We have had to change the date of the next Copyright and Technology conference to one day earlier owing to issues with the venue.  The new date is Tuesday, January 16, 2018.  The agenda and speakers, including keynote speaker Jonathan Taplin, will all be the same. There are still several speaking slots as well as […]

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced on Monday that it has approved Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) as a Recommendation, meaning that it’s now an official standard. This announcement marks the end of a very contentious debate about the role, if any, that DRM should have in web browser environments and open web standards. EME […]

Last week’s announcement of a partnership between Digimarc and Erudition Digital represents an interesting next step in the evolution of watermarking as a copyright protection technology, in this case for e-books.  Erudition Digital is an e-book distributor based in the UK that has incorporated watermarking technology from Custos Technologies of South Africa. According to last […]

Copyright owners have long been at odds with tech companies and service providers over copyright-related issues. We’ve seen various different attempts to solve these problems across industries since the start of the “copyright wars” in the late 1990s, enough to have some idea of what works and what doesn’t. In rough terms, there are four types […]

We’ve got an exciting keynote speaker lined up for Copyright and Technology 2018 on January 17: Jonathan Taplin, Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. Like Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?, Taplin extrapolates the effects of those Internet […]

I’m pleased to announce that our next Copyright and Technology conference will be on Wednesday, January 17, 2018 at Fordham Law School, on Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on the upper west side of Manhattan. The conference is now in its ninth year, and once again I’m proud to be producing it in partnership with the Copyright […]

An effort is brewing in Washington to get an authoritative online database of music rights information built for the United States. It started last week as a bill called the Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership Act. (It has neither a catchy acronym nor even a bill number at this time of writing, so we’ll just call […]

Late last month, the United States Copyright Office published the results of a study on Section 1201 (17 U.S.C. § 1201), the section of U.S. copyright law that makes it a violation to hack DRM systems and other content access and copy controls. Section 1201 was enacted in 1998 as part of the Digital Millennium […]

Summer’s here and the time is right for planning the agenda for the next Copyright and Technology Conference — which will be in NYC in late January 2018 (exact date TBD), now in its ninth year and once again in partnership with the Copyright Society of the USA. For those of you who have attended […]

Last week we discussed the new “cost-per-circulation” (CPC) model for public libraries — in which they can make e-books available to patrons and pay the publisher per “loan” instead of paying fixed fees to “acquire” titles as if they were print books (the “pretend it’s print” or PIP model). HarperCollins has just become the first […]