BERLIN, GERMANY — Ideas, fortunately, cannot be copyrighted. Ideas, however, are very important in the debate over copyright. Stanford University Law Professor Lawrence Lessig knows that, and is back with yet another book urging the reduction of rights of creators. This self-appointed pied piper of copyright dilution has given us a preview of his new [...]

BERLIN, GERMANY — The Popkomm Music Conference here wrapped up with a half-day conference on media and P2P hosted by the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA). It drew a good crowd, although by my panel (the last) we were getting into Friday evening and more than a few souls, understandably, had drifted off. It was [...]

BERLIN, GERMANY — No, the title of this blog doesn’t refer to a new Windows Media service. Rather, it examines the possibility of the music industry adopting a digital version of the “windows” used by the motion picture industry to target consumers at the right price points.
This notion, that popped up in various forms throughout [...]

BERLIN, GERMANY: It doesn’t seem to matter if I’m in Las Vegas (CES), Los Angeles (Digital Hollywood), Cannes (Midem) or Berlin — the big mystery before both creative industries and technologists is how on Earth to make money in the digital space. That was a recurring theme at the sessions I attended at the Popkomm [...]

MUNCIE, INDIANA: The folks here at Ball State’s Digital Economy Institute have put on an interesting conference called “Digital Policy in the Information Age.” I’ve already blogged on an interesting exchange I had regarding DVD replication with a student who attended the panel discussion in which I participated.
What was my panel on? That’s kind of [...]

After speaking on a panel earlier today at a conference here at Ball State University (apparently their football team is 5-0, or so everyone told me), a student asked me why he couldn’t legally make copies of his DVDs. I don’t know if the question was prompted by news of the RealDVD service by RealPlayer [...]

Remember that web site that actively encouraged visitors to upload entire contents of magazines? It was obviously a blatant violator of copyright law, but it was an offshore operation with false Whois information and thus considered outside the reach of the law. But leading magazine publishers and the Magazine Publishers of America traced the site [...]

About two years ago I was on a panel where a speaker said he had just come back from Silicon Valley, and every investor he met said they wanted to get in with any start-up that had a way to get creative works to people more easily, the law be dammed. Asked why they weren’t [...]

The intellectual property rights enforcement bill, S. 3325, passed the US Senate Friday and the US House on Sunday. This legislation, once signed by the President, will give new tools to federal, state and local officials to enforce existing copyright laws and thus defend the rights of creators and copyright owners.
After moving to the House, [...]

We’re at a critical economic moment right now. Obviously the eye-opening upheaval on Wall Street should be of immediate attention to policymakers, but that’s not the crossroads of which I’m thinking.
The critical moment I’m thinking of is very real and can have long-term economic ramifications. If we act, it will mean saving potentially hundreds of [...]