We write a lot on this blog about the puzzling ability of those who are able to rationalize their acquisition of a creator’s work without permission or compensation. Some of those logic-twisting rationalizations are debunked in our piece, “Critiquing Copyright Canards.” We’re not the only ones who have observed this, and picked up on how [...]

This blog was written by Michelle Gagnon, a crime fiction writer. The blog was originally posted on The Kill Zone, and is reprinted with permission from the author. I received a Google alert last week for a website called, “Plunder.com.” I clicked on it, and lo and behold, it led to a file sharing site. [...]

There remains a stubbornness out there among some Internet users, a sense of entitlement to enjoying someone else’s creativity without payment to the creator. In this Chicago Sun-Times story by Kara Spak, Ms. Spak quotes a student at the U. of Illinois at Chicago who enjoys watching unauthorized and infringing copies of movies online saying [...]

What a thrilling week to be a part of the Copyright Alliance team! Just a couple of short months ago, when I began here as a intern, the Copyright Alliance’s Letter to the President hadn’t yet been launched, and planning for the third annual EXPOnential was in its very early stages. Not only was I [...]

An impromptu jam session ensued on Tuesday at the Copyright Alliance’s EXPOnential between two musicians: Jonathan Ifergan and Margot MacDonald. Photo credit: Renee Bouchard The two had met for the first time just the day before to deliver the artists’ letter to the White House. Upon meeting, they found they had some areas of common [...]

Innovators from across copyright industries today gathered on Capitol Hill to provide a peek at new entertainment and educational products and talk about the importance of copyright to fostering creative new iterations of content. Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, a Simon and Schuster imprint, described Atria’s new vooks, an exciting new product that blends [...]

If you’d like to get a glimpse of the art scene in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City all in one evening, then you should stop by the Copyright Alliance’s EXPOnential on Tuesday where artists from each of these cities will be discussing their work and their careers. The Copyright Alliance’s Third Annual EXPOnential [...]

I had the pleasure of attending an interesting conference yesterday hosted by the Institute for Policy Innovation on broadband policy, a timely topic here in D.C. You can watch most of it on this C-SPAN recording; in an obvious conspiracy, the one panel C-SPAN chose not to videotape was the first one, in which I [...]

Do I have a right to obtain music by The Beatles in any format I want? That is the question that one needs to ask when deciding how to view the decision by the remaining Beatles and key rightsholders to rule out certain forms of digital distribution. L. Gordon Crovitz has a nice overview of [...]

A key part of the copyright debate is that copyright somehow inhibits innovation. Yet if you look around, innovation has been occurring and continues to occur at a dizzying pace. Hype quickly follows that innovation, and assumptions surround each new innovation. We hear lots of references to Schumpeter, as if the Austrian economist who focused [...]