Election

I keep seeing people make this error, especially in social media discourse. Somebody wants to “use” something. Except obviously, it’s not theirs, and so it’s absurd for them to make that demand, right? Quick examples§ I’m not trying to pick on this person at all: they’re not a twitter main character, they’re not expressing an unusual opinion...

This was originally something I was going to talk about in Corporations have Rejected Copyright, back when that series was going to just be one long post (really!). But since I saw Nintendo apparently sued Palworld today, I wanted to put this up as background information. You should definitely read You’ve Never Seen Copyright first, particularly...

Part 2: Growth, Waste, and Externalities§ The AI tools are efficient according to the numbers, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean there isn’t a power problem. If we look at the overall effects in terms of power usage (as most people do), there are some major problems. But if we’ve ruled out operational inefficiency as the reason, what’s left?...

Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people don’t actually want. Worse, it then turns out there’s some reason they’re not just useless, they’re actively harmful. While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes — cryptocurrency,...

or, the many people who said movies like Coyote v. Acme that were killed for a tax write-off should be forced into the public domain were right, and here’s why This is the last post in a series. You can read this entry by itself, but for the full context, start at the beginning. Copyright is busted, now what?§ A healthy system of creative rights,...