Arts + Labs will be hosting a themed dinner, "The Digital Economy: Treats and Opportunities" at the 2010 Media Summit in New York. on March 10th.  The event will be moderated by Arts + Labs advisor Andrew Keen.

Brian Napack, President, Macmillan Publishing
Channing Dawson, SVP of Emerging Media, Scripps
Rick Cotton, EVP & General Counsel, NBCU
Jeff Turner, Founder & CTO, Interstream
C. Lincoln Hoewing, Vice President of Internet and Technology Policy, Verizon

Mr. Keen will also be participating in a panel discussion, "Defending the News and Media Industries: Restructuring, Recovery and Technology - the Role of the Media Industry, Wall Street, Government and Non-Profits" on  March 11 with the following speakers:

Timothy Karr, Campaign Director, Free Press
Steven Waldman, Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, FCC
Michael Wolff, founder, Newser and Columnist, Vanity Fair
Jane Mago, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, National Association of Broadcasters
George Mahoney, Vice President, Secretary, and General Counsel of Media General, Inc.
Anne M. Swanson, Member, Dow Lohnes, Moderator

See full details here.

The Arts+Labs New Media, New Networks policy forum is here. (Recorded Oct. 29th, 2009)

New Media, New Networks Presented by Arts + Labs and GSPM's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet from GSPM on Vimeo.

REGISTER FOR THIS TECH POLICY FORUM HERE

Arts+Labs and GWU's Institute for Politics, Democracy & The Internet are proud to sponsor a network and technology policy forum, New Media, New Networks: The Evolution of Content on the Internet, moderated by former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley. It will be held at George Washington University on Thursday, October 29th from 9am to 12noon.

You can register for the event here.

Breakfast and Welcome (9:00-9:30)

Panel #1 - Networks for the Future (9:30-10:30) - The Importance of Wired and Wireless Next Generation Networks, deployment, capacity, interactivity, consumer choice and content.  Panelists:

• Bret Swanson (Entropy Economics, WSJ Contributor)
• S. Derek Turner (Research Director, Free Press)
• Robert Curtis (FCC Director, Network Deployment)
• Christopher Yoo (Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Law School)

Q&A Session (10:30-10:45)

Panel #2 - Network Management and Delivering for the Consumer (10:45-11:45) - The evolving role of the networks - better, smarter, faster. Panelists:

• Richard Bennett (Research Fellow, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation)
• Robb Topolski (Chief Technologist of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation)
• Dave Farber (Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at the School of Computer Science, Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University)
• Harold Feld (Legal Director of Public Knowledge)

Q&A Session (11:45 - 12:00)

The Cato Institute will continue its exploration of the vigorous debate about copyright and intellectual property at a book forum at 12 noon on Monday, November 10th, featuring Michele Boldrin (author of Against Intellectual Monopoly) and Rob Atkinson, Founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The event is free of charge and you're encouraged to attend or watch the event live online. Cato's Jim Harper has written about the event here. According to his blurb:

Michele Boldrin and his coauthor David K. Levine argue that intellectual property laws are costly and dangerous government grants of private monopoly over ideas. Their book Against Intellectual Monopoly seeks to show through theory and example that these legal regimes are not necessary for innovation and are damaging to growth, prosperity, and liberty.

As we said before, Arts+Labs falls on the side of those who believe that artists have a right to be compensated for their work. It is an important part of our mission "to ensure that artists and innovators can easily and effectively share their creativity through new distribution channels online, secure in the confidence that their rights will be respected and their ingenuity rewarded."

In testimony to the Senate Finance Committee earlier this year, Rob Atkinson pointed out the following:

As a net exporter of manufacturing know-how as intellectual property, the United States is more dependent on protection of intellectual property (IP) than other nations. Over 50 percent of U.S. exports depend on some form of IP protection, compared to less than 10 percent 50 years ago.

The ideas in Against Intellectual Monopoly pose an obvious challenge to this source of American economic strength. You can hear both sides at the Cato Institute Book Forum, noon on November 10th.

As our About page points out, Arts+Labs is "a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today's rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products and services to consumers."  A Presidential campaign is a perfect storm of conditions for the innovation and presentation of great content and valuable content delivery efforts.  

Ustream.tv is providing some of that tonight, with election night coverage on a variety of channels - both viewable at UStream and embeddable at your site.  According to Ustream.tv, they're featuring the following channels tonight...

• Rock the Vote - Rock the Vote and Warner Brothers is partnering with Ustream to live stream its phone bank from New York all day on Monday and Tuesday. 
  
