Among the reasons I defend copyright is that I firmly believe it is inadvertently one of the most profound expressions of democratic principles in the American Constitution. When the Framers essentially transposed English copyright into Article I of the Constitution, they could not possibly have imagined the full value—cultural, economic, and political—of vesting authors, with both the moral and pecuniary ...
You know how it’s offensive when a certain president uses a trope like “Do Nothing Democrats” to sling mud in lieu of articulating some kind of coherent, let alone moral, policy on any issue? Well, this same tactic is even more offensive when it’s used by people who should know better, especially people who believe they’re standing up for something. ...
Signaling one of the talking points I expect we’ll be seeing quite often as the DMCA fight brews—and it is brewing—Mike Masnick and others have declared that the Copyright Office, in its newly released report on DMCA Section 512, neglected to include the public among the stakeholders with a vested interest in the 1998 addition to the copyright law. In ...
From the Techdirt Sycophants Department In his post of May 28, Mike Masnick dutifully opened his hymnal and joined the chorus in a rendition of “How to Criticize the CASE Act,” lending his bel canto to the refrain that the new law would create a “copyright trolling court.” As explained here and here, this is an inscrutable criticism because the ...
It was encouraging to see our most prominent millennial Member of Congress, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recognize the link between a healthy democracy a professional class of journalists. On Friday, presumably in response to the startling number of layoffs at BuzzFeed, @AOC tweeted this: True to form, Mike Masnick of Techdirt replied: It is ironically quaint at this point to see ...
