Author Archives: Bill Rosenblatt
Copyright and Technology 2020 Conference: Agenda and Call for Speakers
The agenda for the next Copyright and Technology conference is published. Registration is live, and earlybird discounts will apply through December 15. The conference will take place at Fordham Law School in Manhattan on Wednesday, January 15, 2020. Once again, I am thrilled to be partnering with the Copyright Society of the USA and the […]
CJEU’s Advocate General Finds No Resale Right for Digital Files
The European Union’s highest court is likely to rule that, as with ReDigi in the U.S., it’s not legal to resell digital content files without the copyright owner’s permission.
UC Davis’s Plan to Disrupt Textbook Publishing
We are entering a period of real disruption in the textbook publishing industry, as the major textbook publishers are finding out that their strategy of continuously raising prices isn’t working anymore. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, Pearson’s new strategy includes taking over relationships with professors and students instead of ceding them to […]
Announcing Copyright and Technology 2020 Conference
I’m pleased to announce that the date and venue have been set for Copyright and Technology 2020. The date for our eleventh conference is Wednesday, January 15, 2020, and we will be back at Fordham Law School. Once again, I’m co-producing the event with the Copyright Society of the USA, and the Fordham IP Institute is sponsoring. As […]
Pearson Launches Digital-First Textbook Strategy
Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, announced on Tuesday that it is transitioning to a digital-first model for textbook publishing, moving away from the print-edition-based model that has been the foundation of higher education publishing for centuries. In its press release, the company announced that it will move almost all of its 1500 U.S. textbook […]
Blockchain Applications for Music Enter the Bowling Alley
An interesting experiment in the use of blockchain technology was announced last week at the MIDEM music conference in Cannes, France. It involves the Israeli music blockchain startup Revelator, working with the music recognition service BMAT and the Finnish music collecting society Teosto. The application is payment of performance royalties to composers for radio airplay, […]
Podcasting Leaves the Copyright Garden of Eden
For fifteen years — until last week — podcasting was a relatively untouched and unspoiled environment regarding copyright issues. Apart from clearing rights for music used within podcasts, no one in podcasting thought much about copyright. If you produced a podcast, you paid a distributor like Libsyn or Blubrry to host it and get it […]
EU Article 13 (Now Article 17) Passes After More Changes, Making Copyright Filtering More Likely
The European Union’s copyright directive finally passed last week, with 56% of the European Parliament vote, after several rounds of significant changes to the text. On its way to final passage, the controversial Article 13 — now Article 17 — went through yet another round of changes that are worth discussing here. Two issues in […]
Cengage Learning Brings Subscriptions to Higher Ed Publishing
Cengage Learning, one of the major textbook publishers, announced last month that it has accumulated a million subscribers to the subscription college text content service, Cengage Unlimited, that it launched for the Fall 2018 semester. Students can subscribe for $120 per semester or $180 per year, with print textbook rentals available for a flat $7.99 […]
Article on Blockchain and Music
I have an article on blockchain technology in the music industry that has just been published in the American Bar Association’s Entertainment and Sports Lawyer journal Winter 2019 issue. A few errors in case citations crept in during production, so I thought I’d put the corrections on record here: p. 18: the citation should be […]
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