With less than three weeks to go until our Copyright and Technology London 2013 conference, I’m very pleased to announce some additions and updates to the conference agenda.  Most importantly, Vikram Kumar, CEO of Kim Dotcom’s new service MEGA, will appear by videoconference from New Zealand.  I’ll be talking with him about copyright issues related to the market for cloud storage services, and he’ll take questions from the audience.

I’m also particularly excited about a few of the sessions at this year’s conference.  A very hot topic in the digital copyright field nowadays is websites that attract traffic with offers of free unauthorized copyrighted material and make money from advertising, and what the advertising industry could be doing about this.  Our panel on this issue will include Nick Stringer from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (representing the ad industry side) and Geoff Taylor from BPI (representing recorded music).  It will also feature Jeremy Penston, an independent consultant in the UK who has been the brains behind piracy studies for PRS, Google, and Spotify; and Nick Swimer from the law firm of Reed Smith to provide the legal context.

And speaking of piracy studies, our panel on cyberlockers will feature David Price of NetNames (formerly Envisional), author of a highly detailed study called Sizing the Piracy Universe just this week.

We will also get a presentation on HADOPI, the French graduated response agency, from Pauline Blassel, HADOPI’s research director —  just a week after the agency is to give a progress report in Paris.  And speaking of progress reports, our session on the launch of the Global Repertory Database (featuring speakers from Google, STIM, and others) should be quite interesting.

With a spectacular setting at Reed Smith’s offices in London, Copyright and Technology London 2013 should be a great event.  Please register today!  Our sponsors, MarkMonitor and Civolution, are helping to keep registration fees low.

For those of you on the other side of the world from London, you may also be interested in the International Copyright Technology (ICOTEC) 2013 conference, which will take place at the COEX conference center in Seoul, Korea, on November 4-5.  I will be giving one of the keynote addresses.