and bot engagement on policy issues, a couple of things happened. One was the publication of a story by Max Read in New York Magazine reporting that a substantial (though hardly surprising) amount of material and people on the internet are fake. The other ...
(This post was first published as part of Copyright Alliance’s Secret History of Copyright Series) “This copyright bill is the doing as we would be done by.” — Walt Whitman, 1891— Upon passage of the international copyright law just about a year before his death, Walt Whitman’s comment (quoted in Part I) included this refrain of the Golden Rule, about ...
(This post was first published as part of Copyright Alliance’s Secret History of Copyright Series) “Publishers move without concert, harmony, or agreement. There is no law to regulate their rights, and they have none (which are respected) by courtesy. They print the same book, and the spirit of competition is such as to destroy all correctness, all taste, and all chance ...
In several posts on the subject of Facebook and fake news, I have opined that if we users are going to believe and disseminate bogus information, that’s mostly an us problem, one which Facebook likely cannot solve. In that spirit, there is an extent to which I agree with Mike Masnick’s Techdirt post on May 2 calling Facebook’s plans to ...
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin