Here’s the first reporting I’ve seen on Title III of the Senate immigration bill. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carolyn Lochhead writes:
A government that cannot issue passports to 3 million U.S. citizens in time for summer holidays is expected to create a vast work-authorization system for more than 7 million U.S. employers and eventually all 146 million U.S. workers that is quick, accurate and safe.
Up to now, there has been almost no public discussion, much less analysis, of this part of the Senate bill, though the House Immigration Subcommittee held a hearing on issues in electronic employment elgibility verification in April. There, I testified on the privacy and civil liberties concerns with such a system. Even yesterday, though, Senator Ted Kennedy appearing on Fox News Sunday touted the strong employment eligibility verification system in the Senate bill.
Broad immigration reform is needed, especially with increased legal avenues for immigration, but electronic employment eligibility verification will fail. The only question is how much damage will be done to law-abiding Americans’ privacy in the process.
This month, as part of “National Internet Safety Month,” I have been posting a series of essays about how parents can deal with potentially objectionable online content or contacts. In my new book, Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods, I argue that the best way to deal with concerns about online child safety is through a “3-E Solution,” which stands for “education, empowerment, and enforcement.” The empowerment and education components have already been discussed extensively in previous installments in this series. (See parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8).
But, to reiterate, it is essential that parents take steps to mentor and monitor their children as they enter the world of cyberspace. And industry should empower parents with more and better tools to help them do that job. But the tools discussed throughout my book provide a great deal of assistance already.
As essay #7 in this series made clear, education is even more important. “You need to take a holistic approach” to such problems, notes Ron Teixeira, executive director of the National Cyber Security Center.” Teixeira argues that it is essential that we drill basic lessons into our children–the digital equivalent of “don’t take candy from strangers,” for example–to ensure that they are prepared for whatever technologies or platforms follow social networking sites. “Education is the way you teach children to be proactive, and that will stay with them forever,” he rightly concludes. As Parry Aftab of Wired Safety argues, it’s about teaching our kids to “use the filter between their ears” and “make responsible decisions about their use of technology.” Critical thinking, in other words, is the best form of self-protection.
As will be discussed next, the final “E” in the 3-E Solution is enforcement, as in stepped up law enforcement efforts to find and adequately prosecute child predators.
But Warner/Chappel Music Inc. of Los Angeles said the video infringes on its copyright to “We Are the World.” The song raised money for famine relief the video featured some of U.S. music’s biggest stars, including Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen.
“According to our records, no request has been made to use the Composition, no authorization has been granted nor has any license been issued for the use of the Composition on the website,” Kelly Isenberg, the company’s director of legal and business affairs wrote in a May 8 letter to the church.
Inasmuch as any use of “We Are the World” constitutes a parody and other fair use; given the parodic purpose and character of “God Hates the World;” its transformative elements; the complete lack of any commercial use; and the complete lack of any market substitution or confusion; your demands are respectfully denied. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. “God Hates the World” is clearly a parody of “We Are the World,” targeting that work with criticism and commentary, including commentary with critical bearing on the substance, style, nature, approach, marketing-of-an-idea-purpose, and various other aspects of the original work, in many particulars. The nub of the parody is to mimic the worldwide unity the song purports to reflect and encourage, and criticize that unity as God-defying and the heart and soul of why God hates the world, in our view of the matter.
The guy has a point; fair use permits bigoted parodies as much as any other kind.
Over at the Google Public Policy Blog, there’s an interesting post about recent efforts by Google to lobby the State Department and USTR to treat censorship as a trade barrier. Andrew McLaughlin writes:
Just as the U.S. government has, in decades past, utilized its trade negotiation powers to advance the interests of other U.S. industries, we would like to see the federal government take to heart the interests of the information industries and treat the elimination of unwarranted censorship as a central objective of our bilateral and multilateral trade agendas in the years to come.
But my hope is that the U.S. government can begin to move – incrementally, agreement-by-agreement, over the coming decade and beyond – to include in our bilateral and, eventually, multilateral trade agreements the notion that trade in information services should presumptively be free, absent some good reason to the contrary.
I can see how censorship hurts U.S. IT companies, especially if entire sites like YouTube are blocked when governments object to some user-generated content. But good luck to our trade negotiators in getting China or other repressive governments to loosen their grip over information!
Identity card producer Digimarc has hired Janice Kephart to lobby for the REAL ID Act. That doesn’t surprise me. Indeed, I assumed she was working for them.
