by Erik Kain on February 9, 2012
The Civil Wars talk about music and piracy in the age of the internet and social media. The Civil Wars have lots of videos up on YouTube, many of them nicely shot amateur stuff in color and black-and-white. John Paul White and Joy Williams have a captivating look about them as they stare into one another’s eyes, [...]
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by Erik Kain on February 4, 2012
According to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Lead Designer, Ian Frazier, the real culprit behind the demise of the exclusive PC title is piracy. Others have speculated that the modern consoles, with their high-definition graphics and uniform hardware specs have been the main driver behind the decline of PC gaming. Frazier disagrees. “A game this big is [...]
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by Erik Kain on January 29, 2012
The fight for an open and free internet is taking place on many different fronts across the globe. In Europe, the latest battle took place in the Court of the Hague. Anti-piracy group BREIN won its case against two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands – Ziggo and its smaller competitor, XS4ALL – forcing [...]
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by Erik Kain on January 26, 2012
David Thier takes issue with my piracy post, writing that my argument over the nature of most piracy is “nothing but economic apologism. It says that we’re allowed to steal because it doesn’t really matter. Because we didn’t like that song anyway, we just wanted to hear what it was all about. Because it’s all [...]
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by Erik Kain on January 21, 2012
Julian Sanchez has an excellent piece in Ars Technica which takes a look at the claim that content creators are being discouraged from creative pursuits due to online piracy – a claim that has fueled the recently stalled anti-piracy legislation in congress. Whether SOPA and PIPA would have actually worked is an open question, but [...]
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by Erik Kain on January 15, 2012
Lost in the discussion of internet censorship, anti-piracy measures, and the politics of the internet is a simple question: does piracy actually cause economic harm? Tim O’Reilly read the White House statement on the SOPA / PIPA legislation and came away with mixed feelings. “I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me [...]
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by Erik Kain on January 5, 2012
In Sweden CTRL+C and CTRL+V (the keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting) are now recognized as part of an actual, official religion – Kopimism – which claims that these are holy symbols and reveres the act of copying and sharing files, according to the Los Angeles Times: The church was founded by philosophy student Isak [...]
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by Erik Kain on December 27, 2011
Freddie deBoer wants a better class of IP reform advocates. In a long response to Julian Sanchez, Freddie dismisses the current batch as “pro-piracy” and lays down a critique of the technofuturist crowd that basically writes them off as calloused advocates of artistic ruin and the decline of the artistic middle class. I think piracy [...]
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