Washington — Following 20 hearings on copyright reform, the House Judiciary Committee could see substantive copyright reform legislation introduced before the end of the year.  In advance of the renewed copyright reform conversation, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which has testified on the subject, released its latest whitepaper Tuesday “Copyright Reform For a Digital Economy” along with a webinar…

Harry Potter Alliance Of Fan Fiction Activists Joins Re:Create. The Harry Potter Alliance, an activist group that leverages themes from Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and other popular media to encourage social change has joined the Re:Create coalition. As first reported in Politico’s Morning Tech today, “Along with the group’s Fan Works Are Fair Use campaign, Harry Potter Alliance Campaign…

New York Times Magazine In Depth Look At The Creative Economy. Be sure to take time to read the August 19 New York Times Magazine story “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” by Steven Johnson. In the extensive piece on the digital economy, Johnson focuses on data analysis to answer the question: “How is today’s creative class faring compared with its…

This post is the third installment of #CopyrightwithCourtney, a series from Courtney Duffy on the copyright challenges faced by artists in various disciplines. Courtney, who is the Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow at Public Knowledge, focused on authorship in her first post. In the post below, she continues her three-part series on filmmaking. You can read Part…

When it comes to the nexus between competition and regulation, competition is all too often cursed with fair-weather friends.  For today’s example, we’ll take a trip down the copyright regulation rabbit hole. It begins with a Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) proceeding for setting webcaster rates under a statutory license in Section 114 of the Copyright Act.  The process, called “Web…

South By Southwest Panels – Cast Your Vote For Re:Create Today. The 23nd annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival returns to Austin in March and Re:Create wants copyright to be part of the discussion. Our Copyright & Creators: 2026 panel entry features a respected academic, a noted futurist, fan fiction leader and a reporter with the Los Angeles Times…

I think that recording artists should have the right to prevent public performances of their copyrighted works, the same as composers. I just don’t think that a district court in New York can spontaneously give them that right and insist it always existed. Last week, Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief in lawsuit between the company Flo & Eddie, which…

Free Market Groups Warn International Trade Commission On Digital Data Authority. Re:Create members R Street and FreedomWorks along with the Niskanen Center sent a letter to the chairwoman of the International Trade Commission expressing their deep concern over categorizing the transmission of digital data as an “importation.” The August 3 letter cites specific concerns that treating digital data in such…

The United States is currently negotiating a large, regional free trade agreement with eleven other countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. On August 5, 2015, Knowledge Ecology International published a new leak of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement’s (TPP) negotiating text for the intellectual property chapter. This text, dated May 11, 2015 reflects…

Happy Birthday Song Could Celebrate Entry Into Public Domain. The New York Times’ article, New Evidence Should Free ‘Happy Birthday’ From Copyright, Lawyers Say, details documents showing that the popular “Happy Birthday to You” song has been free of copyright restrictions for decades. The story reports that the current copyright holder collects an estimated “$2 million a year for the…