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 text and video. The company recently launched its first four vooks, two fiction books and two non-fiction.

“For more than 500 years, books have been a remarkably coherent entity,” Curr said. “Now in the age of iPhone and YouTube, the notion of a book has become increasingly elastic in order to keep readers engaged.”

Mark Lukasiewicz, Vice President, NBC News Specials and Digital Media, discussed the ways NBC News is providing options for consumers to use the company’s news content in legal ways.

“Across the news business, we are all very focused on bringing content to consumers on all the devices and in all the places we want it to be,” Lukasiewicz said. “We’re all about storytelling. We’re about getting the story out. But that’s not free to produce. It costs a lot of money.”

Lukasiewicz showed the audience how embedding content on a web site enables the browser to see the content on a site, but then click through to the original provider’s site, thus potentially increasing traffic for the content owner and allowing for more revenue from ad support. He stressed the cost of not using content legally.

“It’s really painful to watch working journalists, camera people, technicians, bureau chiefs losing their jobs because the monetization of news is going away,” he said.

Becky Brasington Clark, Marketing Director at Johns Hopkins University Press, added an educational take on the added value copyright can bring even to content in the domain. Showcasing the First Congress Project, a collection of 17 volumes of information gleaned from sources all over the country relevant to the first U.S. Congress. The information is now online and searchable.

“The importance of the first congress cannot be overstated, so it was an important project to capture that history. Until a few years ago it was all over the place. Scholars organized, transcribed and catalogued all the materials,” she explained.

And Erik Huey, Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at the Entertainment Software Association, talked about the innovative new products available for video game fans, including downloadable content, console diversity and interconnectivity.

“The future of online gaming we’re trying to explore alternatives to give consumers a choice of how to play the games,” he said.

Huey talked about evolving controls – from the popular motion sensor devices of the Wii to a new Microsoft technology coming soon that will be completely remote-less.

U.S. Representatives Howard Coble and Bob Goodlatte stopped by the discussion and praised the contributions of the copyright community.

“You contribute very significantly to the well-being of our country and I’m very appreciative of that,” Coble said.

More of that innovation will be on display this evening at the Third Annual Expo from 5-7 p.m. in the Cannon Caucus Room.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 4:25 pm by Gayle Osterberg and is filed under capitol hill, copyright law, creators, culture, events, internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.