In this TEDTalk, Jean-Philippe Vergne spends sixteen minutes proving one thing:  that piracy is the wrong word for mass, digital copyright infringement.  Those who operate torrent and similar sites should never have been called pirates, a word charged with romance and all too easily embraced as a badge of honor and charming rebelliousness. Never mind the fact that even this ...

“Speaking of shotguns,” a Chilean idom I learned from an old school friend to describe an abrupt change of subject, I came across this article from NBC News about a new report on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, which covers issues to do with serious cyber-espionage threatening both national security and economic interests of the United States.  Apparently, the report raises the ...

Now that the very early stages of copyright reform are underway with preliminary hearings on Capitol Hill, I think it’s worth revisiting the question as to why the conversation is happening in the first place.  There are, of course, specific adjustments to the system that ought to be looked at with regard to media & information distribution in the digital ...

Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing meant to lay some of the groundwork for overhauling copyright law in the United States.  The title of the hearing is “A Case Study in Consensus Building: The Copyright Principles Project,” suggesting that the “project” is about establishing premises and ground rules for how the debate might be framed going forward.  I ...

When it comes to new ideas about copyright, Derek Khanna is a very good looking person. In fact I’m reasonably sure this particular tweet was actually composed by his perfect hair. For the uninitiated, Khanna is the new poster boy for conservatives against artists’ rights, a career he effectively created for himself when he wrote a thoroughly uninformed memo for ...

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