This seems to happen every four years like clockwork during Presidential elections. Some musician gets upset about a politician he or she disagrees with, making use of his or her music during campaign rallies. This time around the candidate is Newt G… Continue reading →

This morning a friend shared with me some amusing American Sign Language videos, and in return I wanted to share with him my favorite ASL video of all time: B. Storm’s interpretation of the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy. Only I couldn’t because it was gone… Continue reading →

As we noted in our ACTA primer, there appeared to be a lot of misinformation spreading about the agreement — which many people were comparing to SOPA/PIPA. While we appreciated that folks who had become interested in SOPA/PIPA were turning their atte… Continue reading →

It’s now widely recognized that the extreme demands of SOPA/PIPA catalyzed a new activism within the Net world, epitomized by the blackout effected by sites like Wikipedia on January 18. But as Techdirt has reported, SOPA and PIPA are not the only att… Continue reading →

Yesterday, President Obama used Google Hangout to do a kind of online virtual town hall meeting, which was both live streamed and is now up on Youtube:

Being a “first” such use of a relatively new technology is bound to get some attention, and I tho… Continue reading →

One of the recurrent themes on Techdirt is the sense of entitlement the owners of various kinds of monopolies display, and their common belief that being able to maximize the profit from those monopolies trumps any other consideration.

For example, FI… Continue reading →

Well, this one’s bizarre. Back in March 2010 we wrote about the UK Usenet aggregator Newzbin being found liable for the copyright infringment of its users. A year later, the ISP BT was ordered to block access to Newzbin2, its successor. What amounte… Continue reading →

One of the recurring themes around here is that advertising should be engaging and entertaining, not annoying. Every year, there are excellent examples of this truism — during the halftime of the Superbowl. Some ads are easily forgotten, but some are … Continue reading →

While the White House has been asking the tech/internet world to come up with their own “best ideas” concerning legislative solutions for copyright issues, it’s a question that rubs many the wrong way. As folks like Tim O’Reilly have noted, this seems… Continue reading →