• ABC News - ABC News will be streaming all of their live election coverage on Ustream.
• PressPassTV - PressPassTV, a 4-time Emmy winning site, brings live interviews and chat with professional athletes from around the world on Election Day with Ustream.
  
• OneNewsNow.com - OneNewsNow.com will be doing live Christian Conservative election coverage from 6 p.m. to midnight Central Time on Election Day. Get a Christian world view of the election results. Live blog on onenewsnow.com, by SMS text, email or call OneNewsNow with comments.

At Broadband Census, Andrew Feinberg reports on the Chamber Intellectual Property Summit at which Mark McKinnon of Arts+Labs spoke.  The panelists, Feinberg writes, "spoke about the importance of preserving users' right to make "fair use" of copyrighted material", as well as "the importance of technological protection measures."   Some excerpts...

There is "no question" that old business models need to change in a networked world, said Rick Cotton, executive vice president and general counsel for NBC Universal. Embracing digital distribution will "drive the future," Cotton said. "It's what consumers want."

New content protection technology brings the promise of a "mature model" of internet distribution that avoids "the dark side" of peer-to-peer technology, said Cotton. The broadband ecosystem envisioned by Cotton would somehow tell people that they can access programming as they please, but also send a message that stealing is not acceptable. Such an ecosystem must be built cooperatively, balancing ease of access, consumer desires and a choice of ad-based or fee-based models.

[...]

Lane and McKinnon agreed that consumer convenience is paramount in any content protection scheme and should be "seamless," Lane said. McKinnon predicted that with the rise of broadband and good content protection, it would not be long before "DVD's are like 8-tracks."

Fair use is not incompatible with content protection, Lane said. Content protection technology is a "key component" of the future broadband economy, and mechanisms could be devised to protect fair use as well as copyrights. Lane cited News Corp.'s MySpace Music as an example. He said that MySpace had received "zero complaints" about its content protections restricting fair use.

Read the rest at Broadband Census.

We'll try to avoid turning this into an Event Notification blog, but another good event this week has popped onto our radar (and by "popped onto our radar", we mean "has invited Arts+Labs Co-Chairman Mark McKinnon to participate").   The US Chamber of Commerce is hosting the Fifth Annual Global Intellectual Property Summit Wednesday, October 8th.

We would particularly like to draw your attention to this panel, which features Arts+Labs Co-Chairman Mark McKinnon...

Frontiers of Innovation: Protecting IP in the Digital World

The digital world is emerging as the cornerstone for innovation, with new products, applications, and platforms being launched daily. This new frontier allows the business community endless opportunities to get consumers what they want, how they want it, almost instantaneously. At the same time, the Internet provides seemingly endless opportunities for bad actors to steal intellectual property and deceive, and sometimes harm, consumers. This panel will examine how innovation on the Internet can be fostered while protecting intellectual property more effectively.

Rick Cotton, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, NBC Universal
Susan Mann, Senior Director, Intellectual Property Policy, Microsoft
Rick Lane, Senior Vice President, Government Affairs, News Corp
Mark McKinnon, Co-Chairman, Arts+Labs

Moderated by: Robert Shapiro, Co-Founder and Chairman, Sonecon, LLC

More details about the 5th Annual Global Intellectual Property Center Summit are here, and the summit agenda is here.

The Cato Institute will be exploring the vigorous debate about copyright and intellectual property in a book forum at 12 noon on October 10th, featuring Robert Laughlin (author of The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind)  and Thomas Sydnor, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Property at the Progress & Freedom Foundation. The event is free of charge and you're encouraged to attend or watch the event live online.  Cato's Jim Harper has written about the event here and here.

Of course, Arts+Labs falls on the side of those who believe that artists have a right to be compensated for their work. It is an important part of our mission "to ensure that artists and innovators can easily and effectively share their creativity through new distribution channels online, secure in the confidence that their rights will be respected and their ingenuity rewarded."

With that in mind, I offer this, from Thomas Sydnor, on the importance of protecting the rights of the creators...

Property rights ensure that the relative value of these activities to others can be assessed and revised through a decentralized process of consensual agreements and mutually beneficial exchanges. Consequently, if one person makes the risky investments needed to create a socially valuable resource--like a sound recording--governments should not let others appropriate that resource for their own gain just by showing that the creator might also derive some incidental benefit.

You can hear both sides at the Cato Institute Book Forum at noon on October 10th.