As a strong believer in property rights both real and intellectual, and a fervent supporter of the free market — what’s happening on Wall Street right now isn’t a failure of the market, it’s the result of the collapse of distortions and bypasses of the market — I was optimistic when I saw an article [...]

Everyone by now must be familiar with the theory by Wired’s Chris Anderson that in the Internet age, there is more money to be made on the vast majority of creative works that are niche items than in the few that are very popular. He has depicted this through what is called a Pareto curve, [...]

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 [...]

I always love talking about free markets, and miss daily hallway conversations on that subject from my think tank days. So I was delighted to come across a new publication (PDF) by the Washington Legal Foundation in which the Honorable Dick Thornburgh, now with K & L Gates, discusses the state of intellectual property in [...]

I’ve heard some peculiar arguments against intellectual property over the years, and two of them have been at events sponsored by the Cato Institute. The first was two or three years ago, when Cato hosted a conference featuring then-UCLA Economics Professor David Levine. In his dissection of copyright, he defended the notion of pirated motion [...]

In The Graduate, the father of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) — after learning his son is driving to Berkeley to propose to Elaine Robinson, daughter of a woman Benjamin was having an affair with — says “Don’t you think that idea is a little half-baked?” Benjamin replies, “Oh no, Dad, it’s completely baked.”
The idea I’m [...]

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 [...]

* i know, I prefer the term “creative works,” but I’m speaking the lingo of the conference here and will use “content” in this blog entry.
SANTA MONICA, CA — Another Digital Hollywood, another amalgam of creative start-ups with bizarre Web 2.0 names, another set of panels where people continue to try to figure out how [...]

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 [...]