Once again the Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken up the cause of industry in the guise of public interest, principally with the ultimate goal of distorting fair use doctrine beyond its intended purpose.  I am speaking about the case of FoxNews v TVEyes, which as Terry Hart points out in this post on Copyhype, re-treads some familiar ground regarding the ...

I just watched a fun little documentary film called Stripped (2014) made by David Kellett and Frederick Schroeder about comic strip creators. The film features interviews with veteran artists whose careers were born in the syndicated market as well as contemporary cartoonists whose work never graced a newspaper but instead found an audience in cyberspace. Every artist interviewed generally seemed ...

“What would the world be without America? It would be a dull and dinky planet indeed.” – Elizabeth Wurtzel – In honor of the 225th Anniversary of the first copyright act of the United States (May 31, 1790), I’d like to recommend a little book that neatly offers both a primer and a rationale for intellectual property in the United States. Creatocracy:  ...

The Digital Citizens Alliance, has released its second annual report on the for-profit, ad-supported media piracy trade.  In collaboration with MediaLink, the report titled Good Money Still Going Bad studied 2014 data to reevaluate the central questions posed in the research done with 2013.  How profitable are these pirate sites, and where does the money come from? The macro view is much the same ...

Once again, a confederacy of the usual suspects has regrouped, rebranded, and relaunched a campaign on copyright in the digital age. They call themselves the Re-Create Coalition. David Lowery on the Trichordist referred to them as “getting the band back together,” and it is true that this familiar list of mostly Google-funded organizations (with bizarrely similar logos) has been trying ...

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