Kephart has worked to cash in on her service to the 9/11 Commission by opening a boutique ‘security’ lobbying firm. In my testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, I characterized her as part of the “do-overs” school of REAL ID advocacy. ‘If we could just do 9/11 again, maybe someone would have gotten suspicious and stopped the attack.’
Worried about national security? Immigration control? Identity fraud? No, the governor is working to help an in-state company feed from the federal trough.
I am testifying today at 10:00 in the House Energy & Commerce Committee (Telecom & Internet subcommittee) at a hearing on “The Images Kids See on the Screen.” The purpose of the hearing is to examine the negative things that children may be exposed to on various screens (TV violence, product placement, fatty foods, smoking, etc.) and what should be done about it. My prepared remarks are attached below.
______________________________
Testimony of Adam D. Thierer
Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom
The Progress & Freedom Foundation
June 22, 2007
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me here today and giving me the opportunity to testify. My name is Adam Thierer and I am a senior fellow with the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) where I serve as director of PFF’s Center for Digital Media Freedom.
This hearing is particularly timely for me because this week PFF released a new special report that I spent the last two years compiling entitled, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” The booklet provides a broad survey of everything on the market today that can help parents better manage media content, whether it be broadcast television, cable or satellite TV, music devices, mobile phones, video game consoles, the Internet, or social networking websites. (Incidentally, this booklet can be downloaded free-of-charge at www.pff.org/parentalcontrols, and I plan on making frequent updates to the report and re-posting the document online as new information comes to my attention).
As I note in my book, we live in an “always-on,” interactive, multimedia world. Parents need to be prepared to deal with media on multiple platforms, screens, and devices. While this can be a formidable challenge, luckily, there has never been a time when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them determine and enforce what is acceptable in their homes and in the lives of their children. And that conclusion is equally applicable to all major media platforms, or all the screens our children might view.
Slashdot has a story about how the ESRB has given Manhunt 2 an AO rating, which means that they won’t be allowed to release it for the major console platforms.
A Slashdot reader asks why they couldn’t just release the game without Nintendo, Sony, and Microsofts’ permission. After all, the Accolade decision held that reverse-engineering a video game console to produce compatible games was fair use under copyright law. So in the 1990s, competitors had the option of producing games for a console without the console manufacturer’s permission.
But this comment puts his finger on what has changed:
Legally they can’t stop you. You’re welcome to release your game. The trick is, it will only run on modded hardware, same as any other homebrew game. They’re not preventing you from *releasing* it, it just won’t run on most hardware without the magical cryptographic signature that licensed games get.
So, they can’t sue you to stop you from releasing it. But they don’t need to, because it won’t work anyway. And if you manage to break the cryptographic signature and release it in a manner that actually works, well, that’s where the DMCA comes into play. Nintendo/Sony/et al. have all their bases covered.
It’s a basic tenet of libertarian theory that limitations on speech by private party isn’t censorship; the Wall Street Journal isn’t censoring me by refusing to run my letter to the editor. But I think it becomes less clear-cut if the law gives a company the legal power to prohibit consumers from playing the games of their choice on a console even after they purchased it. That’s obviously not at problematic as having a government agency make the decision for all consoles simultaneously. But if we’re concerned with liberty, I think we should be trying to maximize consumers freedom to do as they please with their lawfully acquired property in the privacy of their own homes. Reverse-engineering can be an important safety valve for free speech if the companies that control our media devices impose too many unreasonable restrictions. Nintendo should never be forced to sell, support, or endorse any video game. But if consumers want to go to the trouble of acquiring a game without Nintendo’s help or approval, I don’t see what possible rationale there is for the law to stand in his way.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, Hance Haney of the Discovery Institute, and Cord Blomquist of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Topics include,
Adam Thierer releases a new book on parental controls,
Congress debates an immigration proposal that would require a beefed up national ID system, and
Google beefs up its presence in Washington, DC.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
According to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), constructive patent reform would “reduce the unnecessary burdens of litigation” in the patent system and “enhance the quality of patents” granted by the Patent and Trademark Office. Better patent quality ought to be the focus of discussion, because only bad patents lead to unnecessary litigation. Most people would agree courts ought to vigorously enforce good patents. The Leahy-Hatch/Berman-Smith Patent Reform Act of 2007 (S. 1145 and H.R. 1908) fails to reflect this basic point. The bills misguidedly treat the goals of improving patent quality and reducing litigation as mutually exclusive goals to some extent. The result will be to reduce protection for all patents, not just the bad ones.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.