Credit: William Hook [CC BY-SA] Honestly, I still have trouble convincing myself that the push by the record industry to implement a three-strikes-and-you’re-out (that is, three-accusations-and-you’re-kicked-offline-for-a-year) system is actually happening, that grown men and women running companies claim—with a straight face—that this will save failing business models. It’s just so […]
Blog – Unity Behind Diversity
313 posts
Just hours before the iPad announcement yesterday, I wrote the following: When we think of mobile computers as merely “phones,” we tolerate restrictions that we would otherwise reject on our computers. How many iPhone users would come to Apple’s defence if they instituted the same strict policies and arbitrary limitations […]
Credit: mackarus [CC BY] People keep asking me about my new “cell phone,” but the Nokia N900 isn’t a phone. It’s a handheld, mobile computer. Calling it a phone is like calling a house a bed—sleeping is just one thing you do inside a house. I became interested in the […]
I’ve got a new post up at Roots Music Canada, why copyright infringement isn’t theft, which draws on William Patry’s book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, to explain that theft is a poor metaphor for copyright infringement. Canadian law professor Stephen Waddams, in a well-regarded book about how we […]
Photo by Ed McAskill I’ve been in love with Robyn Dell’Unto from the moment I first heard her voice, and it’s been almost two years now since we became friends and she first introduced me as her secret weapon. This past Thursday, we had the opportunity to perform at the […]
This post originally appeared on Roots Music Canada. When I tell someone that all of my recordings are downloadable for free, I’m often asked, “but… how will you make money?” “Well,” I’ll respond, “since it doesn’t cost me anything, I may as well let people share and listen to my […]
I had a bit of a moment yesterday. It’s just that I’m so incredibly excited and energized right now. I’m starting to move on a variety of really cool projects and endeavours. A little over a year ago, I claimed I was about to “up the diversity” on this blog. […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. We were just talking about how SOCAN, the Canadian copyright collection society, was going after gymnastics clubs for kids using music in their practice routines. Now they’re getting some well-deserved attention for other antics. Michael Geist explains how SOCAN tried to keep its submission […]
At the end of September, Matt Asay wrote a provocative post: Free software is dead. Long live open source. He argued that, while “free software advocates provided the early backbone,” that “ideological” approach has given way to the more realistic “pragmatism” of open source and that “we’re all the better […]