In the comments section, Patry expresses disappointment that “The Wall Street Journal chose to have my book reviewed by an extreme partisan rather than by someone on staff who might have an objective view.” While I welcome his thoughts, I’m not sure why he’d expect an objective reviewer and I would hardly identify myself as an “extreme partisan”: I favor shorter copyright terms, greater leeway for fair use, and many of Patry’s suggestions. In any case, I hope this will be an interesting discussion of a book worth talking about.

-On the day intelligent debate died, technology thinker Jaron Lanier wrote a New York Times op-ed that got to the heart of the debate. This isn’t really a debate about free speech – it’s about how the Internet should work. The problem is that, after mocking the media business for refusing to adjust its business model, large technology companies are trying to preserve theirs.

-Andrew Orlowski wrote an amusing analysis of the debate over SOPA and makes a point that can’t be repeated enough: “Last year, Google made 11 million sites disappear on a whim, removing the .co.cc domains from its search index because the sites were deemed by Google to be “spammy”.” (It had no way of determining that absolutely all of them were.) I don’t have a problem with this. But most SOPA opponents would find this reprehensible, since they object to the idea that Google should de-index sites devoted to piracy. But if it’s OK for Google to exercise good judgement in a way that helps its own business, why isn’t it OK for it to do the same in a way that upholds the law? Like Lanier, Orlowski is especially interesting to read because he knows technology so well.

-Jeffrey Rosen wrote an interesting analysis of SOPA in the New Republic that calls it “A Bad Solution to a Very Real Problem.” I admit: I’m biased because he mentions my book favorably. His piece is refreshingly free of the sky-is-falling rhetoric we’ve heard from Google and Stanford. (There’s so little space between them that I will call them either ‘Googford’ or ‘Stanoogle’ from now on.) He, too, makes a point that can’t be repeated often enough: “There are lawyers and lobbies on both sides of the debate, however, and neither side is devoted to the promotion of creativity for its own sake.”

The obvious problem is this: How much can you trust a company that deliberately attempts to profit from the work of others without providing any compensation? (Whether YouTube’s behavior was legal under the DMCA will be determined in court, but emails that came out in Viacom’s lawsuit make it clear that the company’s employees didn’t think they were going to get rich on cat videos.) Ironically, most online streaming services are actually less transparent than major labels when it comes to royalty accounting – and that’s saying something.

So it’s not all that surprising to hear that the online music service Grooveshark has just been sued by EMI – the only major music company it actually had a deal with. (Universal’s suit against Grooveshark is ongoing, and Sony and Warner recently filed suits of their own.) In its complaint, EMI Publishing – the division of EMI that controls the copyrights to songs, not recordings – that it has “made not a single royalty payment to EMI, nor provided a single accounting statement.” Ouch.

This fits with Grooveshark’s strategy – “achieving all this growth without paying a dime to any of the labels” – as outlined by chariman Sina Simantob in a December 2009 email. Much as musicians who want their work removed from the service have to repeatedly file DMCA takedown notices for the same work, perhaps companies simply have to sue in order to get paid. (Grooveshark told The New York Times that this was a contract dispute it expected to resolve.) Sadly, this would hardly be unprecedented in the music business.

If I had to guess, I’d suggest that Grooveshark’s apparent decision not to pay EMI Publishing could even be part of its legal strategy. Remember that EMI Music Publishing controls the rights to songs released by other major labels, some of which are suing Grooveshark. If Grooveshark were to account to EMI Publishing for those songs, it would mean that the company knew how much they were being played. And the DMCA safe harbor only applies if a company like Grooveshark lacks “actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system is infringing.”

Please keep in mind that this is just a guess: I’m not a lawyer, and the DMCA is a complex law subject to varying interpretations. But it does seem that it would be pretty tough for Grooveshark to pay song royalties to EMI Publishing for a recording owned by Universal Music Group, while at the same time insisting that it doesn’t know which Universal Music recordings are on its site.

Here’s an example from a Google lobbyist.

Naturally, he was also a fellow at the Berkman Center.

I am also happy to share a new Spin.com interview. And I will leave you with one of my final comments to the reporter who did it: “Google is not Woodstock; it’s a technology company.”

Indeed.

Here is an interview I did with The Wrap about piracy, pricing, and the future of the media business in general. Since it’s a business site, I got the chance to talk in some depth about the exact nature of the media’s problems, as well as potential solutions.

