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 blog [...]

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 voice [...]

I’ve seen a fair amount of dismissal in the digital-utopian crowd of the nearly 12,000 individual artists and creators who signed our letter to President Obama and Vice President Biden asking that their rights over their works be respected online. If you’re acquiring or giving away someone else’s creativity and labor without their authorization or [...]

On a panel discussion on copyright on Monday, I noted how in 1995 — when few folks had heard of the Internet and they probably thought it meant the walled garden of AOL — I had my own web site, where I posted for free and distributed to a fan list full text of a [...]

We write a lot on this blog about the puzzling ability of those who are able to rationalize their acquisition of a creator’s work without permission or compensation. Some of those logic-twisting rationalizations are debunked in our piece, “Critiquing Copyright Canards.” We’re not the only ones who have observed this, and picked up on how [...]

I had the pleasure of attending an interesting conference yesterday hosted by the Institute for Policy Innovation on broadband policy, a timely topic here in D.C. You can watch most of it on this C-SPAN recording; in an obvious conspiracy, the one panel C-SPAN chose not to videotape was the first one, in which I [...]

Today we’ll look at the meme that says artists should no longer try to make money off of their works, because in a virtual world they have no ownership of those works. We should take those works as we like and they can live off of other sources of income, including charity, i.e., a donation [...]

Call me a Luddite, call me behind the times, call me out of step with consumers (although I too am one), but like many folks of a certain age it’s becoming more difficult for me when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. That was my feeling this morning when I went out and collected my newspapers, The [...]