Justice O’Connor, in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises (1985), called copyright “the engine of free expression.” This was not a novel idea. The Justice was merely summarizing a well-established relationship between an author’s copyrights and the freedom to express herself as she wishes. Freedom in artistic expression requires that the author have a degree of personal economic liberty, which ...
I think Senator Blumenthal summed it up about right, as he was quoted in this week in the Wall Street Journal: “I’ve certainly been one of Congress’ loudest critics of Section 230, but I have no interest in being an agent of Bill Barr’s speech police.” In the post I wrote right after Trump threw a hissy fit because Twitter ...
As mentioned in my previous post, Article 13 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is the latest proposal that will “destroy the internet as we know it,” if the statute is ratified in its present form. The #copyright feed on Twitter seems dominated by messages proclaiming the existential toxicity of Article 13, and, as usual, ...
Last week, I stumbled on a tweet by a staff member at the Electronic Frontier Foundation warning California citizens to “take action” in protest against the passage of Assembly Bill 2880. The linked article on the EFF website written by Ernesto Falcon begins by asserting in its headline, subhead, and first paragraph that California will be venturing into brand new ...
I was told by a colleague who attended the Section 512 round tables in San Francisco that a consistent response from representatives of the OSPs was that anecdotes about harm to rights holders from piracy or YouTube-style infringement are not sufficient. “We need data,” was apparently an oft-repeated imperative. This is funny because that same crowd loves anecdotes about abuse ...
