WASHINGTON, March 7, 2007 – The country’s two satellite television companies have joined forces with four major technology companies and a wireless company to promote the auction of frequencies currently used by television broadcasters.
In a March 5 meeting at the Federal Communications Commission with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, the tech companies – Google, Intel, Skype and Yahoo! – joined with Access Spectrum to promote their “Coalition for 4G in America.”
The engagement of Internet giants like Google and Yahoo!, which traditionally have not lobbied the FCC, suggests considerable interest by the technology industry in the upcoming auction, which is set to begin no later than January 28, 2008. In 2006, Congress fixed February 19, 2009, as the end-date for analog television, freeing a wide swath of radio-frequencies for use by new technologies.
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Last Friday, France’s Constitutional Court approved a law cracking down on violence — well, at least documenting it. According to IDG News Service, the new law “criminalized the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists.”
The law was — apparently — spurred by disturbing stories of people being assaulted randomly solely for the purpose of recording it for entertainment value (a practice known as “happy slapping.”) But the legislation’s reach goes far beyond that — broadly criminalizing the filming of violence by eyewitnesses.
In an unfortunate irony, the decision approving the law was published on the anniversary of the amateur videotaping of the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers in 1991. Unless the cameraman were a professional journalist, such recording would now be illegal in the French Republic. The penalty, according to IDG: up to five years in prison, “potentially a harsher sentence than that for the committing the violent act” itself.
It gets worse. Since professional journalists are exempted from the ban, the government has “proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules.”
No word yet on the criteria to be used to get France’s approval to report news.
(Thanks to Declan McCullough for the heads up on this.)
It was a symphony of togetherness at a recent ICANN symposium at the University of the Pacific School of Law. One presenter titled his paper on Internet governance after the Beatles song "We Can Work It Out." And when commenting on a paper about "enhanced cooperation," I paraphrased the Stephen Stills song – if you can’t be with the ICANN you love, then love the ICANN you’re with. And most agreed. The takeaway from the conference was that we should work within ICANN’s current institutional
framework for better management of the domain name system (DNS), but at the same time ensure that the U.S. (or any) government treat ICANN as an
independent, private-sector entity.
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My friend Seba, who DJs around here in D.C. from time to time, had some interesting insights on the music scene, and the relationship between copyright and new music, which I brought up in my recent “Amen Brother” post:
You know, I was thinking more about this and I’m not sure it’s totally correct to say the current legal framework for IP as it applies to sampling stifles creativity. I am in total agreement that it’s overly restrictive . . . and, as that YouTube vid pointed out, it’s kind of ass-backwards: How does a series of seminal beats that were so widely sampled — and thus arguably in the public domain — become the intellectual property of a company that creates beats for musicians to use in new works?
What I want to say is that this legal framework creates a barrier, but not at the level of creativity. Rather, the barrier exists at the level of commercial release. Here’s an example:
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Arguing in favor of telecom regulation, some people say that telephone networks are owned by the public, which was forced to pay for them as captive ratepayers. The upshot is that telecom firms therefore shouldn’t be able to restrict competitors from using their wires.
As my colleague and co-blogger James Gattuso has explained in some detail, this historical analysis is deeply flawed. Today’s networks are “overwhelmingly the product of recent private investment,” concludes Gattuso.
But for those seeking more proof that private investment in building network capacity continues to be robust, today’s Wall Street Journal covers Verizon’s hugely expensive effort to bring super-high-bandwidth fiber into the home.
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Today’s Wall Street Journal profiles ($) Free Press, a media activist group that opposes loosening ownership rules for broadcast stations. As the Journal reports, the group has been wildly successful in its drive to block further consolidation in local markets, organizing thousands to protest and contact the government.
Free Press’s stated concerns are “diversity of viewpoints and coverage of local issues.” But no surprise, there’s more than a bit of media elitism at work, too.
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My DRM piece was noted in a piece on fair use and DRM. I am among other things critiqued for referring to information as a “product” and the end user as a “consumer.” For Pete’s sake! The article adds some more substantive claims about fair use, which I’m happy to respond to. But before I get there, enough of the deconstruction already!
Quite a lot of energy is being expended in various circles thinking about what language is used to frame various debates in copyright. It’s not that the issue isn’t worth thinking about at all–language can be used in tricky ways and carelessly, so that the underlying concepts are obfuscated. But for the most part, if the concepts are the problem, fiddling with the language won’t fix it. Some people use the concepts of efficiency and marginal cost pricinghttp://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2006/08/the_marginal_co.html in ways
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There’s a whole genre of libertarian thought about things that can and can’t be property. Other people, for example.
Then we get to intellectual property arguments. Can ideas and images be property? Some say no, because it amounts to making a claim on a thought in someone else’s head. I don’t see why not, so long as the right is defined in such a way that one stays out of other’s heads, and focuses on their behavior (making copies for example).
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Despite our differences on many issues, David Isenberg was kind enought to invite me to address the “Freedom to Connect” conference this week. Luckily, David didn’t ask me to comment on Net neutrality, municipal networks, or anything like that or else it is likely I would have been drawn and quartered on the stage!
Instead, David asked me to give the audience an overview of some the things happening on the First Amendment front in Washington right now and focus on the prospects for data retention and age verification mandates in particular. I was about to write up my remarks from the event, but Susan Crawford of Cardozo Law School and Andrew Noyes of National Journal were there and did a much better job summarizing what I had to say, so check out their blog posts if you are interested.
Last week I was a guest on a Seattle radio station (KVI 570) program hosted by conservative talk show host Kirby Wilbur. He invited me on to talk about various First Amendment issues including efforts to regulate video games. Like many radio hosts I’ve dealt with in the past, he was very sympathetic to my free speech leanings. But Kirby Wilbur has another good reason to love the First Amendment: It’s the only thing he has to rely on in his fight against our nation’s absolutely absurd campaign finance laws.
Here’s Kirby’s story. Back in 2005, Mr. Wilbur and his KVI colleague John Carlson had the audacity to speak their minds about a ballot initiative pending in their home state of Washington. The ballot initiative was an effort to repeal the state’s recent gas tax increase. Proponents of the tax (mostly municipal government officials) were none too happy to hear people speaking their minds about the issue on a talk radio show. So, they decided to file a lawsuit demanding that the grassroots “No New Gas Tax” organization that had mobilized to fight the tax actually disclose the value of the hosts’ radio advocacy as an “in-kind campaign contribution”! And, amazingly, they got a judge to agree with them!!
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.