Rapp On This

When did the City of Albany become culturally moronic? Last December, Albany code enforcement shut down a burlesque show at the Lark Tavern, apparently based on a “tip” from some clean-up-the-neighborhood types. The reason? Well, ...

Maybe the most obscene trend of our lifetime is this mania about free markets. It’s part of the racist Tea Party dogma. It’s central to neocon dogma. It’s why we have a sequestration happening in ...

A bunch of people have asked me to write about this Jonathan Coulton/Glee thing, so here goes. Those of you who are over, say, 30, have probably never heard of Jonathan Coulton until now. The rest ...

Holy crap, it’s prediction time again. Looking over last year’s, a couple of purely wistful-thinking predictions came through—that SOPA/PIPA would go down in flames and that Mittens would get nominated and then get pounded in ...

Well, it happened again. Facebook blew up on Monday with a cut-and-paste declaration of “rights” that went seriously viral. It was very similar to something that flew around earlier this year; it boldly proclaimed something ...

Several years ago, when the whole e-book thing was just starting, there was a bunch of controversy over what exactly you got when you bought an e-book. In one of those turns of events that ...

It’s time to talk, once again, about musician Amanda Palmer. A couple of weeks ago, she posted a notice that she was looking for a couple of musicians to play a couple of songs with ...

Last week I got an e-mail from a Berkshire Eagle writer who was concerned that my last article could be interpreted as saying that the Eagle ignored the story about the Berkshire blogger being ordered ...

Picking up more or less where we left off last time, talking about why David Lowery is so FoS in his damning of the Internet, tech companies, and the generation of music lovers who don’t ...

Facebook vs. Twitter. They don’t really compete, but I’ve always thought about them in competitive terms, probably because of how they compete for my time. A year or so ago, one of my favorite people said ...

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 ...

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 ...