Responding to Kevin Drum, who argues that we just haven’t tried hard enough to enforce IP law in this country, Tim Lee has an extremely useful timeline of the major efforts to crack down on piracy over the past two and a half decades: 1992: Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act, which mandated that […]
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Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick has some big news for the ongoing Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) debate. Germany has announced that it won’t sign the agreement, at least not yet: Okay, things just got serious over ACTA. In our post on Latvia bailing on signing ACTA, we noted that in joining with Poland and the Czech […]
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David Thier takes issue with my piracy post, writing that my argument over the nature of most piracy is “nothing but economic apologism. It says that we’re allowed to steal because it doesn’t really matter. Because we didn’t like that song anyway, we just wanted to hear what it was all about. Because it’s all […]
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SOPA, PIPA, ACTA – the four-letter acronyms of the various laws and trade agreements aimed at cracking down on internet piracy have been swirling about the internet lately. More often than not these regulations have been crafted behind closed doors, leading to discussions about each that are too murky and confusing by half. Hyperbole abounds, often magnifying […]
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Now that SOPA has been shelved, the Entertainment Software Association has dropped its support of the bill. Not long ago the video game lobbying group remained staunch supporters of both SOPA and PIPA. Piracy, they claimed, was hurting the booming video game industry. The political winds have shifted, and industry groups and politicians alike are […]
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The White House has responded to two anti-SOPA petitions at the White House blog today. “While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response,” the post said, “we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative […]
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Freddie deBoer wants a better class of IP reform advocates. In a long response to Julian Sanchez, Freddie dismisses the current batch as “pro-piracy” and lays down a critique of the technofuturist crowd that basically writes them off as calloused advocates of artistic ruin and the decline of the artistic middle class. I think piracy […]
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Nearly every elected official in Congress voted for the National Defense Authorization Act, a bill placing domestic terrorism investigations into the hands of the US Military. We need to elect more politicians willing to vote ‘Nay.’ Over on Google Plus, in a response to this very excellent post by Alex Tabbarok, Jim Henley writes: The […]
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