Once again President Obama has demonstrated a commitment to copyright owners’ rights, just as more than 11,000 artists and creators asked him to do last fall in a Copyright Alliance letter to him and Vice President Biden. As I have in past posts, here are his own words, in a speech yesterday at the Export-Import [...]

Yesterday, March 11, 2010, I was pleased to attend a panel discussion moderated by our own Lucinda Dugger.  The discussion, titled Cross-Discipline Collaboration: How Writers and Artists are Working Together to Push Boundaries and Engage the Public, was part of Washington DC’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival.  It explored questions about the collaborative process and [...]

Yesterday I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at the second Split this Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC. The first festival took place two years ago on the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq and served as a call to poets to use their inner voices for speaking up about issues of [...]

Any veteran of Capitol Hill knows that some of the shortest legislative language can lead to some of the most dramatic reversals of law. Pick a random statute, add or remove the word “not,” then imagine the consequences.
It is important to keep this inverse relationship between text and impact in mind when reviewing draft legislation [...]

Major League Baseball has issued a series of announcements in the past few weeks that will expand the fan experience for the 2010 season, including new streaming services, a new online statistical tool in partnership with Bloomberg and upgrades to MLB.com to improve access for fans with visual impairments. Spring Training games kicked off the beginning of [...]

There is no larger global market than China. If you are one in a million in that country there are more than 1,300 of you. Naturally, as the U.S. looks to promote jobs here in this country, we want to export our creativity abroad. It does little good if our creative works are phenomenally popular [...]

It’s not every day that I recommend readers devour every single line of a written work authored by someone other than myself (I’m smiling while writing that), but I strongly recommend doing so with Andrew Zolli’s “My Turn” column in Newsweek titled “The Future Won’t Be Free.” In fact, print it out, paste it on [...]

It’s entirely understandable that union members share the harms of copyright infringement. For example, look at the unions that belong to the Copyright Alliance. But also note the announcement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council stating it “unanimously supports anti-piracy measures,” summed up nicely by Dave McNary in Variety.
The AFL-CIO Executive Council denounces piracy in strong [...]

A colleague noted that our blog entry on an author who plagiarized others’ work and then defended it as a generational issue was quoted in a Sunday New York Times piece by Randy Kennedy:
Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a trade group involving movie studios, networks and artists, took to the alliance’s blog [...]

Copyright Alliance Executive Director Patrick Ross today weighs in on fair use versus free use in a guest column for Photo Business News & Forum: Fair Use of Copyrighted Works - A Reasoned Perspective.