It’s two o’clock in the afternoon and Pandora plays my (new) favorite radio station through my laptop speakers. While doing work, every dozen or so minutes I click back to the website to see who the band is that has popped up on the station. I haven’t heard of this band before. Who are these [...]

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 [...]

Is it any surprise to read in The New York Times that today’s students don’t understand that cutting-and-pasting another’s work into your own isn’t research or scholarship, or that a new study from Northwestern University found that today’s youth don’t comprehend that the top search engine result may not be the most reliable? As a [...]

Thursday featured many Obama Administration officials speaking strongly about the importance of copyright enforcement at an event sponsored by the U.S. Commerce Department, but enforcement actions on Wednesday by the Administration spoke even louder than words. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other state and federal agencies, with the new “Operation in our Sites,” cut [...]

Welcome back to my conversation with William Aicher, author of “Starving the Artist.” In yesterday’s post, Mr. Aicher shared his thoughts on how his work in the online music business led him to feel artists were not getting sufficient respect online. He also spoke about how copyright serves as an incentive to create, and that [...]

Recently I read a very compelling book titled “Starving the Artist.” (I enjoyed the Kindle version and now have a hard copy given to me by a colleague of the author I met recently at the Music Publishers Association meeting in New York). The thesis of the book — that technology has advanced in ways [...]

An mindset entirely unfriendly to artists and creators has emerged in recent years that contains an argument and a conclusion: (1) Copyright doesn’t work in the digital age. (2) Thus, as much as we might pretend to disapprove, infringement is a reality and the resulting forfeiture of rights by artists and creators should be accepted. [...]

Congratulations to Denis Seguin, Nick Kalish, and Spencer Maybee, winners of a film contest in which their very short entries describe in direct and engrossing terms why copyright is important to them as individual creators. The Reel Challenge Contest was sponsored by the Canadian Film Centre (CFC), the Copyright Collective of Canada (CCC), and the [...]

Do you consider yourself an artist? Then ask yourself this: Are you living an art-committed life? In Creativity for Life, famed creativity coach Eric Maisel describes three ways one can embrace creativity in one’s life. We can approach everyday tasks in a creative, resourceful way, engaging in “artful living.” We can also embrace creative output [...]

Thank you to all of the good folks at the Music Publishers Association, since 1895 the oldest music trade association in the United States, for honoring the Copyright Alliance with the prestigious Arnold Broido Award for Copyright Advocacy. Mr. Broido, universally considered a music industry treasure, passed on in 2007, but the publisher of symphonic [...]