I’ve seen a fair amount of dismissal in the digital-utopian crowd of the nearly 12,000 individual artists and creators who signed our letter to President Obama and Vice President Biden asking that their rights over their works be respected online. If you’re acquiring or giving away someone else’s creativity and labor without their authorization or [...]

On a panel discussion on copyright on Monday, I noted how in 1995 — when few folks had heard of the Internet and they probably thought it meant the walled garden of AOL — I had my own web site, where I posted for free and distributed to a fan list full text of a [...]

We write a lot on this blog about the puzzling ability of those who are able to rationalize their acquisition of a creator’s work without permission or compensation. Some of those logic-twisting rationalizations are debunked in our piece, “Critiquing Copyright Canards.” We’re not the only ones who have observed this, and picked up on how [...]

I had the pleasure of attending an interesting conference yesterday hosted by the Institute for Policy Innovation on broadband policy, a timely topic here in D.C. You can watch most of it on this C-SPAN recording; in an obvious conspiracy, the one panel C-SPAN chose not to videotape was the first one, in which I [...]

Today we’ll look at the meme that says artists should no longer try to make money off of their works, because in a virtual world they have no ownership of those works. We should take those works as we like and they can live off of other sources of income, including charity, i.e., a donation [...]

Call me a Luddite, call me behind the times, call me out of step with consumers (although I too am one), but like many folks of a certain age it’s becoming more difficult for me when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. That was my feeling this morning when I went out and collected my newspapers, The [...]

When fighting for the rights of copyright owners it helps to have a sense of humor. I’m grateful that the Software and Information Industry Association* has shown one in their new video titled “Don’t Copy That 2″ — here’s a link to its home with other goodies and here’s the YouTube link — an update [...]

Building on my last post, which focused on the “exclusive right” granted by the first U.S. Congress to authors and inventors, as guided by the U.S. Constitution, let me address briefly the rights that users of creative works often claim for themselves. I am an avid consumer of creative works myself, and understand that it’s [...]

There is no question that in our digital age we find ourselves falling into information traps, where our information sources are restricted to certain perspectives and biases, and our own biases are reinforced. I call these traps digital hollows, and they are unavoidable, but we can try to think beyond them if we remain cognizant [...]

Is our so-called “remix culture” really a new Renaissance of learning and cultural progress? Certain thinkers such as Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler knock vigorously on that door but are wise enough not to walk through. Plenty of bloggers and blog commenters, however, show no fear in ecstatically breaking through that thought barrier. In this [...]