the now mostly forgotten history of how, during previous revolutions in information technology, Americans successfully protected free speech and democracy by using government to carefully manage competition and structure news media markets, including through direct regulation of essential communications platforms.

Copyright nearly killed the open web, in fact. Until the 11th hour of international decision-making on the subject, copyright law in both the US and the EU was going to make all intermediaries on the web, from search engines to internet service providers, liable for all copyright infringements that traveled over their networks, whether they knew... See more

The optimism of Web 2.0 rested in large part on its pure excitement about the web as a fundamentally open-ended technology. In Free Culture, permissive intellectual property and remixing would unleash a wave of as-yet unimagined discourse and expression.

Copyright is, and always has been, a compromise between incentivising creators and increasing social welfare by promoting cultural participation, sharing knowledge and affording creative freedoms. That compromise is highly dependent on the nature of the technology. And LLMs (and the wave of digitisation from the decades before) have made the need... See more

Intellectual property rights are sometimes hailed as the mother of creativity and invention. However, Marshall Brain points out that many of the finest examples of human creativity—from scientific discoveries to creation of literature, art, music and design—were motivated not by a desire for profit but by other human emotions, such as curiosity,

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