The earlybird discount for the Copyright and Technology 2018 conference expires tomorrow, December 20. The event will take place on Tuesday January 16 at Fordham Law School’s beautiful new facility near Lincoln Center in west midtown Manhattan.  I’m also pleased to announce that Booxtream, the provider of e-book watermarking  technology, will be a Gold Sponsor, along with the Fordham IP Institute. Click here to take advantage of the lower rates.

As a reminder, we have an exciting agenda planned for this year – our ninth year. We’ll start with a presentation of new research on “black box” music royalties by Daniel Dewar of Paperchain and Neeta Ragoowansi of National Performing Rights Exchange (NPREX). Then we’ll move into our keynote from Jonathan Taplin, award-winning film producer, Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab,and author of the new book Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.

Our afternoon sessions will split up into Technology and Law & Policy tracks. This year our Technology track will feature a session on one of the most controversial issues in music licensing today: the problem of matching music recordings to compositions. On this panel we’ll hear from an attorney involved in litigations that turn on this point, an executive from the biggest provider of solutions to this problem today (Harry Fox Agency/Rumblefish), a product developer at Spotify working on blockchain-based licensing solutions, and the head of two startups addressing this issue.

Another panel on our Tech track will cover e-book watermarking — the alternative to “hard” DRM for e-books that is growing in popularity for trade and STM publishing. Watermarking is not a “thing” as DRM is, so it’s all the more important for us to discuss it. Finally, we’ll have a discussion on copyright as a means of protection for software after the Supreme Court’s 2014 Alice decision limited the power of patents to protect software.

Our Law & Policy track will start off with a session on Sci-Hub, the website that has often been called “the Pirate Bay of Science.” Two major scientific publishers have secure large monetary judgments against a site run by someone who is in hiding in Eastern Europe. The latest judgment includes an injunction that could apply to search engines and ISPs. The panel will discuss whether any of these court results will help stem the damage that publishers say Sci-Hub is doing to their businesses and what they can do about it.

We’ll also have a panel on the future of First Sale for digital content. European courts are starting to recognize what they call exhaustion rights for certain types of digital content, and the digital-resale case of Capitol v. ReDigi is making its way through the Second Circuit here in the U.S. — represented by one of the speakers on this panel. We’ll end with what should be a fascinating panel on the copyrightability of AI-created works, featuring the CEO of a startup company that produces them.

Join us on January 16th in NYC – register now!