Much of the writing on blockchain applications for music and other media is on the blogging platform Medium. The platform has pros and cons compared to WordPress, the current platform for Copyright and Technology. Medium looks nice, has easy-to-use writers’ tools, and has great features for increasing readership, but it has limited flexibility, limits ways to establish […]
One aspect of the recent hype about blockchain applications for music is the spate of conferences and panels about it. I went to one of these last Wednesday: the Music 4.5 conference at the offices of the ReedSmith law firm in NYC. The event was cleverly organized: the first half was devoted to startups who touted the virtues […]
In a recent exchange in the comments to an article in Nate Hoffelder’s The Digital Reader blog, I mentioned Readium Licensed Content Protection (Readium LCP), the standard DRM scheme for EPUB-formatted e-books that I’ve been working on for the past couple of years. I gave a talk on Readium LCP a couple of weeks ago at the EPUB Summit […]
We’ve decided to get an earlier start on next year’s Copyright and Technology conference — our eighth year. Save the date: Tuesday January 24, 2017. The venue will once again be the Kimmel Center at NYU, and my co-producers once again are the Copyright Society of the USA and Larry Miller of Musonomics and the Steinhardt […]
Last time I talked about blockchain technology and its potential to revolutionize certain types of copyright-related transactions. Now let’s talk about some challenges. Even though the potential for blockchain applications in the copyright arena is high, it’s inevitable that many of the schemes being proposed will not pan out; that’s the nature of technology hype. […]
Lately I’ve been hearing about blockchain-related solutions to copyright problems on practically a weekly basis. Perhaps this was inevitable, given the massive amounts of activity and hype surrounding blockchain technology, and the realization that it has applications well beyond cryptocurrency (and I’m sure others have been observing this same phenomenon in different industries at different times). But […]
My latest column in Forbes is an analysis of the U.S. recorded music revenue figures for 2015 that the RIAA released last week. Total revenues are $7 Billion – a figure that has remained almost exactly the same for six years now. This would suggest that $7 Billion is the amount that the American public […]
I’ll be moderating a breakfast panel during the NAB trade show in Las Vegas in mid-April: The FCC’s Open-STB World: What Does It Mean for Content Security? Back in February, the FCC approved a proposal that will require pay television operators to let users choose their own access devices instead of using the set-top boxes (STBs) […]
The U.S. Copyright Office sits within the Library of Congress. It uses the Library’s IT infrastructure and is subject to the Library’s budget process, and the decisions it makes are subject to the Librarian of Congress’s approval, although that’s usually a rubber stamp. When James Billington retired as Librarian of Congress last September, many viewed it […]
You know the old philosophical conundrum: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Here’s an analogy in the world of digital copyright: if a file is made available online and no one is around to download it, is that evidence of possible copyright infringement? In […]
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