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 ...
When my wife and I were first starting out in Seattle, we both got retail jobs, and she worked in the Eddie Bauer basement where everything was discounted due to overstocks, minor flaws, or seasonal obsolescence. Still, she had customers who approached her daily insisting that they were entitled to some further reduction from the marked price because, “See, this ...
There are few companies on the planet that can pony up a half-billion dollar fine for criminal behavior and shrug it off like an overpriced night on the town. And there are probably even fewer companies that can pay such a fine and continue to get away with the very same behavior. But then, not every company is a as ...
“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 ...
