I saw it again the other day. In a sarcastic tweet that flew by. A familiar theme. Without naming names, it said something like this: As if creativity didn’t exist before 1709. There was no Shakespeare. For one thing, this is the kind of pugnacious statement that I can’t believe ever informs the copyright debate. Because I don’t know anyone who ...

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 ...

Increasingly, in the United States, the answer to that question seems to be yes.  As Exhibit A, I offer this latest anecdote from Ellen Seidler at VoxIndie, who describes the experience of one indie film distributor who found an entire film uploaded to YouTube by some smug little snot with the handle Free Movies. The film distributor had used its ...

I have a dream that one day my children will be judged not by the content of their character, but by the content they can steal.   So, my friend David Lowery, on his blog The Trichordist, has been taking the organization Fight for the Future to task lately, and he most recently caught the organization in a lie related ...

The father of modern chemistry Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was beheaded in 1793 in what is now the Place de la Concorde. A victim of France’s post-revolutionary Reign of Terror, he was specifically marked for execution by one vengeful, lesser scientist named Jean-Paul Marat, whose incorrect theory about combustion had been publicly scorned by Lavoisier at the royal academy. It’s rare when revolutions ...

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