WASHINGTON — Join me in celebrating World IP Day, and yes, let’s emphasize the word “World.” Here at the Copyright Alliance we tend to focus on U.S. artists and creators, but creativity and cultural contributions are global. International treaties provide rights under law to artists around the world, but that doesn’t mean their own countries [...]

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It’s a good thing copyright is not a person, because three hundred candles on a cake would likely be a fire hazard. But when you divide three hundred candles across the 11 million Americans working as creators or other contributors in copyright industries, that only leaves 0.0000272 candles per person.
Anyhow, kudos to U.S. Senate [...]

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That counterfeiting and piracy causes significant harm to creators and creative industries is unquestioned, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office has affirmed that in a new report. The report is a bit thin on substance, but that appears to be intentional. While Congress in the PRO-IP Act of 2008 called for GAO to quantify the [...]

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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 part [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I hope all readers answer “no” to the question above, but in policy recommendations, we often are told that the answer is “yes.” In particular, we are told that if technology makes something inevitable, we must all not just adjust to it but embrace it. Technology is about improvement, about bettering the world. Short-term disruptions [...]

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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, [...]

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