It’s always nice to write about good news in this space; ito occurs with far too little regularity. Today’s good news is about a deal involving a voluntary agreement on photo licensing. As announced by the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) coalition in a recent press release:
Three major publishers have called for the adoption [...]

How do you stop a viral spread of false information, for example the myth that Senator Barack Obama is a Muslim or that a tooth left in Coca-Cola will dissolve overnight? Well, the fact is, you don’t. That’s the problem with these myths, they’re like Jason from “Halloween” – they won’t die.
That brings me [...]

BERLIN, GERMANY: It doesn’t seem to matter if I’m in Las Vegas (CES), Los Angeles (Digital Hollywood), Cannes (Midem) or Berlin — the big mystery before both creative industries and technologists is how on Earth to make money in the digital space. That was a recurring theme at the sessions I attended at the Popkomm [...]

After speaking on a panel earlier today at a conference here at Ball State University (apparently their football team is 5-0, or so everyone told me), a student asked me why he couldn’t legally make copies of his DVDs. I don’t know if the question was prompted by news of the RealDVD service by RealPlayer [...]

About two years ago I was on a panel where a speaker said he had just come back from Silicon Valley, and every investor he met said they wanted to get in with any start-up that had a way to get creative works to people more easily, the law be dammed. Asked why they weren’t [...]

It never ceases to amaze me how there could be objections to the efforts of Congress to encourage colleges and universities to enforce the law on their campuses while educating — yes, educating at educational institutions — their students on the law, and hopefully what is right and what is wrong. We all know many [...]

HOLLYWOOD, CA:  I've been speaking for several years now on the fact
that the creative industries continue to show more flexibility in terms of
licensing their works to platforms and distributors. What's nice is, every time
I speak at a conference like Digital
Hollywood, there is still more evidence to support that, and more panelists
and attendees who not only agree with it but are living it.

For some time now the Associated Press — a fantastic news service that, despite its excellence, once distributed my reporting — has been using a service by Silicon Valley-based Attributor to track the distribution of their articles online. Attributor isn't an access-blocking technology. Instead, it lets AP know very quickly how their output is being used, be it on a licensed newspaper or TV site, a blog, or an unlicensed aggregator. The technology itself is neutral; the AP — whose newspaper owners are represented by Copyright Alliance member the Newspaper Association of America — can choose how to respond to the information the technology provides it.

Please don't tell me you are justified in infringing an artist's rights because current business models keep you from doing a certain something you want to do.

If enough of you want to do that same thing, a business model will develop. If you find yourself alone, then it hardly seems reasonable that an artist should forfeit her rights to satisfy your particular quirk.

NBC Universal General Counsel Rick Cotton addressed copyright issues at a discussion sponsored at his employer's booth at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, and that led him to be invited to participate in a week-long blog debate with Columbia Law School's Timothy Wu on the New York Times blog Bits. You can read the series here.