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 [...]

Okay, I get it. There’s a lot of free stuff on the Internet, and what is there free and legally is going to have to stay that way. As an example, we can talk about newspaper stories. And we can talk about what the collapse of the Detroit automobile industry means for those newspaper stories. [...]

We’ve all heard that print newspapers are dead, that people like me who like to spread a newspaper across a breakfast table are dinosaurs. News at your fingertips on the web is where it’s at, we hear, and circulation and web traffic data would seem to support that. To respond, newspapers have proven aggressive in [...]

In The Graduate, the father of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) — after learning his son is driving to Berkeley to propose to Elaine Robinson, daughter of a woman Benjamin was having an affair with — says “Don’t you think that idea is a little half-baked?” Benjamin replies, “Oh no, Dad, it’s completely baked.” The idea [...]

* i know, I prefer the term “creative works,” but I’m speaking the lingo of the conference here and will use “content” in this blog entry. SANTA MONICA, CA — Another Digital Hollywood, another amalgam of creative start-ups with bizarre Web 2.0 names, another set of panels where people continue to try to figure out [...]

What does it mean to be an artist? Well, for anyone who wishes to have their work seen and appreciated, and anyone who then hopes to make modest income from the art, it means spending a lot of time in pursuits that have nothing to do with art. Brian Sherwin of myartspace blog today writes [...]

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 — Recently I was chatting with Martha Reeves at the Copyright Alliance 2nd Annual EXPOnential. She showed me her new CD and was very proud of the fact that she produced it herself, even designed the cover art. She had cut the cord with the labels. Then she leaned in close: “The only [...]

Passage of PRO-IP in the House and Senate wasn’t the only major congressional development this week. This development involves free-market negotiations. Longtime readers will know I’ve written for years about the merits of market-negotiated agreements over statutory rate decisions, and nowhere is a fresh does of market reality more needed than in the music business. [...]

Could it be possible? Could consumers be learning that they can enjoy robust online video, simultaneously or soon after broadcast, in higher resolution, on legitimate licensed sites? It’s a better viewing experience than YouTube? We’re all creatures of habit, and YouTube’s viewership numbers reflect that. The most recent month measured had 5 million videos viewed [...]