I’m happy to announce that registration for Copyright and Technology 2018 is now live, with earlybird discount through December 20.

We also have some exciting new agenda items to announce for our conference on Tuesday, January 16, 2018.  In what has become an annual tradition, we will have a presentation of original research in the morning, following Jonathan Taplin’s keynote address.  This year, Daniel Dewar of the music royalty processing startup Paperchain will unveil research currently in progress on the state of so-called black box music royalties: those payments that are, as Paperchain puts it, “everywhere and nowhere.” The presentation will include results of interviews and surveys, with the goal of documenting and analyzing the various scenarios that lead to misallocation of royalties within the music industry’s supply chain and uncovering the truth behind what happens to these missing royalties every year.

In addition, we’ve added to our afternoon Law and Policy track a panel on Sci-Hub, the academic/scientific paper repository sometimes called “The Pirate Bay of Science.” Two major scientific publishers have secured default judgments against the website, which is run by a Kazakh neuroscientist working from undisclosed locations in Eastern Europe. In the latest development, one of the plaintiffs has secured an injunction intended to force search engines and ISPs to block access to the site.

Our panel on Sci-Hub will feature Joe DeMarco, who served as lead counsel for Elsevier — the world’s largest scientific publisher — against Sci-Hub. It will also feature Andrew Bridges of Fenwick and West, a San Francisco-based litigator who has defended many large Internet companies in landmark copyright lawsuits — and who is likely to be on the shortlists of search engines and ISPs looking to challenge those injunctions. We’ll round out the panel with speakers from the scientific publishing industry, to give their perspective on how the Sci-Hub phenomenon is affecting their businesses.

Join us on Tuesday, January 16 for an exciting day!