shouting loudly

If you’ve ever been a fan of StayFree! Magazine, you can help pick the best articles from the magazine’s history. Sadly, Carrie McLaren & Co. are calling it quits on the published mag, but at least they’ll keep the StayFree! blog up and running. Print pubs take a lot of time and energy, so surely [...]

In an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig describes the legal uncertainty surrounding the Viacom suit as impending “copyright chaos.” Lessig blames the 2005 Grokster decision for inviting Viacom’s lawsuit of YouTube. The Supremes overstepped their bounds, usurping Congressional authority to damn new technologies, heightening the risk for innovators and [...]

I’m in the middle of a 2-week vacation in Colorado, but I guess I have to say something about Viacom’s suit against YouTube–or, at least, I have to link to some people who say something. At News.com, Declan McCullagh says the case depends on how you view 17 USC § 512, the “notice-and-takedown” provision of [...]

Thanks to a recent US Copyright Office ruling, webcasters will pay royalties to copyright holders at a rate nearly three times that paid in 2005, threatening their very ability to stay online. In 2002, the Copyright Royalty Board set the royalty rate at $.0007 per song per listener. This may not sound like much, but

Apparently a Japanese court ruled in July 2006 that all Japanese films produced before 1953 are part of the Public Domain. That includes one of the most brilliant movies in film history: Rashomon by Kurosawa. if you haven’t seen it yet, you have no excuse but to check it out at the Internet Archive: Rashomon.

Much media violence research focuses on at-risk populations, such as the imitation of violent scenes among children. The U.S. Army has recognized its own cadets as another sort of at-risk population, it seems, requesting that Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer on TV’s 24) visit West Point to tell cadets that torture is not okay. Citing the [...]

Representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA) and John Doolittle (R-CA) have introduced a bill that would scale back the effect of the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA and limit the liability of technological innovators, sparking debate among all stakeholders. The Freedom And Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007, or FAIR USE Act (pdf), has been wrongly [...]