Rosenfeld, Meyer & Susman. He moved on to legal and business affairs for Orion Pictures and Warner Bros., before moving to the Seattle area in 1993. Prior to running for Congress in 2004, Alben served as General Counsel and V.P. Business Affairs for Starwave Corporation and head of government affairs for RealNetworks. At Starwave, Alben worked on pioneering CD-ROM products and helped launch popular web sites such as ABCNews.com and ESPN.com. As a RealNetworks Vice President, Alben worked on the "RealJukebox" music management project, which contributed to the proliferation of MP3 music files, both legally and illegally disseminated across the Internet. On behalf of the technology industry, Alben testified before the U.S. Copyright Office, Senate Judiciary Committee and House Commerce Committee on the digital distribution of music and the importance of creating authorized channels for the distribution of Internet Radio and music downloads. In testimony before the Senate in 2002 as Vice President of public policy for RealNetworks, Alben predicted that web video was evolving so rapidly that one day all television programs would be found on the Internet. Along with record label and high tech executives, he participated in the founding of the Secure Digital Music Initiative and the Digital Media Association. Alben's work as an entertainment attorney and as counsel for Starwave are explored in the book, "Free Culture," by Lawrence Lessig, Penguin Press, 2004, which describes Starwave's efforts to license digital rights for products such as a CD-ROM based on the film career of Clint Eastwood. Alben is the author of a comedy-spy novel, Our Man in Mongoa, published by Charles Scribner%27s Sons. Regarding Our Man in Mongoa, Publishers Weekly wrote: "Alben writes smoothly, with terrific pace and even better humor, which, deliciously deadpan, skewers even moving targets." From 2005 to 2013, he has written opinion pieces about politics and media for The New York Times, Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His initial editorial about his experience running for Congress, "Real Candidates Have Curves," appeared in The New York Times, Opinion, September 27, 2004. Since 2009, he has written a guest editorial column on media, technology and politics for "The Seattle Times." Alben's book, "Analog Days-- How Technology Rewrote Our Future" was published in 2012. Stanford Law Professor Paul Goldstein commented: "In his new book, Alex Alben provides a first-person account of working at two of the pioneer companies that laid the groundwork for the modern web.