Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Appetite for Free Content Starves Creativity In his new book, author Chris Ruen provides a glimpse into his personal transition from consumer of free media to advocate for artists’ rights and a more rational conversation about copyright in the digital age. Ruen shares his own thoughts about common justifications for online piracy, about the mechanics behind ...
Back in the Napster days, I had an assistant named Greg, who remains one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever been lucky enough to call a friend. I remember giving him a hard time one afternoon when I realized he was using the file sharing app to download music. With a slightly self-aware grin he said to me, “Yeah, but ...
The ongoing debate over copyright in the digital age is clouded by so many layers of new-age malarkey and overblown, political banner-waving that it’s easy to lose sight of the behavioral realities behind all the self-serving theories of bloggers, legal scholars, corporate interests, and futurists. Take a very common activity like watching movies online via torrents or other sites that ...
Beneath the roil of arguments about illegal downloading of digital media, there is an unmistakable social, dare I say ethical, implication to the idea that the next generation is growing up believing that it is normal to enjoy entertainment media without paying for it. Perhaps the most counter-intuitive phenomenon is the fact that college students currently paying a premium to ...
Consider this: instead of an entrenched government fabricating an Orwellian state of fear in order to limit civil liberties, that it is in fact self-proclaimed rebels crying “freedom” who are using this very tactic to foster an agenda that is more destructive than the world they claim to oppose. It’s true that this website launched with an article praising a ...
