Doug Lichtman has released a new podcast in his IP Colloquium series. The details:

Title: Can Content Survive Online?

Guests: Brad Smith (General Counsel, Microsoft); Scott Martin (Executive Vice President, Paramount Pictures); Dan Cooper (Vice President of Business & Legal Affairs, MySpace).

Description: The music, publishing and motion picture industries are each today struggling to identify new business models that might replace existing mechanisms for funding professional content. In this edition of the Intellectual Property Colloquium, we consider the legal and strategic roadblocks that might be standing in the way. Guests include: Brad Smith, General Counsel, Microsoft; Scott Martin, Executive Vice President, Intellectual Property, Paramount Pictures; and Dan Cooper, Vice President, Legal & Business Affairs, MySpace. UCLA law professor Doug Lichtman hosts.

O‘Melveny and Myers attorneys Christopher Murray and Paul Iannicelli have posted an article at Mondaq and their firm’s website on how the Copyright Act’s termination provisions may impact I.P. transactions. A snipit:

Although [Sections 203 and 304 of the]  Copyright Act seem reasonably clear on their face, it is often the case that in actual application they can become quite complicated. As the judge in the Siegel case noted, “The 1976 Copyright Act contains many intricate formalities that an author (or his or her heirs) must navigate to successfully terminate” a grant. As one example, both Sections 203 and 304 provide that a grant can be terminated when the statutory right ripens “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary,” in order to prevent an unsuspecting author, or one with little leverage, from waiving the right at the time of the grant or before its value can accurately be measured. But what if the author or his heirs have subsequently entered into an agreement with the grantee after the work has been exploited, in a manner that takes into account the demonstrated value of the work? Should those be considered “agreements to the contrary” that have no bearing on the validity of the termination right? Or should they be upheld as waiving the termination right, on the basis that they have effectively fulfilled the public policy of providing the author or his heirs the chance to re-negotiate from a position of knowledge and possibly strength?

Robin S. Lee, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and Tim Wu, Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School have posted a new article at SSRN titled Subsidizing Creativity Through Network Design: Zero Pricing and Net Neutrality. The abstract:

Today, through historical practice, there exists a de facto ban on termination fees – also referred to as a “zero-price” rule (Hemphill, 2008) – which forbids an Internet service provider from charging an additional fee to a content provider who wishes to reach that ISP’s customers. The question is whether this zero-pricing structure should be preserved, or whether carriers should be allowed to charge termination fees and engage in other practices that have the effect of requiring payment to reach users. This paper begins with a defense of the de facto zero-price rule currently in existence. We point out that the Internet, as an intermediary between users and content providers, exhibits pricing dynamics similar to other intermediaries in “two-sided markets.” In particular, we posit that the Internet’s absence of payments from content creators to users’ ISPs facilitates the entry of content creators. In that respect, the rule provides an alternative implementation of the policy goals provided by the intellectual property system and achieves functions similar to copyright and patent law. The rule also helps avoid the problems of Internet fragmentation, in which content providers who do not reach agreements with ISPs cannot access all customers, and consumers on a single ISP are foreclosed from processing their content.