Techdirt

Marvel Should Keep A Tighter Leash On Its Lawyers

On Tuesday, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch took a straw poll on Twitter and decided to set up a screening of the new movie Iron Man, based on the comic. By Wednesday morning the details were set. He...

How Do You Enforce An EULA On Malware?

We've written about all sorts of crazy things that software companies do in their EULAs (End User License Agreement), but it really says something about how ingrained the concept of an EULA has...

Is The Era Of The Amateur Blogger Over?

Megan McCardle ponders the future of amateur blogging and wonders if we're seeing a transition to a world in which most high-traffic bloggers do that as their day jobs, and the line between amateur...

Head Of Canadian Post Offices Says Satirical Top 10 List Is Libel

Rob Hyndman writes in to let us know about yet another person trying to use libel laws to get content taken down that isn't libelous at all. Apparently, the head of the Canadian postal service, Moya...

Court Rejects RIAA's 'Making Available' Theory In Infamous Howell Case

The lawsuit of Atlantic v. Howell got a ton of attention late last year when some folks, including the Washington Post, misinterpreted an RIAA filing to suggest that the RIAA had claimed that merely...

The Smear Campaign Against Larry Lessig And Free Culture

You may recall that I've had my run-ins in the past with the incredibly misnamed Progress & Freedom Foundation. While I tend to think that Adam Theirer does okay work for them, almost every...

Microsoft Gives Vista Backdoor Keys To The Police

It's long been assumed that Microsoft has built in various "backdoors" for law enforcement to get around its own security, but now reader Kevin Stapp writes in to let us know that the company has...

Is Copyright Law Killing The Documentary?

A few years back, we wrote about a documentary that couldn't be shown due to copyright problems. It appears this problem is only getting worse. jprlk writes in to let us know about growing...

Orphan Works Legislation Would Be A Small But Important Step Toward Copyright Reform

We've long promoted the common-sense idea of orphan works legislation. Orphan works are works still under copyright whose present owners are unknown. This is a serious problem because there's no way...

TV Companies Embracing Online Streaming... But Why Not BitTorrent?

The NY Times has an article talking about how the various TV producers are finally embracing the idea of offering up TV shows online, noting that Warner Brothers is now opening the vault and adding a...