As readers of this blog will know, I recently had an op-ed run in U.S. News & World Report on proposed decriminalization of unauthorized file-sharing against an op-ed by Lawrence Lessig, and I linked to both on this blog, although for some odd reason Professor Lessig on his blog chose only to link to his [...]

Has it been three years already?
The US Copyright Office is again hearing arguments for exceptions for, as the December 29 Federal Register notice puts it, “certain classes of works from the prohibition against
circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The purpose of this
rulemaking proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes [...]

You can check out today’s U.S. News & World Report for a Point/Counterpoint by Stanford (soon to be Harvard again) Law Professor Lawrence Lessig and yours truly on Lessig’s proposal to decriminalize unauthorized file-sharing online. This is not a simple issue, and I’m pleased the magazine provided a platform for the debate.
It should be noted [...]

All of us, every one of us, is a copyright owner. Every time we take a picture, write a letter or doodle a drawing, we are creating a copyrighted work. Copyright law gives us the right to use the courts, through civil law, to enforce our rights.* If we didn’t have this tool at our [...]

The Progress & Freedom Foundation today published a new paper titled “From ‘Dinosaurs’ to Digital: An Examination of Ongoing Innovations in Copyright Industries.” As PFF’s press release notes, the paper “itemizes the variety of ways traditional content industries are experimenting with digital distribution models. In an effort to compete with user-generated content and online [...]

In part one of this two-part series, I pointed out that QTrax — a P2P service — is continuing its quest to be the first legal ad-supported P2P service for music, and while I remain skeptical I applaud their ongoing efforts and progress. But simultaneous to that news is word of two developments that actually [...]

Every day my inbox receives a news summary known as the Dean’s List, and it seems for every one good-news story for creators and their rights, there are (at least) two bad-news stories. That’s certainly not Dean Kay’s fault, it’s the world we live in, but this week the good-news/bad-news stories have hit the presses [...]

How many times have we seen this before? A federal policymaker speaks on copyright and makes several cogent and reasonable remarks about the cost of piracy and steps by the private sector to reduce that threat and provide more legal alternatives to consumers. An online critic of copyright generates hits by providing his like-minded readers [...]

Okay, I get it. There’s a lot of free stuff on the Internet, and what is there free and legally is going to have to stay that way. As an example, we can talk about newspaper stories. And we can talk about what the collapse of the Detroit automobile industry means for those newspaper stories.
There [...]

Sure, you can buy your wife or girlfriend a silver necklace at the local department store so she can look like everyone else. But would she rather you buy a silver necklace lined with sea glass that converts into a bracelet? Sure, you could buy your husband or boyfriend yet another tie. But perhaps he’d [...]