FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“They’re saying, hey, it might be a tractor, but it has a computer in it, and we own the software on the computer. And you have an implied license to operate the software on the tractor, but you don’t actually own the software that’s on the tractor.”
“They’re saying, hey, it might be a tractor, but it has a computer in it, and we own the software on the computer. And you have an implied license to operate the software on the tractor, but you don’t actually own the software that’s on the tractor.”
We think all of our interviews are special, but there are some that seem to strike a chord in listeners—maybe because they engage questions that aren’t often engaged, or encourage alternative visions. We revisit three of those conversations on this week’s show.
“It’s really an environmental imperative to figure out how we can make things last as long as possible.”
FCC chair Ajit Pai has announced his plans to gut net neutrality; the former Verizon lawyer and Jeff Sessions staffer declared his intentions at a private event in DC. So the victory activists fought for—having broadband recognized as a public utility like the telephone, and not some sort of corporate gift—is in jeopardy.
“Misinterpreting Copyright: A Series of Errors,” an essay by Richard Stallman, is one of the best explanations I’ve seen for what’s wrong with the way we think about copyright. The main idea is that the when the U.S. Constitution authorized copyright laws, it did so on the basis that it is “not a natural right of authors, but an artificial concession made to them for the sake of progress.”
From Matthew Yglesias (3/30/12), one simple chart that illustrates why copyright terms are way, way, way too long for the good of the culture: Books published before 1923 are in the public domain; we read a lot of them (based on Amazon shipping figures). Books published in the past 10 or 20 years or so […]
A New York Times op-ed today (2/15/11) by Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro (“Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?”) uses William Shakespeare as exhibit A in their case for copyright, noting that theater flourished in 16th century England because playwrights were able to make money by charging people to enter their theaters. […]
The problem with Rupert Murdoch’s proposal to create an online news consortium, in which major publishers would all band together to put their news content behind pay walls (L.A. Times, 8/21/09), is that it’s not illegal to discuss news events online. And you don’t want to make it illegal to discuss news events online. And […]
Considering how, “in recent months, news aggregators like the Huffington Post have received heated criticism from some who believe theyâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢re stealing valuable traffic and ad revenue from newspapers,” with even “appeals court Judge Richard Posner recently wr[iting] a widely-linked post arguing that copyright law should be changed in order to bar linking to websites and […]
Richard Posner is the sort of judge who gets mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee because of his supposed brilliance. But, then, he’s also the person who wrote this: Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without […]
In an affidavit supporting a lawsuit against a new novel related to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (New York Times, 6/17/09), Salinger’s literary agent makes a statement that encapsulates a common misunderstanding of what copyright is for. Referring to Salinger, the agent said, “He feels strongly that he wants his fiction and his characters […]
Corporate media’s arguments against Google are getting stranger and stranger. While previously the Washington Post had accused the search engine of “vacuum[ing] up their content without paying a dime,” now the Post has media lawyers Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown (5/16/09) charging that search engines “crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.” Can […]
We noted recently Fox News‘ peculiar understanding of the Fair Use doctrine, which allows writers, artists and others to make reasonable use of copyrighted material so long as they don’t infringe on the copyright owners’ commercial rights; Fox interprets this to mean that critics should only be allowed to make use of Fox video if […]
