At a recent gathering of college alumni, a friend asked, “Is it me, or are you less active on Facebook these days?”  He was right.  I have all but bailed on the platform.  As a practical matter, it was just becoming a big time-suck; and as we all know from experience, engaging via social media doesn’t only occupy the measurable ...

In my recent post on this issue, I said I hating digging into it because it’s such a slog.  So in that regard, kudos to Grammy-winning composer/artist and activist Maria Schneider for assembling what might be the most comprehensive and digestible narrative lately presented on this subject.  Published as a guest post at The Trichordist, Schneider lays out the backstory, ...

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 ...

Musician David Lowery, founder of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, has become one of the most vocal defendants of artists’ rights in the digital age. A co-founder of The Trichordist, Lowery and his colleagues write some very detailed, professional assessments of the state of the music industry since digital file sharing, streaming, and purchasing have become a reality. Presently under ...

Imagine your diet will henceforth be determined by the tastes of a majority of American ten-year-olds.  This may sound as unlikely as it does unappetizing, but the prospect is not really all that different from the basis for at least one of the arguments of the copyleft crowd with regard to distributing creative content via the Web.  One assumption behind DIY ...

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