Among the standard responses to any proposal to mitigate online piracy is an insistence that it just cannot be stopped. Perhaps not entirely. But it can be starved. That was the underlying goal of SOPA, but people decided the criminal sites deserved the money they were making because freedom. As many readers know, the piracy universe is still largely supported ...
On Monday, I was up early and first heard about the Las Vegas shooting on the radio in the car. It was still dark, and the winding road thick with fog, lending an eerie mood to the sound of Scott Simon’s voice on NPR reporting what little was known about this latest incident in what is now an epidemic of ...
The implication that copyright is fundamentally a tool of censorship is a favorite theme among its critics. They rarely miss an opportunity to ring this particular bell when the chance presents itself; and most recently, Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica, reported that Sirius XM filed a DMCA notice to have an archive of interviews between Howard Stern and Donald ...
That would be an incendiary claim, wouldn’t it? But let’s be honest. If a different industry (say the motion picture industry) were opposing the anti-trafficking bill called SESTA, then the EFF, Fight for the Future, PublicKnowledge, Techdirt, and about 30 other Google-backed organizations would surely not hesitate to righteously declare from their laptops that “Hollywood Loves Child Sex Slaves.” There ...
Everybody loves a scandal, even though sometimes where there’s smoke there’s just more smoke. German politician Julia Reda (MEP), the sole member of the Pirate Party at the European Parliament was joined by TechDirt and some mainstream news sources in making a fair bit of noise last week, declaring that the EU Commission buried a study, which concluded that “piracy ...
