HHR New Media, Entertainment and Technology Group

DigitalHHR’s Wayne Josel will be moderating a panel at the upcoming Digital Hollywood New York conference.  Entitled “Cloud Media & the Connected PC-TV-Mobile Universe: The New Face of the Digital Consumer”, the panel will feature top executives from Verizon, HP, ActiveVideo Networks, Thwapr and IBB Consulting in a discussion on new initiatives to deliver content to consumers from the cloud. 

Digital Hollywood New York, being held from November 10 through 12, is the East Coast version of one of the leading conferences focusing on the convergence of entertainment and technology, bringing together leaders in the film, television, music, home video, cable, telecommunications and computer industries.  This year’s conference theme is “Media Disruption: TV, Film & Video, Magazines, News, Books, Games, Commerce & Advertising”.  Registration information is available here.

Next week, Matthew Syrkin will present a panel on music licensing and related copyright issues to the Copyright Society of the U.S.A.  The panel, entitled “Beg, Borrow or Steal – Exploring Practical Solutions to the Music Sampling Debate” will take place on Monday, Oct. 18 at noon at the Princeton Club in Midtown.  Panelists will address the rise in popularity of music sampling in popular music and explore the complex licensing and clearance issues implicated through the practice.  These issues include new business models, such as sample clearing houses and statutory fees.  The panel will include music industry litigators, in-house counsel from Warner Bros. Records, the founder of Public Enemy (the famous rap group), and an NYU Professor of Musicology.

For more information regarding the panel, please click here.

Recent activities out of Washington have again turned the spotlight on the complexity of protecting privacy in an era of targeted advertising and what role, if any, the federal government might take to implement regulations on the collection and use of data related to consumers’ digital habits.

This week the chair of the House Caucus on Privacy, Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, criticized responses received by the Caucus from several large Web publishers admitting that keeping track of data collection on their sites is technically difficult, if not impossible.  Markey said that while the publishers detail their own privacy policies and opt-out procedures, these are often too complicated for the average consumer to follow.  He also pointed out that a single website may have dozens of firms collecting data through ads on the site and consumers would need to consult the policies of each of those firms to determine precisely what information was being collected and how it was being used.  (We recently wrote about this issue in a previous Digitalhhr post in connection with location-based advertising and Apple’s iPhone app policy.)  Continue Reading »