We’ve got an exciting keynote speaker lined up for Copyright and Technology 2018 on January 17: Jonathan Taplin, Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. Like Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?, Taplin extrapolates the effects of those Internet giants on content creators to greater forces affecting society.

I’ve admired Taplin at a distance for quite some time. As a high school student, I saw The Last Waltz, the film he produced of the final San Francisco concert by The Band — a group he managed, along with the likes of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. The film lives on as an important document of rock music in the 1970s, and I’ve seen it several times since; Taplin has produced several other feature films that have been nominated for Oscars and Golden Globes.

When I was at Sun Microsystems during the late 1990s, my group supplied technology to Intertainer, his early streaming video startup. More recently, I’ve written (here and here) about the work that his USC Annenberg Innovation Lab has done on identifying ad-supported pirate websites. And I saw him give a compelling keynote at the Digital Book World conference in 2016, where he discussed ideas that would become central themes of his new book.

The agenda for the conference is up, and plenty of moderating and speaking slots are still available — as are a limited number of sponsorship opportunities. Please inquire if you’re interested in speaking or sponsoring our ninth Copyright and Technology conference.