Today’s guest blog is from Adrian Ross, ASCAP’s Director of Public Affairs, who writes about ASCAP’s Songwriter Residency @ America Scores program. In recent years there has been increasing focus placed on providing children with opportunities to learn about the importance and value of copyright and intellectual property. ASCAP and The ASCAP Foundation have been [...]

As a strong believer in property rights both real and intellectual, and a fervent supporter of the free market — what’s happening on Wall Street right now isn’t a failure of the market, it’s the result of the collapse of distortions and bypasses of the market — I was optimistic when I saw an article [...]

Everyone by now must be familiar with the theory by Wired’s Chris Anderson that in the Internet age, there is more money to be made on the vast majority of creative works that are niche items than in the few that are very popular. He has depicted this through what is called a Pareto curve, [...]

It’s always nice to write about good news in this space; ito occurs with far too little regularity. Today’s good news is about a deal involving a voluntary agreement on photo licensing. As announced by the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) coalition in a recent press release: Three major publishers have called for the adoption [...]

We’ve all heard that print newspapers are dead, that people like me who like to spread a newspaper across a breakfast table are dinosaurs. News at your fingertips on the web is where it’s at, we hear, and circulation and web traffic data would seem to support that. To respond, newspapers have proven aggressive in [...]

Earlier this year Congress passed a Higher Ed reauthorization bill that, among other things, encouraged colleges and universities receiving federal support to develop plans to target illegal downloading and uploading of creative works on university networks and to promote legal alternatives, a move we promoted and praised. This issue has been ongoing at the state [...]

I always love talking about free markets, and miss daily hallway conversations on that subject from my think tank days. So I was delighted to come across a new publication (PDF) by the Washington Legal Foundation in which the Honorable Dick Thornburgh, now with K & L Gates, discusses the state of intellectual property in [...]

Today’s guest blog is written by David Israelite, President and CEO of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA). At the NMPA, I am fortunate to work on behalf of people who inspire us with their work on a daily basis – songwriters. Their words and music have the power to move and motivate and excite [...]

I’ve heard some peculiar arguments against intellectual property over the years, and two of them have been at events sponsored by the Cato Institute. The first was two or three years ago, when Cato hosted a conference featuring then-UCLA Economics Professor David Levine. In his dissection of copyright, he defended the notion of pirated motion [...]

In The Graduate, the father of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) — after learning his son is driving to Berkeley to propose to Elaine Robinson, daughter of a woman Benjamin was having an affair with — says “Don’t you think that idea is a little half-baked?” Benjamin replies, “Oh no, Dad, it’s completely baked.” The idea [...]