Next week two important Subcommittees in the House and Senate are holding hearings on the proposed acquisition of 51% of NBC Universal by Comcast. Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts is expected to testify at that hearing. This morning he gave a sneak preview of his testimony in a Q&A with Alan Murray The Wall [...]

I just came from a compelling event hosted by a think tank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. ITIF was promoting a paper released today by technologists titled “Steal These Policies: Strategies for Reducing Digital Piracy.” The paper is a must-read; let me summarize the event, which had a very important theme — namely, that [...]

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 [...]

We have a tech-savvy president here in Washington, and in addressing cybersecurity the other day in a speech he made a very interesting observation: It’s the great irony of our Information Age — the very technologies that empower us to create and to build also empower those who would disrupt and destroy. And this paradox [...]

Both the House and Senate in recent weeks have held hearings on the future of newspapers, and the fact that the future — and present — for newspapers is bleak is no surprise to readers of this blog. There is of course a larger issue here, and that is the future of journalism. The back-and-forth [...]

A few months back I wrote a series of blog posts compiled into a paper attacking ten common myths, or canards, about copyright. One I didn’t address, because it seemed obviously false, is “Copyright is an attempt to lock down facts.” Uh, no. Facts are not copyrightable. But expressions are. A website publisher in a [...]

PHOENIX, ARIZONA — Greetings from the fantastic metropolis (my home town) that in one week will host the NFC championship game. (Go Cardinal Nation!) I’m here attending the Imaging USA conference sponsored by one of our founding members, the Professional Photographers of America. This isn’t really a policy conference; it’s more on the art and [...]

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard somebody (including CEA President Gary Shapiro) say artists can compete with free, I would be richer than any artist who ever tried to sell his work on a peer-to-peer network. But this troublesome meme (you can occasionally compete with free, as [...]

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 [...]