Attorney and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig considers the current copyright system to be generally antagonistic to contemporary culture. In fact, any number of common assertions about copyright’s supposed obsolescence in the digital age are very likely derivative of something written or said by Lessig, who has devoted a fair amount of energy promoting the value of the remix. In at ...
Every time a Martin Luther King anniversary comes around, the anti-copyright armada is well armed with blogs and articles decrying the indecency that the civil rights leader’s words and recordings are not in the public domain. And never one to miss such an opportunity, even while missing the point, Mike Masnick at Techdirt insists that Dr. King’s “I Have a ...
You know how you can tell a social or political point of view is losing ground? When the crazy stuff bubbles to the surface. Here in the U.S., for example, the GOP is floundering because it has a bit of a crazy people problem. Intelligent conservatives remain frustrated by the headline-making loons in their party who don’t realize the ...
On July 4th, I announced that I’m rebooting a project that began as a short film in the summer of 2011. goneElvis is a portrait depicting a day in the life of a female veteran of the Iraq War who is homeless and suffers from PTSD. As stated in the new post on the film’s website, there are things I ...
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 ...
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin