RIAA's Steven Marks is anything but cavalier as he attempts to puncture some of the myths surrounding the Jammie Thomas file-sharing case. Read his reasoned and persuasive comments in the Harvard Crimson. RIAA's Cary Sherman also had an informative piece on this recently on CNET.

This blog entry's title is from an interesting story by Greg Sandoval in CNET. It's by Rick Carnes, the president of the Songwriters Guild of America. I don't know anyone who works harder for copyright owners than Rick, when he could be spending time pursuing his main line of work, writing songs. But in this article, Rick points out that just as Metallica's Lars Ulrich has been attacked online millions of times for opposing the unauthorized downloading of his works off of Napster, Prince will now be attacked mercilessly online for his decision to enforce his rights against YouTube, The Pirate Bay and eBay.

Longtime observers of copyright policy know that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and committee member Cornyn (R-Tex.) are both major champions of creators. (Get them debating Supreme Court nominees and that cooperation can diminish quickly, though!) This week the two of them introduced "The Intellectual Property Enforcement Act of 2007."

If you ran a photocopy shop, and you could easily identify the few customers of yours who were egregiously violating copyright law by photocopying book after book numerous times, what would you do?

In a very simplistic world, you likely would do nothing, because any other action would cost you that person's business. You're making money off of those copies, and that person will just copy elsewhere if you stop them from copying here.

But what if their use of your copier was tying up your resources? You were running short of paper. Legitimate customers couldn't make as many copies as they'd like because the machines were in use by the infringers.

And what if the law said you could be liable if you did in fact know of this infringement?

One mission of the Copyright Alliance is to remind those who would dismiss copyright that copyright has a face (see our video to that effect). Today's face is Judy Laquidara, a Missouri-based quilting pattern developer. Quilting patterns are (1) very hard to develop, and (2) very easy to steal in the digital age. Back when Lamar Smith of Texas chaired the House Judiciary IP Subcommittee, he once included a quilting pattern developer on a panel on Internet piracy. This woman was part of an online group of pattern developers who would swap patterns; someone snuck into the forum, downloaded all of their copyrighted patterns and started distributing them.

A busy day today for Copyright Alliance member Attributor. For one, it dispensed with the "beta" tag that's been up and running for months for AP and one month for Reuters and made official its content monitoring and analysis platform to track copied content across the Internet. (What's up with these Silicon Valley folks being so attached to the "beta" label, anyway?) This very cool technology was discussed at our July 24 panel discussion in the U.S. Capitol with Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) (read the transcript).

NASHVILLE — I had the privilege of speaking earlier this morning at the Americana Music Conference, and despite the fact that we were up against another panel featuring one of my favorite artists in this genre, Lyle Lovett, we had a good crowd in the audience (maybe it's because he didn't bring his Large Band). Even better, we had Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) join our panel at the last minute.