Interview with Founder & CEO, Robert Warren

Five arts groups that are as creative in the rehearsal room as the board room 2017 Arts Entrepreneurship Awards Honorees: The Black List, Hire Notes, Gigsy, Southern Theater, Opera Vireo This past year saw new paradigms for defining entrepreneurship in the arts and culture sector, and we had an amazing group of nominees. We are excited to honor these five organizations whose experimentation and innovation in the field truly stood out. Whether its elevating Hollywood’s unproduced hidden gems, helping musicians get booked and get paid, solving New Orleans’s digital media needs by training the next generation of media artists, bringing the content bundling model to the performing arts, or creating an new genre of opera by embracing online television… these organizations are each in their own way using cutting edge solutions to deliver their messages.

2017 Arts Entrepreneurs Awards — Honorable Mentions: Inclusive Fashion + Design Collective, Jukely, Mosaic America, Sofar Sounds, and Theater of Public Policy This year, the nominations for the 2017 Arts Entrepreneurship Awards were chock full of amazing and entrepreneurial arts projects. While we forced ourselves to name just five honorees, we also wanted to tip our collective hat to these awesome creative projects that impressed us with their ingenuity, drive, and business savvy.

Clockwise from top left: Sarah Carson, Sriram Emani, Erica Taylor, Jess Peterson. Event featured Adam Huttler and Courtney Duffy as panelist and moderator, respectively by Courtney Duffy, Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow at Fractured Atlas What better day than February 14 to celebrate our love for creative entrepreneurship? Last Tuesday, Adam Huttler and I joined four arts entrepreneurs for a Capitol Hill panel hosted in conjunction with the Congressional Arts Caucus, and in collaboration with Public Knowledge. In addition to Adam, our talented panel consisted of the following entrepreneurs:

Source: keepwatchstayfree.org Lessons from the SOPA/PIPA Battle Are Relevant As Ever by Courtney Duffy, Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow at Fractured Atlas On Wednesday, January 18, 2012, major Internet websites united to protest censorship and defeat SOPA/PIPA. Five years later, it’s as important as ever that we — both the arts community and the Internet community at large — rededicate ourselves to the principles of Internet freedom. Join the conversation on Twitter by using hashtags #InternetFreedomDay, #SOPA, and #PIPA. Remind me exactly what happened. Five years ago last week, more than 50,000 websites made their homepages dark, uniting to protest both censorship and threats to Internet freedom posed by two bills in Congress: the House version, the Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”), and the Senate’s Protect IP Act (“PIPA”). Participating websites included such recognizable names as Google, Amazon, Reddit, Craigslist, Wikipedia, and more. The move made Congress take notice, resulting in the failure of both bills. What was wrong with SOPA and PIPA? While the bills claimed to protect copyrighted works from piracy, their enforcement mechanisms would have had a dangerous effect on the Internet power balance, promoting censorship. The proposal was essentially a “guilty until proven innocent” model — it would have been easy, for example, for an organization to claim copyright infringement against a competitor in order to shut down the competitor’s website. Even if the accused party was innocent, they would need to pay expensive legal fees to defend themselves. It’s important for us to note that we at Fractured Atlas believe wholeheartedly in copyright law, as well as the importance of artists being fairly compensated for their work. We simply felt strongly (and still do) that the solutions proposed in SOPA and PIPA were tremendously flawed and posed dangers to the constituency of artists that we serve. Did Fractured Atlas speak out against SOPA and PIPA? We’re proud to say that we did — in fact, we were the first major national arts services organization to take a stand. Adam Huttler, our founder and CEO, urged in a letter to Senate leadership to consider other solutions and avoid passing PIPA. We were soon joined by a number of other arts organizations, who together signed onto a second letter to Senate leadership. The coalition consisted of friends like Dance/USA, OPERA America, Theatre Communications Group, and Chorus America, among others. Our efforts were part of a large coalition of Internet defenders, large and small, that spoke out against this harmful potential legislation. Has anything major happened in this space between then and now? In February 2015, the Federal Communications Commission adopted strong rules to protect net neutrality. This victory was largely a result of yet another large-scale advocacy effort that caught the attention of policymakers — 4 million people submitted official comments in support of strong open Internet rules. What does this mean to the arts and Internet communities today? As has historically been the case when the D.C. power balance shifts to a new party, the Trump administration and Congressional Republican majority will put forth their own broadband policies. There is a strong possibility of new FCC commissioners overturning the net neutrality rules, as well as other rulings made over the last several years that could resemble the frameworks of SOPA and PIPA. As artists and Internet users, we must actively keep ourselves informed about these developments, and vigilantly defend an Internet that allows for continued creativity and innovation on an even playing field. Where can I find more information? A new Medium post called “Keep Watch, Stay Free,” is chock full of additional resources. You can also check out this video about the blackout, along with articles from TechCrunch and BoingBoing. You can find Courtney on Twitter @cduffy90, and join the conversation by using hashtags #InternetFreedomDay, #SOPA, and #PIPA. Courtney Duffy is the Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy fellow at Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit technology company that helps artists with the business aspects of their work. To learn more about Fractured Atlas, or to get involved, visit us here.

by Aisha Jordan, Program Associate at Fractured Atlas Each month we feature one of our fiscally sponsored projects who have been successful at using our program to advance their art/cause/career. This month’s featured project is Doppelgänger Dance Collective

At the conclusion of 2015, you met several of our staff through our Cool Beans: 12 Days of Coffee series, a celebration of our favorite buzzy beverages. And at the end of 2014, we shared plenty of staff quirkiness with our 12 Days of Cocktails series. (The Vine videos still crack us up.)

Fractured Atlas empowers artists to be entrepreneurs by removing practical barriers to creative expression. As a nonprofit technology organization, we take this entrepreneurial spirit to heart as we create novel and innovative solutions for age-old problems.

by Ian David Moss, Vice President, Strategy & Analytics at Fractured Atlas From Flickr user Ian Brown: “The Twitter logo mod is from graffiti seen on a wall during [the 2013 Gezi Park] protests in Turkey.” Last month, the cast of Broadway’s most popular show made a political statement from the stage…and the President-elect of the United States of America demanded, via tweet, that they apologize for it.

Image: “Gogbot,” Installation at the Gogbot Media Art Festival in Enschede. By Flickr user Ineke Happy holiday season! The Fractured Atlas and Createquity teams are back with another installment of the Createquity podcast, this time highlighting different perspectives on how to approach the issue of cultural equity.