SANTA MONICA — Anyone who has been in the copyright policy space awhile knows that the music industry is frequently described as the “canary in the coal mine.” The analogy comes from the tradition of miners bringing caged canaries into mines to gauge how toxic the air was. If the canary died, they should probably [...]

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Kudos to the White House for posting hundreds and hundreds of comments online in response to the call by Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, for guidance on how to improve enforcement of IP rights. You can see them here.
I’d direct your attention to our filing, because even though we already have our [...]

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WASHINGTON — Happy World IP Day! The ten-year old holiday, launched by the World Intellectual Property Organization, has been celebrated for the last five years by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) with a conference on Capitol Hill. Today’s was possibly the best yet, despite the fact that I moderated a panel there with a [...]

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We praised the FCC recently when it released its long-awaited National Broadband Plan. We share the FCC’s vision of a wired and wireless world of high-speed Internet connectivity. Creative industries are embracing the online market in new and innovative ways — see our In Syn(c) series for more — and the more robust and widespread [...]

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Any veteran of Capitol Hill knows that some of the shortest legislative language can lead to some of the most dramatic reversals of law. Pick a random statute, add or remove the word “not,” then imagine the consequences.
It is important to keep this inverse relationship between text and impact in mind when reviewing draft legislation [...]

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It’s not every day that I recommend readers devour every single line of a written work authored by someone other than myself (I’m smiling while writing that), but I strongly recommend doing so with Andrew Zolli’s “My Turn” column in Newsweek titled “The Future Won’t Be Free.” In fact, print it out, paste it on [...]

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I’d like to begin by giving a shoutout to the King of Norway. Then I’ll explain why we at the Copyright Alliance are all about the word “go.”
It turns out the King is dropping by the Vancouver Olympics today to watch his nation’s curling team compete in the semifinals. He also wants to wear a [...]

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I came across a breath of fresh air today from the academic community — a professor who takes offense at the notion that unauthorized infringement of a creator’s works should be viewed as some kind of a just social movement.
U. of California at Berkeley Law Professor Peter S. Menell has authored a short work titled [...]

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This paragraph early in Ellen Ullman’s Washington Post review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget seemed written just for me, someone who has become increasingly dismayed after nearly two decades of digital policy-related work:
Anyone who has followed technology and for years has resented the adoration heaped upon the ascendant tribe will positively swoon [...]

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While snowbound this week I read some pieces in The Washington Post about condescension. The first author wrote a piece titled “Why are liberals so condescending?” He maintained that liberals are “committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but [...]

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