Yep. I’ll throw myself on this grenade. No problem. Let me say at the outset that anyone who wants to bring up the RIAA lawsuits of the aughts in context to this post can just stifle the instinct because you’re being silly. You might as well say your scorecard on American civil liberties stops with the Trail of Tears. Let’s ...
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 ...
Compressorhead, the all-robot band that plays hits by AC/DC, Motorhead, and The Ramones, represents another step toward a technological future in which machines continue to perform tasks as well as (or better than?) humans. Many a techno-utopian envisions a world in which human labor, including creative and performing arts no longer represents economic or social value. Naturally, the prospect of ...
This op-ed that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times is easily one of the best pieces I’ve read on both the cultural and financial dangers of forsaking copyright in the name of technological “progress.” The entire article is a pull-quote, but here are two that get right to the heart of the matter: “The value of copyrights is being quickly ...