I’m also thrilled to be the subject of “The Sunday Conversation” in today’s Los Angeles Times. In 1994 – in what seems like another world – my first job out of graduate school was an internship at the Los Angeles Times Calendar section, where I covered minor music news, wrote about small films, and profiled a movie-set “Baby Wrangler.” It was “intern stuff,” in other words, and I did it in “intern style” – with much more enthusiasm than expertise. It wasn’t always easy, but I had a blast and I learned a lot. Whatever the journalism businesses of the future look like – digital or analog, big or small – I hope they have the organizational stability to give young reporters the same learning opportunities.

You can decide for yourself if I have a point. When I did a Businessweek story on this issue, I got the following response from Stanford Law School: “As an institution, Stanford Law School does not take an advocacy position on issues, political or otherwise, and maintains a position of strict autonomy when it comes to academic research.” (The statement also contained information on its research policies.) And yet tomorrow the Stanford Law School’s Center for Information and Society will hold a panel on “What’s Wrong With SOPA?” that will “explore the potential impact of SOPA on Silicon Valley, the concerns that have been voiced by legal scholars, technology companies, entrepreneurs, engineers and venture capitalists, and what the technology sector can do to make a difference in the outcome of this bill.” Panelists include two Stanford professors, a Google copyright counsel, a venture capitalist, a former Google attorney, two top executives at technology companies – and no one who seems to believe this bill isn’t a menace to society as we know it.

Personally, I think SOPA is too vague – I think most of the objections to the bill are hysterical, but it needs to be more specific. I’m sure that plenty of people who read this blog will disagree, and that’s fair enough – this is an important issue that deserves serious debate. But does online copyright infringement ever really receives serious debate at Stanford, where Google has donated generously to the Law School and the university’s dean sits on the company’s board? (There are two sides to a debate: One of the panelists, Fred von Lohmann, is an extremely smart lawyer and a nice guy but I’m not sure who he’d debate with.) Could they not find anyone to argue the other side?

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that anyone who objects to SOPA favors piracy or anything like that: There are serious issues about which reasonable people can disagree. But how much disagreement will there be at a panel that seems structured to come off like a pep rally? If these lawyers have convictions and the arguments to back them up, shouldn’t they go out of their way to invite the other side? More important, isn’t this exactly the kind of issue that Stanford’s statement says it doesn’t take an advocacy position on?

Does that mean we should simply accept SOPA the way it is? No – I think that debating these issues is important, and I hope it leads to a more specific bill that will accomplish the same goals. But having that debate means recognizing how much money Google and other technology companies are spending to influence it. Say what you want about the MPAA – they’re very open about where their funding comes from. The New America Foundation is not nearly as transparent. The organization does important work on many issues, but it seems worth noting that it made technology policy more of a priority after Eric Schmidt became chairman of its board of directors. If Disney chief executive Bob Iger ran a think tank, I don’t think journalists would take what it said at face value – and they would be right not to.

Here’s a Podcast from my appearance at Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center For Art, Enterprise & Public Policy.

And here’s a video of my appearance at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication.

Enjoy.

*To be entirely honest, no one demanded this and my “U.S. tour” amounted to a handful of speaking engagements punctuated by inconvenient air travel and fast food. But I had fun!

Of course, Googlers aren’t known for their sense of irony. Today the company’s homepage honors the birthday of Mark Twain. What’s interesting is the way it does so. The illustration looks like a comic strip with three panels. In the first, one boy hands his friend a paint can; in the second, he watches as his friend paints a fence; in the third, he offers a thumbs-up for his buddy’s work as his friend sits, exhausted, on the ground. The scene evokes “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” when Tom’s Aunt Polly makes him whitewash her fence and he tricks his friends into doing the work by convincing them that it’s fun.

In modern terms, this might be called “Sawyersourcing” – and few companies have done more to promote it than Google. Jimmy Wales is more of a Sawyer-esque character, a quintessentially American huckster who talked people he never met into writing an encyclopedia for him, then convinced the media that he wanted to run a charity even though he’s an Objectivist. But Google made this idea respectable by making large donations to Creative Commons, Harvard’s Berkman Center, and other institutions. Sometimes, Sawyersourcing produces great work. But technology companies, like Tom, rarely volunteer to share the wealth the way they share the work.

Twain himself, one suspects, would be laughing his ass off.