Public Knowledge, for all its claims to be looking out for the future, appears in its rhetoric to be stuck in the 80s. An oddly gratuitous swipe at the movie industry this week about studios “coming to recognize that technology is not your enemy” left me asking, simply: Seriously? The notion that the creative world [...]

The United States economy in the 21st Century will be driven by creatives both native and immigrant, as a rich social and economic network fostering creativity draws creators and fuels further creativity. So argues David Brooks today in The New York Times. America will be a “crossroads nation,” he said, due to several factors, including [...]

On the heels of the Future of Music Policy Summit and the recent introduction of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) by Senator Leahy, I keep mulling over in my mind what the true value of music, books, and the visual arts is, and how this value – whether actual or perceived – [...]

Welcome back to my conversation with William Aicher, author of “Starving the Artist.” In yesterday’s post, Mr. Aicher shared his thoughts on how his work in the online music business led him to feel artists were not getting sufficient respect online. He also spoke about how copyright serves as an incentive to create, and that [...]

Recently I read a very compelling book titled “Starving the Artist.” (I enjoyed the Kindle version and now have a hard copy given to me by a colleague of the author I met recently at the Music Publishers Association meeting in New York). The thesis of the book — that technology has advanced in ways [...]

Copyright law gives authors exclusive rights to their works, except when it doesn’t. In other words, U.S. law places some limitations on copyright owners’ rights. Copyright is not perpetual. Folks can occasionally make use of a copyrighted work without permission or compensation (fair use). And some exceptions are made for libraries and archives, under Section [...]

The Property Rights Alliance (PRA) has outdone itself with the 2010 International Property Rights Index (IPRI) Report, which once again highlights the close coordination of strong rule of law and physical and intellectual property rights in a nation’s economic success. The latest data shows those countries in the top quintile on those yardsticks have an [...]

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 [...]

The national nonprofit dedicated to advancing the arts in the United States, Americans for the Arts, released today the National Arts Index by Roland J. Kushner and Randy Cohen, a report that analyzes the health and vitality of the arts and culture in the United States. It looks at 76 national-level indicators of artistic and [...]

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 [...]