Category: Intellectual Property

Slate today has a great article called “Don’t Support Your Local Bookstore” on the emerging trends that make e-publishing vastly superior to authors and literary culture than traditional publishers. Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection, no… Read more →

Some interesting news on the intellectual property front. As our country works toward intensifying the criminal prosecution of those found to be file-sharing (to the point of desiring the power to kill websites that post copyrighted content), Switzerland has defied the corporate Entertainment lobby and affirmed its earlier ruling that peer-to-peer downloading of copyrighted material for personal use is completely… Read more →

Yet because the copyright term is now so long, in many cases extending well over a century, most of twentieth century culture is still under copyright–copyrighted but unavailable. Much of this, in other words, is lost culture. No in is reprinting the books, screening the films, or playing the songs. No one is allowed to. In fact, we may not… Read more →

This is not so much a review of Tron:Legacy as it is a way of reading the film as an exposition of our technological climate. There are three observations I would like to make, ways in which Tron:Legacy illustrates our era, as contrasted with the first film. The original Tron was done in the heady technology boom hayday of the… Read more →

Today the United States Congress is discussing a new Internet Censorship program, one which would allow the corporations and the government to remove any website they deem fit, and would mandate the criminal charge of felony to any person who streams or uploads copyrighted material in any form (this would include videos of your kid dancing to a Prince song)… Read more →