If you get your hands on 18 million books you don’t own, make full copies of them, and look to profit from them online, expect a bit of legal trouble. Google’s latest headache is from photographers and illustrators. You go, visual artists! Let me say up front that while the Copyright Alliance didn’t play a [...]

DENVER — Lucinda Dugger and I spoke before a gathering of photographers here at a dinner sponsored by one of our members, the Advertising Photographers of America (in particular, their LA-Denver chapter). I did my song-and-dance about what’s happening in copyright policy (the suit filed that morning by photographers and illustrators against Google certainly made [...]

The core principle of copyright is that the creator and copyright owner has the right to reproduction, distribution, public performance and the creation of derivative works of his or her creativity. Take that away and copyright is meaningless. Some would like that result. Others want to keep placing limits on those rights by expanding fair [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]