By Justin Sanders

[All photos courtesy of Julian Fort] When we last spoke with Julian Fort, in September of 2018, he had recently completed his first feature film, The Midnighters. With a powerful lead performance from Leon Russom (The Big Lebowski), the indie thriller made the most of its shoestring budget and has... Read more

By Ruth Vitale

Stop us if you have heard this one before: a Google-funded organization has cited Google-backed research to spout misleading piracy claims that benefit Google. This time, the guilty party is Re:Create, a purported coalition of “Innovators, Creators and Consumers United for Balanced Copyright.”  They started circulating a “fact” sheet titled Copyright Infringement on the... Read more

By Justin Sanders

Let’s be clear – it’s difficult to make a living in any creative pursuit. However, it’s especially difficult to make a living as an author.  Say you have the temerity to actually, against all odds, write a book – which, for most people, takes years of toil and strife. Now, you actually have to... Read more

Just when you thought the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) couldn’t possibly hate creatives more than they already do, they’ve now appointed one of the greatest anti-copyright champs of them all: UC Berkeley professor Pamela Samuelson. Over many decades in academia, Samuelson has worked diligently to weaken copyright protections so that massive internet companies... Read more

Dear Mark Zuckerberg, Well, here we are again, sharing our outrage about your company’s seriously flawed system of monitoring “political” advertisements on your platform.  We both know why we’re putting quotes around the word, “political.” We’ve been over this before – back in January, in fact, when we wrote you to complain about... Read more

By Justin Sanders

Meet Mitchell Block. He is the owner of Direct Cinema Limited, a production and distribution company specializing in under-the-radar documentaries, shorts, and other independent films that are only available through the company’s catalog. Block is a curator of the obscure and the avant-garde. His titles play frequently in colleges and libraries... Read more

The internet has given, and it has taken away. It has created abundant riches for some, and brought about staggering, even ruinous losses for others – and nowhere has this dichotomous paradigm been more apparent than in industries supported by copyright. People employed in the production of books, journalism, movies,... Read more

By Justin Sanders

Breaking their own exorbitant lobbyist-spending records has become a regular occurrence for Google – but that’s just one tool in their toolkit of political influence. Google also makes friends and influences people by soliciting scholarship at leading university campuses throughout the country. While dressed up as “research grants,” Google enriches a... Read more

Like many public organizations with strong opinions, we find that our social media posts attract a lot of strong support as well as a number of misinformed, mean-spirited, and even downright crazy online comments. We love our supporters and we silently curse the idiots who have nothing useful to offer.... Read more