When will the legacy entertainment industry get it through their thick skulls that recording content is legal. We’ve done this. We’ve done it at the highest level. Tools that have substantial non-infringing uses are legal. Well, at least in the US. Which explains why the legacy companies often go overseas to do their dirty work. […]
At one point, we had a functioning Constitutional Republic. Sure, it wasn’t an actual democracy — the Electoral College still elected our president — but it seemed to function about as well as any major nation’s government does, if not better on most occasions. Then things changed. For reasons I still can’t understand, a failed […]
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This one will take a bit of background to explain where things stand. As you likely know, two years ago first Florida and then Texas each signed laws that would restrict social media companies and how they moderate content on their platforms. Both laws were quickly challenged by two trade associations for internet companies: NetChoice […]
Every few months a media outlet will get a staffer to write an inane story about how if you subscribe to every streaming service in existence, you’ll unsurprisingly wind up paying almost as much as you’d pay for cable TV. The underlying message is usually that we haven’t actually made real progress and that gosh, […]
The more things change, etc. We’ll never fully reject this country’s racist history if we insist on stocking our police departments with racists. The horrific events described here do not exist in a vacuum. The officers who felt comfortable doing these things felt comfortable for several reasons. First, there’s the long history of racist policing, […]
It’s important coming into this story to know and note that Rockstar, the publisher behind hit franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, has waged a very public war on modding communities for its games for years now. Despite just how useful these modding communities tend to be in elongating the sales cycle […]
On Friday, the Internet Archive put up a blog post noting that its digital book lending program was likely to change as it continues to fight the book publishers’ efforts to kill the Internet Archive. As you’ll recall, all the big book publishers teamed up to sue the Internet Archive over its Open Library project, […]
The free press is supposed to be free. That’s what the First Amendment means. Journalists have a long-acknowledged, supported-by-decades-of-precedent right to publish information that may make the government uncomfortable. When cops start raiding press outlets, everyone takes notice. This isn’t how this works — not in the United States with its long list of guaranteed […]
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I’ve talked before about the utter stupidity (and danger) of trying to turn the internet into Disneyland: a safe space for little kids, where they’ll never encounter any content that makes them upset, but plenty of states (and many people in Congress) are trying to do it anyway. Wisconsin is the latest, and its Senate […]
If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not just good enough for a publicly traded company to provide an excellent, affordable product that people like. Wall Street demands improved quarterly returns at any cost, which, sooner or later, causes any successful company to begin cannibalizing itself to feed the “growth for growth’s sake” gods. Mergers, price hikes, […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is jmcken with a comment about Benji Smith taking down his “Prosecraft” tool, and specifically the frequent assertion that it matters where/how he got the books that formed its dataset: Think of it this way: If someone pirates a movie, that’s unlawful. But if that […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, there were a few interesting studies and reports that deserved attention. One built on previous research showing that you beat piracy with innovation, not enforcement, and was echoed by similar results coming from the UK. On another front, a new report outlined how US telcos abandoned rural American […]
Cops love shooting dogs almost more than they like casually violating constitutional rights. Even the DOJ called cop-on-dog violence an “epidemic.” Cops dress like warriors, plaster their cars with Punisher logos, declare themselves the “thin blue line”… and then act like small woodland creatures the moment they encounter anything slightly unexpected. Guns, tasers, body armor, […]
Microsoft has long been one of several companies that attempted to monopolize repair in a bid for profit, particularly when it has come to the company’s game consoles. But in recent years the company appears to have realized that with state and federal lawmakers and regulators cracking down on this behavior, it might be smart […]
This is and will keep happening. As complicated a landscape as copyright law is, the idea of automating the policing of copyright infringement without creating all kinds of collateral damage is simply absurd. Our pages are absolutely brimming with example after example of all kinds of entities issuing copyright claims and strikes on all kinds […]
Three years ago we had the CEO of Jungle Scout, Greg Mercer, on our podcast, to debunk the claim that Amazon was unfairly competing with third party sellers in the Amazon marketplace. It’s become somewhat accepted wisdom that Amazon is engaged in some sort of predatory behavior, looking at what products sell well with data […]
It’s a fact: You can violate a government employee’s rights while being a government employee. Sure, it’s more tricky than violating rights as a government employee (when targeting non-government employees), but it can still be done. Constitutional protections are a bit more limited for government employees, but they don’t cease to exist. Every American has […]
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