Tom W. Bell, professor of law at Chapman University and author of the concluding essay in Copyright Unbalanced, a new book edited by Surprisingly Free’s own Jerry Brito, discusses the ways in which copyright has evolved over time and why reform is vital.
Bell differentiates copyright from other types of property, arguing that conflating the two terms causes great confusion amongst laypeople and, over time, corrodes the value placed in tangible property rights. According to Bell, copyright is a privilege created by statute that doesn’t exist in a state of nature and is not recognized by common law.
As a special type of economic good, copyright must be treated differently than tangible property rights, according to Bell, who outlines five proposals for copyright reform.
While Bell is not opposed to copyright, he argues that copyright enforcement has gone too far, and lawmakers should structure policies to lead us towards a world in which we conceivably do without it.
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Perry Keller, Senior Lecturer at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London, and author of the recently released paper “Sovereignty and Liberty in the Internet Era,” discusses how the internet affects the relationship between the state and the media. According to Keller, media has played a formative role in the development of the modern state and, as it evolves, the way in which the state governs must change as well. However, that does not mean that there is a one-size-fits-all solution. In fact, as Keller demonstrates using real-world examples in the U.S., U.K., E.U., and China, the ways in which new media is governed can differ radically based upon the local legal and cultural environment.
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Yesterday it was my privilege to speak at a Free State Foundation (FSF) event on “Ideas for Communications Law and Policy Reform in 2013.” It was moderated by my friend and former colleague Randy May, who is president of FSF, and the event featured opening remarks from the always-excellent FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell.
During the panel discussing that followed, I offered my thoughts about the problem America continues to face in cleaning up communications and media law and proposed a few ideas to get reform done right once and for all. I don’t have time to formally write-up my remarks, but I thought I would just post the speech notes that I used yesterday and include links to the relevant supporting materials. (I’ve been using a canned version of this same speech at countless events over the past 15 years. Hopefully lawmakers will take up some of these reforms some time soon so I’m not using this same set of remarks in 2027!)
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I have always found it strange that the ACLU speaks with two voices when it comes to user empowerment as a response to government regulation of the Internet. That is, when responding to government efforts to regulate the Internet for online safety or speech purposes, the ACLU stresses personal responsibility and user empowerment as the first-order response. But as soon as the conversation switches to online advertising and data collection, the ACLU suggests that people are basically sheep who can’t possibly look out for themselves and, therefore, increased Internet regulation is essential. They’re not the only ones adopting this paradoxical position. In previous essays I’ve highlighted how both EFF and CDT do the same thing. But let me focus here on ACLU.
Writing today on the ACLU “Free Future” blog, ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley cites a new paper that he says proves “the absurdity of the position that individuals who desire privacy must attempt to win a technological arms race with the multi-billion dollar internet-advertising industry.” The new study Stanley cites says that “advertisers are making it impossible to avoid online tracking” and that it isn’t paternalistic for government to intervene and regulate if the goal is to enhance user privacy choices. Stanley wholeheartedly agrees. In this and other posts, he and other ACLU analysts have endorsed greater government action to address this perceived threat on the grounds that, in essence, user empowerment cannot work when it comes to online privacy.
Again, this represents a very different position from the one that ACLU has staked out and brilliantly defended over the past 15 years when it comes to user empowerment as the proper and practical response to government regulation of objectionable online speech and pornography. For those not familiar, beginning in the mid-1990s, lawmakers started pursuing a number of new forms of Internet regulation — direct censorship and mandatory age verification were the primary methods of control — aimed at curbing objectionable online speech. In case after case, the ACLU rose up to rightly defend our online liberties against such government encroachment. (I was proud to have worked closely with many former ACLU officials in these battles.) Most notably, the ACLU pushed back against the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA) and they won landmark decisions for us in the process. Continue reading →
It was my honor today to be a panelist at a Hill event on “Apps, Ads, Kids & COPPA: Implications of the FTC’s Additional Proposed Revisions,” which was co-sponsored by the Family Online Safety Institute and the Association for Competitive Technology. It was a free-wheeling discussion, but I prepared some talking points for the event that I thought I would share here for anyone interested in my views about the Federal Trade Commission’s latest proposed revisions to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
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The Commission deserves credit for very wisely ignoring calls by some to extend the coverage of COPPA’s regulatory provisions from children under 13 all the way up to teens up to 18.
- that would have been a constitutional and technical enforcement nightmare. But the FTC realized that long ago and abandoned any thought of doing that. So that is a huge win since we won’t be revisiting the COPA age verification wars.
