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 ...
Remember when Barack Obama first entered the White House, and he made a deal with the Secret Service to keep his Blackberry? Admitting to his addiction to the device, the president got the agents to create a secure Blackberry that he could use while in office; and to those of us who were fans of the new president, this seemed ...
What do a bunch of puppies, a pretty woman, a dancing baby, Demi Moore, some Rastafarians, and 20 million books all have in common? They all refer to prominent, copyright-related cases* from which a content creator could—if he has nothing better to do—learn something about fair use doctrine. But even if an independent artist were to study Rogers v Koons ...
For someone who clearly doesn’t like Hollywood, Emily Hong, policy wonk for New America’s Open Technology Institute*, is determined to pitch an over-the-top narrative about AG Hood v Google that is so divorced from reality that I don’t think Luis Buñel would know what to make of it. Reposted on Slate, her title and basic plot, which portrays Google as ...
With progress in almost anything, there are usually downsides. Manufacturing and power generation produce pollution; automobiles produce pollution and accidents; smart phones produce selfies. In some cases, it is only common sense (at least to many of us) to try to mitigate the negative results of an otherwise good thing through legal regimes because the owners of industry don’t have a ...
