This is a busy week in Washington on the health care front, but IP issues keep popping up as well, like yesterday’s hearing on the dangers of P2P to another hearing yesterday, the confirmation hearing for David Kappos, the IBM veteran up for U.S. Patent and Trademark Office director. He noted in his testimony that [...]

It’s well understood that a darknet doesn’t function if everyone free-rides and no one shares. The more people share, the more valuable the network (i.e., network effect.) So it should be no surprise that many are skeptical of the P2P industry’s claims of voluntary steps to reduce inadvertent file-sharing, and of LimeWire’s claims that their [...]

To Chris Anderson’s credit, when speaking publicly he freely admits he tends to pursue a “theory-of-everything” model to everything he writes about, from his Long Tail thesis to his notion of everything switching to a free-plus model. (See his latest book, Free, which he has made available for free online; use Anderson’s favorite free-based business, [...]

Rapid advances in technology have been occurring since the Renaissance, and yet sometimes the greatest advocates of advancement fail to predict where science will go. In the 19th Century Lord Kelvin was a father of modern physics, identifying absolute zero, naming kinetic energy, and setting in motion the identification of the second law of thermodynamics. [...]

WASHINGTON — U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke today, at a press conference at the Commerce Department, cited copyright industries as the “critical drivers” of economic growth, jobs and trade, while endorsing the latest study by the International Intellectual Property Alliance and economist Stephen E. Siwek, “Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy: The 2003 - 2007 [...]

Meg the Intern -
Earlier this week, a partnership between research firms The Leading Question and Music Ally released the results of a survey that estimates that the number of teenagers in the U.K. who file-share music has fallen by a third within the last year and the ratio of shared tracks to legally purchased [...]

We know that art fuels the economy. We can see it in the numbers: Across the nation, the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year. Statistics also show that the copyright industries add an estimated $1.38 trillion to the U.S. economy each year.
Towns and cities across the country [...]

The graying of arts audiences is one oft-cited fear among arts administrators who manage the more traditional art forms such as symphonies, operas, and ballets. Many are finding that these audiences are getting older, and younger generations are not engaging in ways that will keep the art alive.
Yet very slowly new partnerships between these more [...]

Meg the intern here, thinking a little about IP law and international affairs. President Obama just wrapped up a two-day trip to Russia meant to “reset” U.S.-Russian government relations which he admitted had “suffered from a sense of drift” following the end of the Cold War. While the announcement of a new arms [...]

Wired Editor Chris Anderson spoke at Google’s D.C. office this morning about his book Free, which hit the bookstores today and is not free. He is allowing a free “download” of the book on Scribd but apparently won’t let you print it out, so have fun reading it on your computer screen.
My feelings on his [...]