A reminder that our eleventh annual Copyright and Technology Conference is coming up on Wednesday, January 15 at Fordham Law School in NYC, co-produced by the Copyright Society of the USA and sponsored by the good folks at the Fordham Intellectual Property Institute. Online registration is still available.

I’d like to announce a couple of changes in the agenda that ought to make the event even more interesting. First, in place of the panel on blockchain applications for visual arts, I will give a talk on Digital First Sale, together with Lance Koonce of Davis Wright & Tremaine, an expert on the subject. This will be based on a talk that I gave at the BYU Copyright and Trademark Symposium back in October. We’ll be discussing first sale (the right to sell, give away, lend, or rent copyrighted works) and what it means for digital content. We’ll cover developments in the law over the past 20 years, including the very recent Court of Justice of the European Union decision on ebook resale. We’ll also cover developments in technology and the digital media market that relate to the possibility of digital resale.

We also have an important addition to our session on the implementation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective pursuant to the Music Modernization Act of 2018: Regan Smith, General Counsel and Associate Register of Copyrights at the U.S. Copyright Office, will join a panel that will also include Danielle Aguirre of NMPA, Frank Scibilia of Pryor Cashman, and John Raso of the Harry Fox Agency. NMPA President and CEO David Israelite will also be discussing this in his keynote address.

Join us on January 15th in NYC!