Katharine Trendacosta

There’s a crisis of creativity in mainstream American culture. We have fewer and fewer studios and record labels and fewer and fewer platforms online that serve independent artists and creators.

The state of streaming is... bad. It’s very bad. The first step in wanting to watch anything is a web search: “Where can I stream X?” Then you have to scroll past an AI summary with no answers, and then scroll past the sponsored links. After that, you find out that the thing you want to watch was...

PERA would overturn long-standing court decisions that have helped keep some of the most problematic patents in check. This includes the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which bars patents on abstract ideas. While Alice has not completely solved the problems of the patent system or patent trolling, it has led to the rejection of hundreds of low-quality software patents and, as a result, has allowed innovation and small businesses to grow.

There is a lot of bad on the internet and it seems to only be getting worse. But one of the things the internet did well, and is worth preserving, is nontraditional paths for creativity, journalism, and criticism.

Jimmy Kimmel has been in the news a lot recently, which means the ongoing lawsuit against him by perennial late night punching bag/convicted fraudster/former congressman George Santos flew under the radar. But what happened in that case is an important illustration of the limits of both copyright law and the"fine print” terms of service on websites and apps.

If there is one axiom that we should want to be true about the internet, it should be: the internet never forgets. One of the advantages of our advancing technology is that information can be stored and shared more easily than ever before. And, even more crucially, it can be stored in multiple...

Copyright is no longer—if it ever was—a niche concern of certain industries. As corporations have pushed to expand copyright, they have made it everyone’s problem. And that means they don’t get to make the law in secret anymore.

For a while, ever since they lost in court, a number of industry giants have pushed a bill that purported to be about increasing access to the law. In fact, it would give them enormous power over the public ability to access, share, teach, and comment on the law. This sounds crazy—no one should be...

For a while, ever since they lost in court, a number of industry giants have pushed a bill that purported to be about increasing access to the law. In fact, it would give them enormous power over the public ability to access, share, teach, and comment on the law. This sounds crazy—no one should be...

The promise of the internet—at least in the early days—was that it would lower the barriers to entry for any number of careers. Traditionally, the spheres of novel writing, culture criticism, and journalism were populated by well-off straight white men, with anyone not meeting one of those criteria...

The promise of the internet—at least in the early days—was that it would lower the barriers to entry for any number of careers. Traditionally, the spheres of novel writing, culture criticism, and journalism were populated by well-off straight white men, with anyone not meeting one of those criteria...