My friend Constantino Diaz-Duran has a great op-ed in the New York Post about the Egyptian blogger free speech case:
Egyptian authorities see blogging as so dangerous that they’ve kept Soliman in solitary confinement since his arrest in November. The former law student, whose dream was to open a human-rights law firm, has been been sentenced to four years in prison for the “crimes” of criticizing President Hosni Mubarak and insulting Islam.
The case sets a dangerous precedent in a country that has, until recently, been a beacon of hope for reform in the Middle East. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Hands Across the Mideast Alliance have condemned the sentence. Reporters Without Borders has even inducted Egypt into its Hall of Shame, naming it one of 2006’s “Internet Enemies.”
The U.S. State Department has expressed concern about Soliman’s conviction and the denial of his initial appeal. In Congress, Reps. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) have joined forces to plead with the Egyptian ambassador on behalf of Soliman. But they remain the sole voices championing the release of this young freedom fighter.
Considering that our government sends Egypt nearly $2 billion in foreign aid each year, the response has been timid.
Doug Lay wants to know what I think of Doug Lichtman’s op-ed on the Viacom/YouTube suit, which he says “comes close to defining a new category of thoughtcrime.” I don’t think I agree with that characterization, but I do have a couple of bones to pick with Lichtman’s argument.
The first is that Lichtman entirely brushes aside what I consider Google’s strongest argument:
Lawyers on both sides will cite the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and argue about the extent to which its provisions provide a “safe harbor” for YouTube’s service. They will parse copyright case law and debate such legal doctrines as “contributory infringement” and the defense of “fair use.” Before the forest becomes lost in those trees, however, it’s important to make three basic points.
He then goes on to talk about how copyright ought to work, and why YouTube ought to be liable for infringement. But deciding those sorts of policy questions is the job of Congress, not the courts. It’s fine (indeed, beneficial) for the courts to fill in the gaps in statutes where Congress has been unclear or unspecific. But when a statute is clear, the job of the courts is to apply it as written, not to second-guess Congress’s policy judgments.
Michael Arrington has a write-up at TechCrunch about the unamed News Corp./NBC Universal joint venture set to launch later this year as a competitor to YouTube.
Arrington’s key points come from an announcement call he listened in on:
The two key messages Chernin and Zucker were selling were (1) a focus on respecting copyright, and (2) the fact that they were creating what they called “the largest advertising platform on earth.” That may be good messaging to stockholders, but it isn’t what the public cares about.
Working name, given by Google: “Clown Co.” Let’s see if they can escape it when they actually come up with a brand and a product.
Today the Illinois legislature did what the Florida legislature wouldn’t do – crush a bad online dating bill in committee.
I had a premonition that things would go well in Springfield. Hey, it’s the Land of Lincoln and Illinois is the state where I was born!
But superstitions aside, the members of a House
Judiciary Committee really carried the day here with their probing
questions and clued-in skepticism about HB 563, the Internet Dating Disclosure
and Safety Awareness Act.
Take Rep. Jim Sacia for
instance. He’s an ex-FBI agent that really knew the difference between background checks and criminal screenings. He said that criminal
screenings—the kind contemplated by all of the state online dating bills, were incomplete
and too easily defeated to mean anything.
I usually agree with Larry Lessig about copyright issues, but I found his op-ed on Grokster and Viacom to be rather off. I’ve been meaning to do a post about that, but Randy Picker has made the point better than I could:
[The Sony] case addresses two issues, whether home users engaged in fair use when they time-shifted free over-the-air broadcast television—the Court concluded that they did—and whether Sony could be held secondarily liable for copying done with the VCR. Just reading statutes, we might have thought the answer to that question was easy. As the majority opinion noted, the Patent Act expressly addressed secondary liability, setting forth in 35 USC 271(b) liability for one who “actively induces infringement of a patent” and in 35 USC 271(c) liability for contributory infringement. Congress obviously knew how to create secondary liability in intellectual property cases when it wanted to, and therefore chose not to do so in copyright when it failed to include comparable language to that of the 1952 patent act in the 1976 copyright statute. Case closed.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. This week we took the podcast on the road and recorded live at our Alcohol Liberation Front happy hour at the Science Club in Washington, DC. Voices on the show this week include Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, David Robinson of The American, Tim Lee of the Show Me Institute, PJ Doland of PJ Doland Web Design, James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center, and Adam Thierer of PFF. Topics include,
Scholars bypass established journals and publishing their research online
The growth of the breadth of patents
The government’s plan to give everyone a free digital TV converter box
The future of physical media in a digital age
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!
Today’s decision in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania again striking down the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 has important implications for the ongoing debate over age verification for social networking websites.
As I mentioned in an essay earlier this week, several state attorneys general (AGs) are currently pushing legislation to mandate age verification of minors before they would be allowed access to social networking sites. Already, age verification proposals have been introduced in Connecticut, Georgia and North Carolina. More proposals are likely on the way. AGs and other policy makers argue that age verification is necessary to protect kids from cyber-predators and other online dangers.
In my new paper, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions“ I find that proposals to impose age verification mandates on social networking websites raise many sensitive questions with potentially profound implications for individual privacy and online freedom of speech and expression. That’s especially the case in light of the definitional ambiguities associated with “social networking.”
Today’s COPA decision bolsters many of the findings in my paper. “Requiring users to go through an age verification process would lead to a distinct loss of personal privacy,” Judge Lowell Reed Jr. says on page 55 of the decision. And his other conclusions are also relevant to the debate over social networking regulation.
As I noted in the first part of this essay, The Child Online Protection Act of 1998, which was passed by Congress in 1998 in an effort to restrict minors’ access to adult-oriented websites, has again been struck down in the courts. The decision is fairly devastating for the government, which had been hoping to prove to the court that private Internet filtering technologies are ineffective in blocking objectionable material. The government had also hoped to prove that age verification technologies were available that might be used to block access by minors to various websites. The court rejected both of these arguments.
Here’s a quick summary of the court’s major findings on these two important issues:
The Child Online Protection Act of 1998, which was passed by Congress in 1998 in an effort to restrict minors’ access to adult-oriented websites, has again been struck down in the courts. (Decision here) Judge Lowell Reed Jr., senior judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, ruled that:
COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) at least some of the plaintiffs have standing; (2) COPA is not narrowly tailored to Congress’ compelling interest; (3) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive, most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest; and (3) COPA is impermissibly vague and overbroad. As a result, I will issue a permanent injunction against the enforcement of COPA.
This decision perpetuates the unbroken chain of Internet censorship cases that the government has lost since the Communications Decency Act of 1996 was overturned over ten years ago. After the CDA was rejected by a lower court and the Supreme Court, Congress passed COPA in 1998. COPA provided an affirmative defense to prosecution if a website operator could show that it had made a good faith effort to restrict site access by requiring a credit card, adult personal identification number, or some other type of age-verifying certificate or technology. But COPA was immediately challenged and has gone to the Supreme Court for review twice and, most recently, it has been stuck in the U.S. District Court where the government was again defending its constitutionality in a 4-week trial last Fall.
Thus, almost 10 years after its initial passage, the legislation remains stuck in jurisprudential limbo after endless legal wrangling about its constitutionality. Untold millions have been spent by the government litigating this decision, and they may not be done yet. If the Department of Justice appeals this latest ruling, the law might again be considered by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and then make another return trip to the Supreme Court for an unprecedented third review by the highest court in the land.
If all the money that has been spent litigating this case had instead been spent on media literacy and online safety campaigns, it could have produced concrete, lasting results. But our government appears obsessed with pursuing regulatory mandates and legal appeals instead.
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.