As a follow-up to my last post, I see that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has (not surprisingly) also accused the News Media Alliance (NMA) of petitioning the incoming administration to “weaken fair use doctrine” and, by extension, threaten press freedom itself. Granted, in contrast to Mike Masnick’s ad hominem style on Techdirt, when EFF obfuscates, they usually write a more ...
In an effort to conflate president-elect Trump’s rhetoric on censoring the press with copyright protection, Mike Masnick at Techdirt accuses the News Media Alliance of seeking to “whittle down” fair use. He further says this will only leave journalists vulnerable to the kind of censorship Trump has threatened by amending libel laws. There are too many holes in Masnick’s post to address ...
There is a lot of anxiety about jobs these days and with good reason. The subject of trade has a lot of people on edge, and we’re only just beginning to talk seriously about the very real prospect of automation killing middle-class jobs in places other than the obvious repetitive factory work. As theoretical physicist Michio Kaku predicts in a ...
In the current political climate, I imagine many artists, authors, and journalists will continue to speak up about a wide range of civil rights. While they’re at it, they should not forget their own rights. For five years now, I’ve written in defense of copyright as a civil liberty—as a property right, a labor right, and a force for strengthening ...
On Monday, the Internet Association, which represents most of the major online platforms, sent a letter to the president-elect asking that his administration show support for the the status quo of the CDA and the DMCA in order to sustain “innovation and free expression” online. But for the date and the name Trump, the letter is a boilerplate industry position ...
