Last week was a rare, silent moment on this blog because I was in the middle of a rather arduous house move. Consequently, I may be more than unusually prickly on the subject of holding onto old things, but it seems the last several days yielded a lot of internet activism aimed against the EU Copyright Directives, all of which ...
It seems that after Public Knowledge came out, guns blazing, and just plain making things up about copyright extensions in the new round of NAFTA negotiations, they and their supporters tried to tiptoe these statements back on Twitter by blaming the USTR for its lack of clarity. While I have little doubt that such vagueness is present—certainly if the USTR’s ...
Back in May, I reported that Cory Doctorow, “writing” for Boing Boing, literally invented a legislative process out of whole cloth in order to portray the CLASSICS Act as an 11th-hour bill written by Senator Orin Hatch. (Not even close.) But not wanting to be outdone in the dissemination of drivel, the group Public Knowledge bested Doctorow yesterday with a ...
On Saturday, Digital Music News reported that BMG Rights Management has reached a “substantial” settlement agreement with Cox Communications, thus ending a four-year legal battle that was teed up for a retrial in district court before the end of this month. In December of 2105, a jury awarded $25 million plus $8 million in fees to BMG, finding Cox guilty ...
As the world mourns the passing of Aretha Franklin, we need no further discussion about the value of recording artists. The anthem of a generation, Franklin’s first hit, “Respect” was not written by her but by Otis Redding, who first recorded the song in 1965. But in 1967, Aretha made that song what it is—“owned it” as we say today—along ...
