Policy Advocacy

This Giving Tuesday, December 1, New Media Rights will be running a one-day, 24-hour fundraiser where your donations will be matched dollar for dollar up to $40,000! We need your support more than ever this year. Please pledge an amount to support@newmediarights now, and then donate on December 1 help us leverage our biggest match opportunity ever!

We’ll also be competing with all of the other wonderful programs at California Western School of Law for that $40,000 match on a first come, first matched basis. In order to maximize your impact we are asking donors to give as close as possible to 12:01am PST on December 1st! As an added bonus the first person to donate on December 1st will get a video thank you from the NMR Team!

Need a reminder? Send the dollar amount you would like to pledge to support@newmediarights.org by Monday November 23 and we'll send you a reminder email at 12:01AM on Giving Tuesday! Even if you're not a night owl, your early bird donations can have a huge impact!

Every three years the Copyright Office meets to reconsider exemptions to the DMCA Anti-Circumvention provisions. These exemptions are critical to ensuring creators and consumers’ ability to bypass technological protection measures on copyrighted works, allowing them to make fair use of works in a variety of circumstances.  As we did in 2012, New Media Rights submitted extensive comments and testimony, working on behalf of creators and consumers to maintain and expand on the exemptions currently in place.

On October 27, the Copyright Office revealed the results of their 2015 Anti-Circumvention Rulemaking. Many of our recommendations were adopted, and we were cited repeatedly in the rulemaking.

This is usually the part where we say we’re proud to have been a part of making sure these vital exemptions were granted and expanded.  We are proud of our contributions and we’ll highlight those below, but we also need to take amount to keep it real.  The DMCA Anti-circumvention rulemaking is broken.

This October Art Neill and Teri Karobonik delivered a talk entitled “Office of the Fair Use Wizard: Creators, Technology and Fair Use in the Digital Age” as part of The Center for Intellectual Property at Whittier Law School’s Fall Colloquium and Distinguished Speaker Series. The lecture covered the basics of copyright and fair use as well as covering some of the emerging fair use issues of the digital age.

Video of the talk will be posted here as soon as it becomes available.

The first annual TwitchCon was held this September in San Francisco.  New Media Rights rounded up some of our favorite video game fans for an awesome panel called “Can We Just Play? The Legality of Let's Play Video and Streams.” The panel addressed the basics of copyright and trademark law that Twitch Streamers and Video Creators need to know to keep their videos and streams up. Our thanks go out to our awesome panelists (listed left to right) Angelo Alcid, Art Neill, Jonathan McIntosh and Teri Karobonik.

Missed out on TwitchCon this year? No worries!  Check out the archive of our panel after the jump!

New Media Rights Executive Director Art Neill recently sat down with San Diego's KPBS to discuss new privacy laws signed by Governor Jerry Brown in California.  The video interview is below, and here's a link to the longer form radio interview.  

This week New Media Rights joined with the Nameless Coalition as part of a broad global alliance of over 60 human rights, digital rights, LGBTQ, and women’s rights advocates to send an open letter (full text below) to Facebook asking them to rethink their authentic names policy.

Imagine a world where you didn’t need a central bank to transfer money at a hefty markup. Enter Bitcoin, a new digital currency disrupting the banking industry.  Before he came to law school, New Media Rights Intern Emory Roane actively worked with this disruptive technology as a Bitcoin miner. Miners help to verify financial transactions in a giant public ledger. Recently Emory was asked to share his knowledge of Bitcoin on a panel called “Can Bitcoin Pay for the Internet of Things”; alongside Bitcoin and cyber security experts Bill Bonney, Justine Phillips, Paul Puey and Paul Boulanger. 

New Media Rights is excited to announce that Executive Director Art Neill will be speaking at The City of San Diego Small Business Advisory Board’s Annual Community Outreach Meeting.  Art will be joining a panel of legal and marketing experts to talk about "Strategies to Promote & Protect Your Business"The meeting will also feature a panel about what small businesses can learn from startups and a keynote from Steven Cox, CEO of TakeLessons.com.

The meeting will take place Friday, October 16, 2015 from 8:30 a.m. - 11:15 a.m in the Downtown Central Library’s Shiley Special Events Suite. The event is free but the Business Advisory Board requests that you RSVP in advance. For more information about the event and to RSVP, check out their Eventbrite page here.

New Media Rights would also like to thank City of San Diego Economic Development Department for their continued financial support of New Media Rights.