A Conversation about Digital Media and Digital Rights with Professor Russell Rains
Russell Rains
Russell Rains is an entertainment lawyer based in Austin, Texas who specializes in trademark and copyright law, especially as applies to digital and emerging media. He is currently serving as Director of the new MBA in Digital Media Management Program at St. Edward’s College in Austin, and is the former head of the Entertainment and Sports Law Section of the State Bar of Texas.
Russell Rains, a lawyer and Director of the Digital Media Management MBA Program at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX, discusses the program he runs and discusses the challenges involved with combining a traditional MBA with a thorough grounding in new media, and delivering all this to a pool of students who are not traditional MBA candidates. He also engages in an extended explanation of how copyright in the USA evolved to where it is today – from the copyright clauses in the Constitution and the roots of the modern music industry in the 1909 Copyright Act to what terms like “fair use” and “compulsory license” actually mean, and whether copy protection technologies, legislation like the DMCA and regulatory bodies like Sound Exchange do more to help or hurt the overarching goals of American copyright law as enshrined in the Constitution.
