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 [...]

It is in the best interest of any broadband user who adheres to the law to see that other customers filling up the broadband pipe with infringing traffic are stymied; that leaves more pipe for the legal user. Have you ever streamed a movie or TV show through Netflix? Before the presentation begins, there’s a [...]

More people are watching video over the Internet than ever before. It is becoming increasingly easy to stream online video on your television, bringing the lean-back and lean-forward technologies together in a pleasant way. We want this to continue, right?
There are two challenges facing the growth of a legal online video market. One is piracy. [...]

Next week two important Subcommittees in the House and Senate are holding hearings on the proposed acquisition of 51% of NBC Universal by Comcast. Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts is expected to testify at that hearing. This morning he gave a sneak preview of his testimony in a Q&A with Alan Murray The Wall [...]

The first round of comments in the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rulemaking on network neutrality have been filed, and there are a number of filings of interest to copyright owners and creators. I’ve taken the liberty of summarizing a few here, with links to the full filings. Note that according to the FCC web site, [...]

I’ve seen a fair amount of dismissal in the digital-utopian crowd of the nearly 12,000 individual artists and creators who signed our letter to President Obama and Vice President Biden asking that their rights over their works be respected online. If you’re acquiring or giving away someone else’s creativity and labor without their authorization or [...]

I just came from a compelling event hosted by a think tank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. ITIF was promoting a paper released today by technologists titled “Steal These Policies: Strategies for Reducing Digital Piracy.” The paper is a must-read; let me summarize the event, which had a very important theme — namely, that [...]

I had the pleasure of attending an interesting conference yesterday hosted by the Institute for Policy Innovation on broadband policy, a timely topic here in D.C. You can watch most of it on this C-SPAN recording; in an obvious conspiracy, the one panel C-SPAN chose not to videotape was the first one, in which I [...]

LOS ANGELES, CA – How I wish some of the bloggers who are so convinced the future of creative production requires reduction or abandonment of artists’ rights could travel in my circle and meet creators and promoters of creators who are in it for the love but also want to ensure they can keep sharing [...]

Earlier this week the Future of Music Coalition (FOM) hosted their 2009 Future of Music Policy Summit. The three-day conference was held on the Georgetown University campus in Washington DC, and boasted a variety of music-related events, panel discussions, and keynote speeches. Through my internship with the Copyright Alliance, I was fortunate enough [...]