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 [...]

If you’re a music student at Middle Tennessee State University you are required to take – and pass – a course on your rights as an artist, namely Copyright Law. And Ramona DeSalvo, an IP attorney and assistant professor at MTSU, is going to make sure you “get” how important your rights are to you. [...]

Why are the digirati so fearful of the talented, gifted, and truly creative? These techie thought leaders seem to believe they themselves have a gift, the gift of seeing the high-tech present for what it truly is, and the ability to see our digital future for what it will truly be. So why are these [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]