Organized labor released a public statement about the Leahy/Hatch bill and the shrill opposition to it from the Google amen chorus: “We respect the rights of business and interest groups to raise thoughtful questions for open discussion and debate, but we must speak up when such groups organize campaigns dedicated to paralyzing the legislative process […]

Interesting coincidence of this EFF call to action to oppose the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act and Geist’s apparent regurgitation of the “open letter” in the Toronto Star.Notice that the EFF did Geist one better–while Geist at least mentioned the title of the bill (although he never once told readers that the purpose of […]

Andrew Orlowski nails it on the continuing saga of the horrendous Google Books metadata in his piece “Google crowdsources card index for ‘humanity’s last library’“. The issue is this: Serious scholars have found extraordinary errors in the Google Books metadata, the equivalent of the card catalog in a library. (Remember those?) Which means if you’re […]

The Obama Administration has done a remarkably effective job at finding clever ways to attack online piracy as evidenced by raids earlier this year that sent torrent freaks running from a federal manhunt and found their domain names seized–but more importantly froze their transactional accounts and advertising revenue accounts. Meaning, the government can use an […]

Helienne Lindvall has another brilliant column in The Guardian, “The Winners and Losers of Social Networking Promotion” in which she has a frank discussion of the problems that artists, and particularly songwriters, have with the demands of marketers and promotion folk to get creators to blog, tweet, and generally engage in the much vaunted “conversation” […]

Is “I dabbled in witchcraft, but I didn’t join a coven” the new “But I didn’t inhale”? There is no doubt–we are deep in the silly season of American politics. If you are an artist standing around watching your life’s work being ripped off in the name of “consumer rights” by some of the largest […]

On the eve of Google Books Take 2, a/k/a Google Music, we are treated to this strong analysis from Google economist Hal Varian as quoted in IP Watch: Art doesn’t scale. Well, what he actually said was: “Searching for the owners of these copyrights is not done at a socially optimal level, Varian told the […]

Paul Resnikoff at Digital Music News nails the Google Music vaporware charade in his column “The Fiction that is Google Music“: “If you want to steal music – lots and lots of music – then Google is the best place to start. Anything else is just a sideshow designed to placate labels and insulate Google […]