Articles by Solveig Singleton 
Solveig Singleton is a lawyer and writer, with ventures into ceramic sculpture, photography, painting, and animal welfare work. Past venues for her policy work include the Cato Institute (mostly free speech, telecom, and privacy), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (mostly privacy and ecommerce), the Progress and Freedom Foundation (mostly IP). She is presently an adjunct fellow with the Institute for Policy Innovation and is working on a new nonprofit venture, the Convergence Law Institute. She holds degrees from Cornell Law School and Reed College. Favorite Movie: Persuasion. Favorite Books: Dhalgren; Villette; Freedom and the Law. Favorite Art: Kinetic sculpture--especially involving Roombas. Most obsolete current technology deployed: a 30 yr. old Canon AE-1. Music: these days, mostly old blues, classical guitar, Poe, Cowboy Junkies, Ministry. Phobia: Clowns.
Comm. Daily had a good article on July 16, “Republican Fairness Doctrine Measure Sidetracked,” concerning a measure that would have blocked the FCC from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine:
Durbin rejected an amendment to the defense authorization bill (HR-1585), offered by Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minn., that would block the FCC from reinstating the doctrine that was banned in 1987. Durbin favors reinstatement, which has provoked an uproar among Republicans fearful the doctrine would be used to shut down conservative talk radio, Coleman said. The fairness doctrine required broadcasters to present balanced viewpoints on controversial issues (CD July 2 p1).
Conservative talk radio has flourished because the market “says ‘I want to listen,'” Coleman said, and consumers have a choice — they can turn off the dial. But government should not be regulating content, he argued: Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine would be a “very, very bad idea.” Durbin said Americans should hear both sides of a story since the airwaves are public property: “What if the marketplace does not provide opportunities to hear both points of view?” Durbin mused whether a government role would then be appropriate.
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The MPAA comments in the FCC’s Net Neutrality proceeding cautions against taking steps that would interfere with the deployment of watermarking, filtering, deep packet inspection, and so on. What’s the connection exactly? Part of it is unknown–since the technologies are new, and are just being deployed. Part of it is known… much of the dispute about technologies being deployed to protect content (not just in the sense of protecting copyrighted content, but in the sense of security generally) is about who will pay for it. The content creator? The network infrastructure engineers? The developers of software used in distribution? The retailer? The CPE manufacturer? Insofar as net neutrality principles end up constraining who may charge whom for what, they may preclude otherwise desirable arrangements of who bears the costs. And insofar as net neutrality constrains one player on the net from blocking or interfering with another, it may hamper efforts to control piracy like spam, by impeding traffic carried by or through disreputable ports of call.
From time to time concern has erupted over the tendency of P2P filesharing software to “share” user files and directories that the user would not want shared–excel files, for example. Identity thieves were known to be mining shared files for social security numbers. Software distributors have several times denied that this continues to be a problem. Apparently that is not so. A new report from the Copyright Office shows that the problem is very much much a current one, and that filesharing software continues to default to settings that share much much more rather than less, sometimes covering the default with deceptive screen displays. TheHouse Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has taken an interest.
Privacy advocates, so far, have not; buy in too far to “business is bad” ideology (ironically perpetrated by Hollywood) and one ends up not being able to see what is right in front of one’s face.
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Scott Cleland blogs alertly on the problems with the framework proposed for the 700 MHz auction. Ah, do we never learn?
Steven Levy’s column for Newsweek bemoans the trouble that some fellow has gotten himself into, selling mash-ups of hip-hop songs without licensing. Fair use? Transformative use? Why bother with the technicalities? Levy and a legislator likes the fellow, so they weigh in on the side of legislating (yet another) exception. Maybe jam transformative and fair uses together into a whole new category, “rave” use, with a safe harbor for “hipster” use and for the older set “cool” uses? The principle behind it might be that if you offend only a little, you are liable, but if you offend multiple players a lot, you are home free.
The problem of how to license a whole bunch of stuff (167 artists in this case) all at once for a reasonable fee is a daunting one. Not so daunting that one ought not to try. But is proposing yet another exemption or exception or compulsory license or combination thereof really an intelligent approach to the problem? It is not. It is flatly embarrassing that legislators and experienced commentators on copyright cannot do better than this perpetual handing out of legal privileges to the favorite information cause du jour, simultaneously screwing creators and leaving the next innovative
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This series of reports on the remarkable growth of the telecom and ecommerce sectors in Brazil since the phone system was privatized makes for upbeat reading.
http://www.ibls.com/internet_law_news_portal_view.aspx?s=articles&id=3901B9B2-66A2-47EF-8A4F-0E598052BF1B
http://www.crito.uci.edu/publications/pdf/gec/brazil.pdf
http://www.internetworldstats.com/sa/br.htm
http://www.midwestbusiness.com/news/viewnews.asp?newsletterID=11893
From within the libertarian camp, one of the stronger anti-copyright arguments is the point that it is hard to prove empirically that copyright in fact fosters creativity, especially as compared to some of the alternatives to copyright. How does one go about showing that in the absence of copyright, there would be fewer created works or fewer quality created works or a lesser range of types of created works? To show this conclusively, one would need to know what would have happened in the absence of a market. For the same reason, though, it is hard to show that copyright (or related laws) do any harm; one would need to know what would have happened in the the absence of copyright.
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TLF co-blogger Tim Lee had an oped in the New York Times on software patents; Greg Aharonian offers his usual pointed response. Am thinking of inviting them both to lunch.
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Fred Von Lohman’s article in the Post chides a group of Congressmen for expecting universities to enforce copyright by fining or expelling students, or by installing filtering software. He urges instead that the university collect monies to pay the music industry for a blanket license for unlimited downloading, as they do for software. At least, it is not a compulsory license. And it seems to be a a reasonably practicable solution at one level.
(One practical problem: does the license transfer the rights in the sound recordings only? Or the rights of the composers and such as well? Licenses for music distribution are notoriously hard to obtain because of this fragmentation issue. Set it aside for now).
But note one key element on which the scheme relies–in order to have any incentive to negotiate for a license,
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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.