- That being said, each tweak or expansion of COPPA, the FTC opens the door a bit wider to a discussion of some sort age verification or age stratification scheme for the Internet.
- And we know from recent AG activity (recall old MySpace age verification battle) and Hill activity (i.e. Markey-Barton bill) that there remains an appetite for doing something more to age-segment Internet populations
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Parmy Olson, London Bureau chief for Forbes, discusses her new book We are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of Lulzsec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency. The book is an inside look at the people behind Anonymous, explaining the movement’s origins as a group of online pranksters, and how they developed into the best known hacktivist organization in the world. Olson discusses the tension that has existed between those that would rather just engage in pranks and those that want to use Annoymous to protest different groups they see as trying to clamp down on internet freedom, as well as some of the group’s most famous campaigns like the attacks against the Church of Scientology and the campaign against Paypal and Mastercard. Olson also describes the development of LulzSec which became famous for a series of attacks in 2011 on high profile websites including Fox, PBS, Sony, and the CIA.
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Thanks to TLFers Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado, and the anonymous individual who leaked a key planning document for the International Telecommunication Union’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) on Jerry and Eli’s inspired WCITLeaks.org site, we now have a clearer view of what a handful of regimes hope to accomplish at WCIT, scheduled for December in Dubai, U.A.E.
Although there is some danger of oversimplification, essentially a number of member states in the ITU, an arm of the United Nations, are pushing for an international treaty that will give their governments a much more powerful role in the architecture of the Internet and economics of the cross-border interconnection. Dispensing with the fancy words, it represents a desperate, last ditch effort by several authoritarian nations to regain control of their national telecommunications infrastructure and operations
A little history may help. Until the 1990s, the U.S. was the only country where telephone companies were owned by private investors. Even then, from AT&T and GTE on down, they were government-sanctioned monopolies. Just about everywhere else, including western democracies such as the U.K, France and Germany, the phone company was a state-owned monopoly. Its president generally reported to the Minster of Telecommunications.
Since most phone companies were large state agencies, the ITU, as a UN organization, could wield a lot of clout in terms of telecom standards, policy and governance–and indeed that was the case for much of the last half of the 20th century. That changed, for nations as much as the ITU, with the advent of privatization and the introduction of wireless technology. In a policy change that directly connects to these very issues here, just about every country in the world embarked on full or partial telecom privatization and, moreover, allowed at least one private company to build wireless telecom infrastructure. As ITU membership was reserved for governments, not enterprises, the ITU’s political influence as a global standards and policy agency has since diminished greatly. Add to that concurrent emergence of the Internet, which changed the fundamental architecture and cost of public communications from a capital-intensive hierarchical mechanism to inexpensive peer-to-peer connections and the stage was set for today’s environment where every smartphone owner is a reporter and videographer. Telecommunications, once part of the commanding heights of government control, was decentralized down to street level.
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There was an important article about online age verification in The New York Times yesterday entitled, “Verifying Ages Online Is a Daunting Task, Even for Experts.” It’s definitely worth a read since it reiterates the simple truth that online age verification is enormously complicated and hugely contentious (especially legally). It’s also worth reading since this issue might be getting hot again as Facebook considers allowing kids under 13 on its site.
Just five years ago, age verification was a red-hot tech policy issue. The rise of MySpace and social networking in general had sent many state AGs, other lawmakers, and some child safety groups into full-blown moral panic mode. Some wanted to ban social networks in schools and libraries (recall that a 2006 House measure proposing just that actually received 410 votes, although the measure died in the Senate), but mandatory online age verification for social networking sites was also receiving a lot of support. This generated much academic and press inquiry into the sensibility and practicality of mandatory age verification as an online safety strategy. Personally, I was spending almost all my time covering the issue between late 2006 and mid-2007. The title of one of my papers on the topic reflected the frustration many shared about the issue: “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.”
Simply put, too many people were looking for an easy, silver-bullet solution to complicated problems regarding how kids get online and how to keep them safe once they get there. For a time, age verification became that silver bullet for those who felt that “we must do something” politically to address online safety concerns. Alas, mandatory age verification was no silver bullet. As I summarized in this 2009 white paper, “Five Online Safety Task Forces Agree: Education, Empowerment & Self-Regulation Are the Answer,” all previous research and task force reports looking into this issue have concluded that a diverse toolbox and a “layered approach” must be brought to bear on these problems. There are no simple fixes. Specifically, here’s what each of the major online child safety task forces that have been convened since 2000 had to say about the wisdom of mandatory age verification: Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.