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Copyright Expert Starts Lobbying Shop
by Sarah Lai Stirland
Alec French is leaving the House Judiciary Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee to start his own lobbying shop, J.A. French Associates.
French served as minority counsel to subcommittee ranking Democrat Howard Berman of California for five years. French's last day will be March 1.
As the subcommittee's minority counsel, he worked on shepherding changes to copyright law in the digital world through the center of the political maelstrom on Capitol Hill. He worked on many key pieces of legislation that determine the way copyright holders are paid in the digital world, as well as on patent legislation.
Among other measures, he worked on a bill the president signed into law last year that reforms the process for adjudicating royalty rates for compulsory licenses; on royalty-collection processes for copyright holders from satellite television companies; and on changes to the way cooperative research ventures are awarded patents.
French's first lobbying client is the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA). He expects to represent NMPA in industry negotiations over the complex issue of compulsory licensing of musical works in the digital world.
Before working on the Judiciary subcommittee, French was legislative counsel and director of congressional relations for the Interactive Digital Software Association. During that time, he participated in negotiations over a digital-era copyright law that Congress enacted in 1998 that for the first time criminalized both the act of breaking through encrypted barriers to digital content and the trafficking of tools to pick such digital locks.
He also has been an advocate in the debate over creators' rights in the digital age. For example, many public-interest advocates and librarians are concerned that the push to exert more control over digital copyrighted works could eliminate the concept of "fair use" in copyright law. But French argues that in the digital world, consumers should not expect that buying a movie or other copyrighted work allows them to manipulate the media however they want. Rather, he said they are merely paying for a limited right to use the media in the format it is sold.
Asked whether he foresaw the issue of digital copyrights becoming a sparkplug for passionate debates among consumers, he said: "I thought it was kind of an arcane legal specialty. Certainly when you talk to authors and musicians they are passionate about it, but did I know that it would become this populist, front-page issue? No."
Sounding Off For SoundExchange
The nonprofit performance-rights organization SoundExchange last week named Gary Greenstein as its first general counsel. Greenstein previously worked for just over four years as vice president of business and legal affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
At RIAA, he worked on statutory licensing issues for the recording industry. For example, he represented recording labels in the first copyright arbitration royalty proceeding over webcasting and participated in voluntary negotiations with Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio. He also participated in negotiations over a 2002 law that established the rules on how royalties should be collected from small webcasters, entities that stream music over the Internet.
SoundExchange was part of the RIAA until September 2003, when it became an independent body now controlled by both artists and recording labels through an 18-member board. The board is composed of nine artist representatives and nine labels and their representatives.
As general counsel, Greenstein's job responsibilities will expand to cover everything from working on the group's administrative issues, such as the group's tax-exempt status, to software-licensing agreements and upcoming copyright arbitration proceedings. He also will work to expand SoundExchange's role internationally and to more vigorously enforce royalty agreements.
Asked whether he gets to attend many free rock concerts as a representative of the music industry, Greenstein said he does most of his rocking at home when he plays Bob Marley for his 16-month-old twin daughters.
Free Software Foundations Taps Leader
On the other end of the intellectual property spectrum, the Free Software Foundation in Boston last week made Peter Brown its executive director.
Brown was previously the foundation's manager of the general public license (GPL) compliance lab. The lab investigates potential violations of the GPL, a license created by foundation founder Richard Stallman to keep any changes made to the source code of the GNU operating system freely redistributable, and free to copy, use and further modify as long as the modifications are passed on.
Brown succeeds Bradley Kuhn, who recently left the foundation to become the chief technology officer for the new and affiliated nonprofit group the Software Freedom Law Center. Brown has worked for the foundation since 2001, when he moved to the United States from the United Kingdom with his wife, who had landed a job at Harvard University's Partners Healthcare Center for Genetics and Genomics.
A major project this year for Brown, the foundation and Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor who sits on the foundation's board and who is also chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, will be work on updating the GPL. Brown said the licenses need to be updated to reflect the needs of the wider community using them.
Staff Changes At Technology Daily
National Journal's Technology Daily has its own People news. Randy Barrett has joined the publication from Warren Communications News' Washington Internet Daily. He will cover the lobbying scene, science policy issues and Internet governance and will write the People Column.
Barrett has written about the intersection of business, technology and policy for 16 years. He was a news editor for Ziff Davis' Interactive Week. Before that, he wrote for Post-Newsweek Media's Washington Technology. His freelance stories have appeared in Baseline, Business Week Small Biz, CIO Insight, Communications Daily, Space News, Virginia Business and Working Woman.
As a journalist, one of Barrett's main writing obsessions is clarity. "I had a crusty editor once who often grumbled: 'If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.' Somewhere along the way, that became my mantra and a lifelong pursuit," he said.
Barrett is a bluegrass musician, songwriter and recipient of five Washington Area Music Awards.
Technology Daily also has promoted two of its staff writers, Chloe Albanesius and Danielle Belopotosky, to the position of reporter.
Albanesius joined Technology Daily in 2002, working for the AM edition part time for a year. She started full time in June 2003. She covers technology policy in the states. Before joining Technology Daily, she held internships at Congressional Quarterly, Meet the Press, Roll Call and Washingtonpost.com.
Belopotosky started work at Technology Daily last July and covers education, health, labor and e-commerce issues. Between 1998 and 2002, she covered the technology industry as a researcher and reporting assistant at The Wall Street Journal before attending graduate school for journalism at Columbia University. She also was a freelance reporter for Conferenza.com, a news service that reports stories from high-technology conferences, and a researcher for a documentary film, Nazim Hikmet: On Living.
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