Once again President Obama has demonstrated a commitment to copyright owners’ rights, just as more than 11,000 artists and creators asked him to do last fall in a Copyright Alliance letter to him and Vice President Biden. As I have in past posts, here are his own words, in a speech yesterday at the Export-Import [...]

There is no larger global market than China. If you are one in a million in that country there are more than 1,300 of you. Naturally, as the U.S. looks to promote jobs here in this country, we want to export our creativity abroad. It does little good if our creative works are phenomenally popular [...]

It’s not every day that I recommend readers devour every single line of a written work authored by someone other than myself (I’m smiling while writing that), but I strongly recommend doing so with Andrew Zolli’s “My Turn” column in Newsweek titled “The Future Won’t Be Free.” In fact, print it out, paste it on [...]

It’s entirely understandable that union members share the harms of copyright infringement. For example, look at the unions that belong to the Copyright Alliance. But also note the announcement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council stating it “unanimously supports anti-piracy measures,” summed up nicely by Dave McNary in Variety.
The AFL-CIO Executive Council denounces piracy in strong [...]

Joining a bevy of other Obama Administration officials including the President himself — U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke out forcefully in defense of strong IP and in particular copyright enforcement this week.
The AG spoke yesterday in Rio De Janeiro at the Prosecutor General’s office on IP enforcement (thank you Tech Law Journal for [...]

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 [...]

The Federal Trade Commission said today that it has warned nearly one hundred U.S. companies that personal information, including sensitive data about customers and/or employees, is floating around on P2P networks, putting those customers and employees at risk of identity theft or fraud. The federal agency also said it has “opened non-public investigations of other [...]

It is in the best interest of any broadband user who adheres to the law to see that other customers filling up the broadband pipe with infringing traffic are stymied; that leaves more pipe for the legal user. Have you ever streamed a movie or TV show through Netflix? Before the presentation begins, there’s a [...]

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 [...]