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 ...
It may be hip these day to talk about platform responsibility, but just a couple years ago, there were no mainstream conversations about how the operations and policies of online service providers might be enabling misinformation, hate speech, propaganda, etc. And while mea culpas from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey make headlines, and Google tries to pitch the ...
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 ...
In a new, must-read article at MIT Technology review, Professor Zeynep Tufekci at the the University of North Carolina describes How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump. Beginning with the euphoric naivete of just a few years ago that universally assumed Facebook and Twitter would save democracy, Tufekci details the mechanisms by which social media became a ...
