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 titled [...]

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 [...]

It would appear to be a victory. Last week, we here at the Copyright Alliance reported on a brazenly infringing web site, a site that encouraged people to upload professional images over which they held no legal rights. These images were then published on the site in magazine form. The magazine was called Pilfered Magazine, [...]

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. [...]

I’m sounding like a broken record (kids, ask your parents, an audiophile or a club DJ what a record is), but one can’t ignore the focus President Obama and his Administration is placing on the importance of enforcing intellectual property law, in particular ensuring trading partners adhere to their commitments on IP enforcement in their [...]

While President Obama made many interesting points during his State of the Union address last night, I’d like to focus on his discussion of international trade. Obama made several key points: 1) Small business can be a growing part of trade, including entrepreneurs. 2) Americans can produce exports unrivaled by the rest of the world. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]