While it will go without saying to readers of this blog that I feel there are many harms that can come from the hacking of a Blu-Ray disc, you can hear me make that case on television by following this link: http://bit.ly/dmpCRF In the interview I point out that it only takes one hacker to [...]

How did we find ourselves in a world where a group of venture-funded entrepreneurs can knowingly build a business model off of the display of unauthorized copyrighted works, be on the record as knowing that their cash flow would stem almost solely from this infringement, and still get off the hook as long as they [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I hope all readers answer “no” to the question above, but in policy recommendations, we often are told that the answer is “yes.” In particular, we are told that if technology makes something inevitable, we must all not just adjust to it but embrace it. Technology is about improvement, about bettering the world. Short-term disruptions [...]

One of the great success stories of the digital age has been the growing app industry. For as long as there has been software, there have been clever entrepreneurs who have developed a nifty game or tool and marketed it directly to the public, but in the smart phone era professional possibilities exist like never [...]

Like all creative industries, the photography industry is undergoing significant change. Technologies have been of benefit to professional photographers by easing legal distribution and creating new models for licensing, and have helped them to better express themselves in their art. But technologies have also enabled infringement of their works, and have created avenues for less [...]

WASHINGTON — It can be easy to underestimate the importance of another’s intellectual property rights, even when you fiercely protect your own. There was an interesting exchange today at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global IP Center Summit. During Q&A of a panel of copyright and patent industry leaders, an entrepreneur named Friedrick Schweitzer stood [...]

Rapid advances in technology have been occurring since the Renaissance, and yet sometimes the greatest advocates of advancement fail to predict where science will go. In the 19th Century Lord Kelvin was a father of modern physics, identifying absolute zero, naming kinetic energy, and setting in motion the identification of the second law of thermodynamics. [...]