Culture and Society

There are two points of view regarding the PR aspects of the RIAA’s aggressive legal assault on file sharers: one side holds that the RIAA knows its image with the public is on par with refried shit, doesn’t care, and this campaign is to intimidate, alter downloading-uploading behavior, impress upon …

The RIAA, which apparently knows no shame in its pursuit of bludgeoning the nation into submission – 12-year-old Brianna Lahara’s family has already settled for $2000 – is attempting to poison the P2P well further by conflating it with child pornography: On Tuesday, one day after filing the landmark series …

The digital entertainment war is a conflict between technology, the copyright industry, and the consuming public. We already know what the public thinks – 60 million file sharers vote with their keyboards. Here is what some of the big swinging members have to say: Chris Gorog Title: Chairman and chief …

We learned yesterday about the RIAA suing 71-year-old grandfather Durwood Pickle as part of its scorched earth campaign to deter file sharing. While Mr. Pickle is a sympathetic figure and didn’t do any file sharing himself, at least he is an adult. Today’s poster child against the campaign is LITERALLY …

The essence of the entertainment industry’s problem with the Internet is its culture of freely shared information that dates back to its beginnings as a connected academic think tank: Part of the challenge facing not just the recording industry but all media companies is how to deal with the lingering …

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo down in the trenches talking amnesty with Vietnam War draft evaders – no, wait, acid flashback – discussing the RIAA’s Clean Slate program: Perhaps to show that it wasn’t the big bully file-sharers claim it is, the RIAA also introduced an “amnesty” program for people who have …

You couldn’t make up stuff this good. We mentioned earlier today that the RIAA is dropping the suit bomb on 261 file sharers – one of them is 71-year-old Durwood Pickle: “Some of my grandkids got in there,” said Durwood Pickle, 71, of Richardson, Texas, who said his son had …

No, not militant Islam against the West, although there are certainly elements of authoritarianism vs. freedom of expression. No, I’m talking about the RIAA against the 60 million Americans who are file sharers, which comes to a head this week: On this there has been virtually no dispute: People who …

Rob Pegoraro discusses the impediments to going legit for online digital music: “I’m trying to make my kids legal, really I am,” wrote Ashburn resident Jane Ellis in an e-mail. But after going to BuyMusic.com, installing the required Windows Media Player 9 software (which left her PC half-crippled) and making …

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of the indispensable Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity and the forthcoming The Anarchist in the Library: How Peer-to-Peer Networks Are Transforming Politics, Culture, and the Control of Information is writing a series, a “five-part panorama of the implications of …