Yesterday, March 11, 2010, I was pleased to attend a panel discussion moderated by our own Lucinda Dugger.  The discussion, titled Cross-Discipline Collaboration: How Writers and Artists are Working Together to Push Boundaries and Engage the Public, was part of Washington DC’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival.  It explored questions about the collaborative process and [...]

Yesterday I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at the second Split this Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC. The first festival took place two years ago on the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq and served as a call to poets to use their inner voices for speaking up about issues of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s entirely understandable that union members share the harms of copyright infringement. For example, look at the unions that belong to the Copyright Alliance. But also note the announcement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council stating it “unanimously supports anti-piracy measures,” summed up nicely by Dave McNary in Variety.
The AFL-CIO Executive Council denounces piracy in strong [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It would seem that Helene Hegemann is a talented, creative young woman. One wonders what sort of fiction she could have created had she simply “stood on the shoulders of giants” and written an original work inspired by past literary giants. Instead, she decided to cut and paste pages of published literary works and pass [...]

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 [...]