It remains a popular talking point among copyright skeptics to say that copyright limits free speech. When this refrain was played a little over a week ago on Twitter by ReCreate’s Joshua Lamel, I responded that those who keep saying it are “hair-splitting to the point of pedantry.” Lamel replied with the assertion that everyone agrees with this trope—all copyright scholars across the spectrum ...
In an op-ed for The Hill published on September 30, Donald Trump, Jr. rails against the power of the major internet platforms, saying that “free speech is under attack” by Big Tech. His complaint, of course, is that the big internet platforms are censoring what he calls conservative voices, blaming “the technology giants that deplatform people at the behest of liberals and then ...
Recently, California legislators introduced the B.O.T. Act of 2018, which, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation summarizes, “would make it unlawful for any person to use a social bot to communicate or interact with natural persons online without disclosing that the bot is not a natural person.” The EFF describes the proposed bill as an understandable but over-broad response to Russia’s ...
Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a.k.a. “the wedding cake case.” In 2012, baker and cake designer Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, CO informed David Mullins and Charlie Craig, that he would not make a new cake for their wedding due to his Christian belief that ...
Suppose you invent something. A box that makes bitter vegetables taste like candy so kids will eat them. You call it KandyKale. Then, along comes an imposter, who steals your tech and infringes your intellectual property, and then sets up a bunch of websites that hijack the customers looking for your product in order to sell them the KandeeKale knock-off, ...
