Trademark law can be a lot of fun. Some of you ancient folk might remember the great QE2 debacle of the late ’80s when Dave and Char Shortsleeve got a nastygram from Cunard Lines, telling ...
By now, you all must be familiar with Kickstarter, the crowd-funding site. It (and similar sites like Indiegogo, Sellaband, etc.) allows for bands, filmmakers, inventors, almost anybody, to raise money for a project from the ...
I just became aware of a two-part article about what’s wrong with copyright law that ran recently on the business news site Bloomberg.com. It’s by the brilliant copyright scholar (and Google counsel) William Patry, and ...
The drapes got pulled last week on one of the most absurd aspects of major media culture—the MPAA’s movie rating system. The MPAA’s Film Ratings Board, the people who attach the G-PG-R-NC17 ratings on mass-distributed ...
A number of folks have pointed me to reports that Internet companies are about to start some heavy-duty spying on their customers. That’s kind of right, and if you had nothing better last summer than ...
Gotta love this. The Wall Street Journal reports this week that one of the fastest growing segments of the electronics industry is sales of . . . television antennas! What’s going on is that, as ...
Oh, my my my. A couple of weeks ago the Obama administration let it drop that it would require contraceptive care to be included in all employers’ health plans, including those in institutions associated with ...
The dust is still settling from the epic defeat of SOPA/PIPA last month. Most major media outlets are still mischaracterizing it as a battle of Big Tech vs Big Media, which is a convenient way ...
It’s incredibly rare these days when something good happens in Washington. Even more rare when it happens unexpectedly, spontaneously, and for the right reasons.
But last Wednesday something really good happened in Washington. The SOPA/PIPA legislation, ...
The Supreme Court is taking another whack at FCC vs. Fox , a case that’s been bungeeing around the courts for years. We’ve talked about the case here at least twice before. This time the ...
Once again, I’m batting around .500 with my predictions for last year. Hank Jr. was bounced from Monday Night Football, but he wasn’t replaced by Kanye. Justin’s did threaten to stop booking jazz (again), but ...
There’s a fascinating drama playing out right now in Albany County Supreme Court. The Daughters of Mary, a group of nuns associated with the St. Joseph’s Church and Convent in Roundtop, have sued Albany art ...
A few months ago, we talked about how an arm of the Department of Homeland Security was getting judges to sign orders allowing for the seizure of Internet domains that appeared to be trading in ...
Back in the Spring,I wrote about some extremely dangerous legislation that had been introduced in Congress. Well,it’s still there and it’s crunch time. The legislation is called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the House ...
The Sunday Times Union had a good article about a young rapper from Ravena who got invited and then disinvited to perform at Red Square at a show put together by an Atlanta company called ...
Got back really late last night from the 10th annual Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. As usual, it will take weeks to get my brain around everything I saw and heard ...
If you’re one of my 1,300-plus “friends” on Facebook, you know that I’m a frequent, perhaps compulsive, poster of unusual, funny, and informative stuff. I’ve defended Facebook here from time to time when some silly ...
According to my abacus, this is the 150th ROT. ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy. Mwah!
Moving on. A friend sent over an article yesterday about an exhibit at Art 404 gallery in New York ...
There have been lots of headlines lately about Anonymous, a mysterious “hacker collective” that’s pulled off a string of “attacks” on various websites. The mainstream media reports on Anonym
ous typically focus on the criminal aspects ...
Well, Spotify finally got here. The music-streaming service that has proven so wildly popular in Europe debuted here a couple weeks ago. So far, it’s living up to the hype.
Free Spotify accounts are readily available ...
First, the dates of this year’s Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit have been announced. It’s gonna be October 2-3 and will be held at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Panelists and topics have not ...
I’m in Montreal at the jazz festival (more on that next week), but I’ll put down my breakfast beer just long enough to inform you about the latest doings in the ...
A decision out of an Albany state court last week turned some art-world heads—it had to do with the Nite Moves “gentleman’s club” on Route 9. The court rejected the club’s owner’s claim for a ...
Here we go again. Last year, loaded up with mountains of money, shiny lobbyists, phony statistics and cheap rhetoric, Big Media landed on Congress and nearly passed a bill called COICA (“Combating Online Infringements and ...
Everybody’s been talking about the Cloud for some time now. Microsoft, in a series of typically cloying advertisements designed to communicate ideas to folks who aren’t all that bright, has actors proclaiming like so many ...
