Sublime

Grokster and StreamCast are dead. Even the iPod is no longer in production. They are buried and gone, like the Betamax and the Betamax “substantial non-infringing uses” standard — all relics of a bygone era, the ephemera of 2004. Copyright law barely made sense then. As you might suspect, 20 years later, it makes even less sense now.

Take Whitney Houston’s 1987 smash “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” which was bought in late 2022 as part of a $50 million to $100 million deal by Primary Wave, a music publishing company backed by two private equity firms. The song was recently rebooted into our collective hippocampus via a movie about the singer, titled, naturally, “I... See more