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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Congrats to the coalition of self-described “consumer groups” that have sent letters to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission urging the federal government to step in, strip audiovisual content creators of their rights, and force all of their content online available to any distributor at prices set by someone other [...]

Kudos to the House Judiciary Committee for holding a hearing Wednesday acknowledging a growing threat to copyright owners’ ability to produce and distribute high-quality entertainment; largely for-profit sites providing real-time streaming of copyrighted works without authorization from or payment to rightsholders.
Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX) began the hearing by talking [...]