Status Updates From Creatocracy: How the Consti...

The teenager is gone. As a group, the teenagers came and went with the twentieth century. They were born with the invention of leisure and the end of child labor....

Copyright is designed to keep the process going. It is meant to pay the rent and keep the work moving along. Ideally, we are always screaming to be heard one more time.

Google values its own intellectual property very highly—just ask opposing counsel—but loves a free web. And bless them for doing what corporations have always done: Being evil while telling everyone else not to be. This is how big businesses make big profit, and it is more apple pie American than selling snake oil and claiming it is an elixir. Whatever Google is selling, all of us have paid dearly for free.

It is often assumed that Thomas Jefferson must have had something to do with the Progress Clause. This is possibly because, as the Secretary of State, he was the first administrator of the first patent office.

Civil society is that which thrives in public spaces, in the lives of townships and urbanscapes, among villagers and city dwellers, in the organizations they form that cohere communities. It is comprised of newspapers and magazines, dance troupes and theater companies, literary reviews and city symphonies, museums and galleries, science centers...

In 1710, Parliament passed the Statute of Anne, regarded as the first public copyright act. Until then, a license to publish was "copied" into a registry of the Stationary's Company Guild, giving its members the exclusive "right" to publish a book—hence the word copyright.

The Constitution made America.

To the modern mind, it seems an obvious inclusion—although many of the European constitutions drafted after WWII have no such thing. We are now so steeped in an idea-based economy—if not a whole life in the ether of cyberspace—that it makes retroactive sense that the Founders envisioned a future full of....

Nowadays, of course, we're so used to the off-kilter geometry of the American Flag that we don't even notice it, the way we don't notice that American exceptionalism is completely, for real, for better and for worse. But in 1776, the normal thing to do was the normal thing to do. To stick a square in one corner but not the others was completely....

Chapter 12 is just a weird diatribe on how “kids today” don’t understand/can’t possibly truly love music because of the big, bad internet… Wurtzel just sounds really out of touch here unfortunately. But I’m interested enough to see if her argument improves.