Last week, the National Music Publishers Association put the top 50 unlicensed lyrics websites on notice. President of the NMPA David Isrealite had a simple message to these top infringers: “Get licensed, get offline, or get sued.” And with two recent judgments in its favor, Isrealite has little doubt his organization would prevail in its pursuit of these cases. Identifying ...
First of all, name if you can the serious competitors of any of the following: Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Google. Go back ten years, name the biggest sites on the web, and you might notice that some of those names are either gone or really quite small compared to the dominant sites today. It isn’t even necessarily sinister, but it is a fact that the ...
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 ...
