The Flux Capacitor and the Copyright Office — “American businesses and consumers deserve a Copyright Office that is suited to the modern era and the future. Last weeks’ outage is yet more evidence that the Copyright Office needs authority over its own systems to make that happen. And we hope Congress gives this the attention it deserves.”
Ninth Circuit Gets Fair Use Wrong to the Detriment of Creators — To reach its conclusion that fair use is a right, the Ninth Circuit selectively quotes an Eleventh Circuit decision to make it sound like there is support for that position, when in fact, the Eleventh Circuit is saying the opposite. Stunning.
Priest on Market-Pressure Based Enforcement of Global Copyright — A new article from Univ. of Oregon Law School professor Eric Priest “proposes a framework for evaluating and improving market-pressure strategies aimed at redressing copyright infringement in markets where enforcement is lacking.”
Full of Schmidt — “…it turns out the demagogues of Silicon Valley are themselves inveterate elitists who slyly and consistently employ populist rhetoric for their own profit-hungry purposes. They elevate the quantitative formulations of Big Data into unalloyed truth, conveniently overlooking the helplessness of quantity alone to identify quality (nowhere in the history of humanity have we ever seen sheer numbers equate with human value), and also conveniently overlooking the subjectivity that will always embed itself into algorithmic selection, because (hey, how about that!) algorithms are at some point in the process created and overseen by human beings and will ever more reflect subjectivity even when posing as immutably objective.”
MPA Reveals 500+ Instances of Pirate Site Blocking in Europe — That’s a lot of broken internets.
“We Own You” – Confessions of an Anonymous Free to Play Producer — “Every time you play a free to play game, you just build this giant online database of who you are, who your friends are and what you like and don’t like. This data is sold, bought and traded between large companies I have worked for. You want to put a stop to this? Stop playing free games. Buy a game for 4.99 or 9.99. We don’t want to be making games like this, and we don’t want another meeting about retention, cohorts or churn.”