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 [...]

Today is a momentous day for the Copyright Alliance. It’s the first time we have filed a brief in any case, and this one was with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to hear an appeal of a 2nd Circuit Court decision reversing a lower court in Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings, Inc. You can [...]

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 line [...]

SANTA MONICA, CA — Every time I come to this show, I hear more technologists eager to make deals with copyright owners, legal deals rewarding both parties. Yes, one big obstacle remains — to date, returns from online distribution of creative works haven’t approached that of traditional models. But improvements are being made in that [...]

Just two weeks ago I gave a presentation where I said sometimes we needed a legal process to sort out thorny issues, and cited the Google Book Search case where publishers were suing the search engine giant for reproducing copyrighted works given to them by major university libraries without obtaining the permission of copyright owners.
Well, [...]

SANTA MONICA, CA — How can you host a conference 200 yards from the beach and expect people to attend your indoor, windowless sessions? Well, DCIA did okay today with their P2P and Video Summit, and I suspect Digital Hollywood will hang in there as well the rest of this week. I’ve spent a lot [...]

More scholarship out today on the role of performing rights organizations (PROs) in the digital marketplace, and it’s worth reading. “Creative Industries in Transition: New Directions for the Digital Era — The Songwriters’ Performing Rights Organization Imperative and Copyright Law for the Electronic Media Marketplace” debuted today at a symposium sponsored by the George Washington [...]

BERLIN, GERMANY — The Popkomm Music Conference here wrapped up with a half-day conference on media and P2P hosted by the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA). It drew a good crowd, although by my panel (the last) we were getting into Friday evening and more than a few souls, understandably, had drifted off. It was [...]

BERLIN, GERMANY — No, the title of this blog doesn’t refer to a new Windows Media service. Rather, it examines the possibility of the music industry adopting a digital version of the “windows” used by the motion picture industry to target consumers at the right price points.
This notion, that popped up in various forms throughout [...]

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 [...]