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 [...]

BERLIN, GERMANY — Ideas, fortunately, cannot be copyrighted. Ideas, however, are very important in the debate over copyright. Stanford University Law Professor Lawrence Lessig knows that, and is back with yet another book urging the reduction of rights of creators. This self-appointed pied piper of copyright dilution has given us a preview of his new [...]

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 [...]

MUNCIE, INDIANA: The folks here at Ball State’s Digital Economy Institute have put on an interesting conference called “Digital Policy in the Information Age.” I’ve already blogged on an interesting exchange I had regarding DVD replication with a student who attended the panel discussion in which I participated.
What was my panel on? That’s kind of [...]

It’s been almost ten years since the original Napster garnered the world’s attention, and lovers of music but not of musicians continue to download and share unauthorized songs, an illegal activity that now includes movies, e-books and other digital media. We heard calls from people as prominent as members of Congress calling for new business [...]

It never ceases to amaze me how there could be objections to the efforts of Congress to encourage colleges and universities to enforce the law on their campuses while educating — yes, educating at educational institutions — their students on the law, and hopefully what is right and what is wrong. We all know many [...]

Yes, a lot has been written about Radiohead’s brief flirtation with allowing free (although they had a cup out for donations) downloading of their album “Chasing Rainbows” last year. I’m not going to add to that. I wanted to point out, however, a nice overview and perspective on the episode in DRM Watch by Michael [...]

I’ve written before about how it’s not just music and movies that suffer piracy online; anything that can be digitized is vulnerable, and any creative work can be digitized. The latest, as many reports have indicated, is the magazine industry.
Piracy isn’t new to the magazine world; there’s a reason why the Magazine Publishers of America [...]

A university’s mission is educating its students. Congress should never thwart that. But nor should university administrations resist opportunities for education.
For those reasons we should all welcome the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HR-4137) that has emerged from a House-Senate conference and is on its way to passage in the House and Senate and then on [...]

Today’s guest blog is written by Dan Glickman, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Consider the following questions:
1. Does your home computer contain information that you feel strongly about protecting, such as your social security number, financial information, tax records?
2. [...]