How many times have comments about copyright included some variation on the theme “I would not pirate, if the revenue went to the artists instead of big corporations.”? Not only is this sentiment a fallacy based on ignorance about how the creative markets work, but these insincere claims to support the real creators ring especially hollow in context to those ...

Yesterday afternoon, the Senate Judiciary Committee (part of it anyway) held the third hearing in its ongoing review of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998). A handful of senators convened in the Rayburn building while witnesses testified via video conference.  The title of this hearing was Is the DMCA’s Notice-and-Takedown System Working in the 21st Century? Notice-and-Takedown is also referred ...

You know how it’s offensive when a certain president uses a trope like “Do Nothing Democrats” to sling mud in lieu of articulating some kind of coherent, let alone moral, policy on any issue? Well, this same tactic is even more offensive when it’s used by people who should know better, especially people who believe they’re standing up for something. ...

Signaling one of the talking points I expect we’ll be seeing quite often as the DMCA fight brews—and it is brewing—Mike Masnick and others have declared that the Copyright Office, in its newly released report on DMCA Section 512, neglected to include the public among the stakeholders with a vested interest in the 1998 addition to the copyright law. In ...

I was on the fence with regard to commenting on Georgia v. Public Resource. Its details are arcane, rather dull, and, despite rising to the level of a Supreme Court decision, is generally inapplicable to copyright law. In essence, the Court succeeded in commenting on a matter of contract law because the upshot of this will be that States seeking to ...

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