Embed from Getty Images When the story first broke about the “Fearless Girl” statue, I didn’t pay it much more attention than I had ever given to the “Charging Bull” that the girl now faces in her defiant, wind-blown pose. I always assumed the bull simply represents the financial industry the same way I assume “The Garment Worker” statue on ...
Photo by DelmasLehman Pretty much since Napster (1999), tech pundits have been presumptuously lecturing pro-copyright creators about economist Joseph Schumpeter’s principle of “creative destruction.” This is the observation that the market will naturally produce innovations which will displace existing products or services, often rendering the older models obsolete. Take Schumpeter, add hubris and piles of money, and you get the “disrupt everything” culture ...
Photo by jeancol1503 Well, here we go. The network of copyright critics seems to be working out their main talking points for hating on H.R. 1695, which proposes to make the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee (with Senate approval) rather than an employee of the Librarian of Congress. Mike Masnick, founder/editor of Techdirt, has written a piece for The Verge ...
Photo by Tamagocha A couple weeks ago, a comment on the Illusion of More Facebook page proposed that the Walt Disney Company was able to get its start in the 1930s because the story for the studio’s first animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was “in the public domain.” I don’t mean to pick on one particular comment ...
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in a copyright case that addresses the principle of “separability.” This is one of those areas of IP that a colleague of mine would call the “metaphysics of law,” and that’s not a criticism. In fact, I happen to think the more subtle aspects of copyright—the ones that challenge judges to weigh esoteric ideas ...
