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 [...]

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, [...]

I’m sounding like a broken record (kids, ask your parents, an audiophile or a club DJ what a record is), but one can’t ignore the focus President Obama and his Administration is placing on the importance of enforcing intellectual property law, in particular ensuring trading partners adhere to their commitments on IP enforcement in their [...]

Thank you to Rob Atkinson and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation for allowing me to participate Tuesday in a forum titled “‘Info-Communism:’ A Progressive Path Forward or a Political and Intellectual Dead End?” I had the pleasure of responding to Syracuse University Professor Milton Mueller and his compelling paper, “Info-Communism? Ownership and Freedom in [...]

The first round of comments in the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed rulemaking on network neutrality have been filed, and there are a number of filings of interest to copyright owners and creators. I’ve taken the liberty of summarizing a few here, with links to the full filings. Note that according to the FCC web site, [...]

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 [...]

Kudos to the House Judiciary Committee for holding a hearing Wednesday acknowledging a growing threat to copyright owners’ ability to produce and distribute high-quality entertainment; largely for-profit sites providing real-time streaming of copyrighted works without authorization from or payment to rightsholders. Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX) began the hearing by [...]

I just came from a compelling event hosted by a think tank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. ITIF was promoting a paper released today by technologists titled “Steal These Policies: Strategies for Reducing Digital Piracy.” The paper is a must-read; let me summarize the event, which had a very important theme — namely, that [...]

Do I have a right to obtain music by The Beatles in any format I want? That is the question that one needs to ask when deciding how to view the decision by the remaining Beatles and key rightsholders to rule out certain forms of digital distribution. L. Gordon Crovitz has a nice overview of [...]

A key part of the copyright debate is that copyright somehow inhibits innovation. Yet if you look around, innovation has been occurring and continues to occur at a dizzying pace. Hype quickly follows that innovation, and assumptions surround each new innovation. We hear lots of references to Schumpeter, as if the Austrian economist who focused [...]