Happy New Year! Grab the coffee!

Recent posts from The Trichordist:
* First USC-Annenberg Brand Supported Piracy Report and Google Response
* Trojan Horse: Orphan Works and the War on Authors by Brad Holland, Part 2
* Trojan Horse: Orphan Works and the War on Authors by Brad Holland, Part 3
* Trojan Horse: Orphan Works and the War on Authors by Brad Holland, Part 4
* What the FTC Should Know About Brand Sponsored Piracy and Google’s “Pinto Problem”

FROM AROUND THE WEB:

THE SMITHSONIAN :
* What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.)

“Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’

“And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES:
* Copyright Rules and the Art They Inspire

PITCHFORK:
* The Year in News 2012

THE REGISTER UK:
* The ‘Digital Economy’ in 2012: A big noisy hole where money should be

“Privacy and copyright are two things nobody cares about,” Mark Bide told us, “unless it’s their own privacy, and their own copyright.” How true.”

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES:
* Report links Google, Yahoo to Internet piracy sites

COPYRIGHT ALLIANCE:
* Instagram Still Has the Right to Commercialize Your Work (or Why You Should Read Terms of Service Carefully)

CNET:
* Google, Yahoo accused of funding piracy

TECHCRUNCH:
* Keen On… Piracy: How Online Ad Networks Are Supporting The Major Pirate Movie And Music Sites [TCTV]

Annenberg’s Advertising Transparency Report should be seen as a wake-up call to brands to invest their advertising dollars in legal networks like Spotify or YouTube rather than pirate sites. Pretty simple, eh? Let’s hope that Madison Avenue wakes up to the troubling implications of Taplin’s report and shifts all its online advertising dollars to movie and music sites which actually pay artists for their content.

VOX INDIE:
* More Evidence Ad Dollars Fuel Web Piracy

HUFFINGTON POST:
* Towards a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers

THE MUSICAL DISCONNECT:
* The Takedown-Why the DMCA has failed

AD LAND:
* David Lowery makes list of people who changed the music industry.
* Collateral Damage: How Free Culture destroys advertising.

STOP FILE LOCKERS:
* Crocko.com lose Paypal. Resellers to follow.
* UltraMegaBit: A Crime Committed on American Soil
* Avangate forced to drop file sharing sites. More sites poised to lose Avangate payment processing.

DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
* Abject Looting Continues at Pandora…
* In France, 92% of Pirates Never Receive a Second Warning Letter…
* Growth of Paid Downloads vs. Streaming, 2012 vs. 2011…

TORRENT FREAK:
* Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2013
* Music Biz Wants To Block Pirate Bay….Plus 260 Additional Sites
* IMAGiNE BitTorrent Group Leader Sentenced To Five Years in Prison
* Identifying Pirates Now Easier Following Swedish Supreme Court Decisions

COPYHYPE:
* A look ahead to 2013

BARRY SOOKMAN:
* Most popular intellectual property and technology law blogs