The world knows history was made Tuesday at noon Eastern when Barack Obama became our 44th President. So many profound things have been said by speakers and writers far more insightful than me, so I don’t wish to travel that same ground. And I’m also hesitant to try to localize his election and inauguration to [...]

Has it been three years already? The US Copyright Office is again hearing arguments for exceptions for, as the December 29 Federal Register notice puts it, “certain classes of works from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The purpose of this rulemaking proceeding is to determine whether there [...]

The Progress & Freedom Foundation today published a new paper titled “From ‘Dinosaurs’ to Digital: An Examination of Ongoing Innovations in Copyright Industries.” As PFF’s press release notes, the paper “itemizes the variety of ways traditional content industries are experimenting with digital distribution models. In an effort to compete with user-generated content and online piracy, [...]

With this post I continue my five-part series on ten myths surrounding copyright. I have tilted at these canards for years, and now I’m trying to compile those critiques into one series. In the first post I addressed the false notion of copyright suppressing artists and the false claims of rights by some creative works [...]

In this five-part series I will be channeling Ebenezer Scrooge, and sharing my inner crankiness with those willing to read past this sentence. In the years in which I’ve been promoting the rights of artists, creators and copyright owners, I have repeatedly heard tired canards that too often go unchallenged. I have challenged them in [...]

We’ve all heard that print newspapers are dead, that people like me who like to spread a newspaper across a breakfast table are dinosaurs. News at your fingertips on the web is where it’s at, we hear, and circulation and web traffic data would seem to support that. To respond, newspapers have proven aggressive in [...]

One of the Copyright Alliance’s academic advisors, James Gibson of the University of Richmond, had a perceptive editorial in The Washington Post today on the recent deal between Google and the publishers over the Google Book search service. Here was our reaction on the morning of the announcement, and here is Professor Gibson’s analysis. Bottom [...]

My oh-so-clever use of question marks in that headline is meant to convey that I find the very “battle” to be both absurd and non-existent, not unlike the so-called “copyright vs. innovation” battle. In both cases the subjects go hand in hand, in fact are symbiotic. But rarely are they portrayed that way. This particular [...]

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 — Ideas, fortunately, cannot be copyrighted. Ideas, however, are very important in the debate over copyright. Stanford University Law Professor Lawrence Lessig knows that, and is back with yet another book urging the reduction of rights of creators. This self-appointed pied piper of copyright dilution has given us a preview of his new [...]