By Justin Sanders
Freed of many of the regulations that govern other American industries, internet companies such as Google and Facebook have grown in wealth and power to a degree that boggles the mind. Along the way, they have toyed recklessly with our private data, turned a blind eye to criminal acts such... Read more
By: Georgia Stitt
I make my living as a composer and lyricist, working in collaboration with playwrights to make new musicals for the theater. I have a lot to say about sheet music, and I’ll get to that, but I’d like to start by drawing your attention to World Intellectual Property Day.... Read more
By: Mitchell Block
In 1973, fresh out of film school, I wrote and directed the dramatic short No Lies, an important film because of its open, and unfettered, discussion of sexual violence against women. Today, No Lies is included in the National Registry and in the curriculum for film theory, women’s studies, and anthropology... Read more
By: Ruth Vitale
We have a long and frustrating history on piracy and other copyright matters with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). We’ve said it before – EFF sometimes does good work. That’s what makes their predictable intransigence about piracy so incredibly frustrating and tiresome. Recently, EFF weighed in against efforts by the... Read more
[The] latest piracy threat [is] even more worrisome to the music industry: stream ripping. – Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2016 Recently, Taylor Swift debuted her latest single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” online to great viral fanfare – quickly smashing records in its wake. On YouTube, the song’s... Read more
By: Ruth Vitale
Mobile applications – the fun, useful programs that tell you how to get home, give you awesome bunny ears, introduce you to the love of your life, and let you text your friends across the world, and are cheap (maybe 99 cents) or even free – are being pirated like... Read more
By: Lucy Sosa
The best film trailers often serve as the audience’s ideal window into a movie’s narrative soul. In mere moments, they must introduce the primary characters and convey a sense of the story’s arc — all while getting filmgoers excited enough to think, “I can’t wait to see that!” One might... Read more
Dear Summer Movie Fan, I am writing this to you because it seems to me that you may not care enough about piracy. And you should! You seem to love movies. I hope you believe that the people who make the movies and television shows you love deserve to be... Read more
By: Richard N. Gladstein
Many of the films I have produced dramatize crimes and heists – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and The Bourne Identity, among others. Safe to say, I know a crime when I see one. Last week at SXSW, I spoke about crime – in this case the multi-million dollar heists involving... Read more
Picture by Noppyviva
Imagine Larry and Sergey at the Google Headquarters, sitting in one of their hundreds of conference rooms with chairs that alternate in blue, green, yellow, and red, both looking intently at a whiteboard with a large Venn Diagram drawn on it. If you’re like me and you were too busy... Read more