Terry Hart posted a great piece this morning on his Copyhype blog. Quoting the late Barbara Ringer’s 1974 essay The Demonology of Copyright, Hart illustrates how, despite the technological advances over the past 40 years, the fundamental arguments for copyright remain the same.  Read the post here, and for some additional summer reading, find Ringer’s essay at the Copyright Office’s [...]

The phrase “free speech” gets tossed around a lot in policy debates, often in a highly misleading way. It’s a topic I’m particularly sensitive to, since much of my career involved the daily exercise of free speech as a journalist. It was also an issue I studied and wrote about as a think tank senior [...]

Songwriter, Jason Robert Brown, recently posted on his blog a story about his experience dealing with copyright infringement.  Knowing for a long time that many websites exist for the sole purpose of “trading” sheet music, Jason decided to log on himself and politely ask many of the users to stop “trading” his work.  While many [...]

Recently eight reporters for The Washington Post decided to take on their addiction to our always-on world and surrender for one week their smart phones, Facebook, Twitter, email, web browsing, the works. It went about as well for them as it did on Seinfeld when the four friends each vowed to abstain from a certain [...]

In what I would call a pretty obvious dog-bites-man story, the highly respected Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found over a year-long study that more than 99% of all links to news accounts in blogs came from traditional media such as newspapers and broadcast networks. Yes, new technologies have made it easier [...]

LOS ANGELES — A common fallacy of modern-day digirati thinking is that because things are new, they must invariably replace the old. This flies against logic and against history. Look at any technological innovation of note, and you’ll still find some level of use of a prior generation of technology. Those critical of modern copyright [...]

A colleague noted that our blog entry on an author who plagiarized others’ work and then defended it as a generational issue was quoted in a Sunday New York Times piece by Randy Kennedy: Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a trade group involving movie studios, networks and artists, took to the alliance’s [...]

It would appear to be a victory. Last week, we here at the Copyright Alliance reported on a brazenly infringing web site, a site that encouraged people to upload professional images over which they held no legal rights. These images were then published on the site in magazine form. The magazine was called Pilfered Magazine, [...]

Start with a web site that posts high-quality, professional-level visual arts works, with the intention of making them available easily and for free to all. Then imagine that it actively encourages people to upload works that are not theirs, but just “found” online. Then imagine it pokes creators in the eye by calling the monthly [...]

This has been a good week for artists speaking out for their rights. I highlighted earlier this week a number of independent artists on an indie label who spoke out against infringement of their creative works. There have been other positive voices as well, nicely summarized by my friend Chris Castle on his blog. One [...]