This post originally appeared on Techdirt. Despite claiming to represent the interests of songwriters and composers, ASCAP has consistently provided bad advice on how they should respond to digital technology and the internet. For ASCAP and many other collection societies, anything that doesn’t involve royalties seems automatically bad (despite all […]
Technology
217 posts
My website was recently migrated to a new server, and since then I haven’t been able to automatically upgrade WordPress plugins via FTP. Tonight I chased down the error. I could login via FTP from the command line, but WordPress kept telling me I had the wrong username/password. I found […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. Howard Knopf, a well known Canadian copyright expert, recently took a look at some of the failed copyright levy proposals in Canada. The Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) administers the tax levy on blank CDs, which now accounts for almost 90% of the price. […]
I’ve been using the Openmoko Neo Freerunner as my mobile phone for over two months now. The phone can run a variety of software distributions. I started off with the Om 2008.12 Update, but spent the first few weeks testing out other popular distributions: FDOM, SHR, Qt Extended and finally […]
This article originally appeared on Techdirt. In the April 2009 issue of Entertainment Law & Finance, three partners in the Intellectual Property Group at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP take a look at the role that “amateur musicologists” have played thus far in the copyright battle stemming from Satriani’s lawsuit against Coldplay […]
This article originally appeared on Techdirt. Greg Gillis (aka Girl Talk) recently participated in a live chat as part of a Download Decade series run by the Globe and Mail. Gillis makes music entirely from samples, combining existing songs in creative ways to make something new. His last album, which […]
This article originally appeared on Techdirt. It’s widely known that internal staff are the biggest threat to IT security, but what about your computer repairman? After a hard drive was stolen from Real Living Action Realty in Pennsylvania, the company called Kevin Andrew Lutes, who had done repair work for […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. We’ve been hearing a lot about “cyberbullying” lately. Cases like the Lori Drew incident have got politicians and teachers all over looking to pass vague new rules and laws (or twist existing ones) to punish behavior they feel is wrong. The problem is, no […]
Adam Thierer’s reaction essay appeared in the Cato Unbound debate on Friday, Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of “Perfect Control.” He argues that the basis for Lessig’s pessimism in his book, Code, was his illusory belief that code provides a mechanism for “perfect control.” While he levies some strong criticisms […]