Interoperability is a topic that has long been of interest to me. How networks, platforms, and devices work with each other–or sometimes fail to–is an important engineering, business, and policy issue. Back in 2012, I spilled out over 5,000 words on the topic when reviewing John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s excellent book, Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems.

I’ve always struggled with the interoperability issues, however, and often avoided them became of the sheer complexity of it all. Some interesting recent essays by sci-fi author and digital activist Cory Doctorow remind me that I need to get back on top of the issue. His latest essay is a call-to-arms in favor of what he calls “adversarial interoperability.” “[T]hat’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them,” he says. “Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.”

Doctorow is a vociferous defender of expanded digital access rights of many flavors and his latest essays on interoperability expand upon his previous advocacy for open access and a general freedom to tinker. He does much of this work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which shares his commitment to expanded digital access and interoperability rights in various contexts.

I’m in league with Doctorow and EFF on some of these things, but also find myself thinking they go much too far in other ways. At root, their work and advocacy raise a profound question: should there be any general right to exclude on digital platforms? Although he doesn’t always come right out and say it, Doctorow’s work often seems like an outright rejection of any sort of property rights in networks or platforms. Generally speaking, he does not want the law to recognize any right for tech platforms to exclude using digital fences of any sort.

Where to Draw the Lines?

As someone who has authored a book about the importance of permissionless innovation, I need to be able to answer questions about where these lines between open versus closed systems are drawn. Definitions and framing matter, however. I use “permissionless innovation” as a descriptor for one possible policy disposition when considering where legal and regulatory defaults should be set. Another conception of permissionless innovation is more of an engineering ideal; a general freedom to connect, tinker, modify, etc. (I speak more about these conceptions in my latest book, Evasive Entrepreneurs.) Of course, someone advocating permissionless innovation as a policy default will sometimes be confronted with the question of what the law should say when someone behaves in an “evasive” fashion in the latter conception of permissionless innovation.

Doctorow would generally answer that question by saying that law should not be rigged to favor exclusion through laws like the DMCA (and specifically the law’s anti- circumvention provisions), Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, patent law, and various other rules and laws. “[T]he current crop of Big Tech companies has secured laws, regulations, and court decisions that have dramatically restricted adversarial interoperability.”

Generally speaking, I agree. I’m not a fan of technocratic laws or regulations that seek to micro-manage interoperability and which stack the deck in favor of exclusionary conduct with steep penalties for evasion. But does that mean adversarial interoperability should be permitted in all cases? Should there exist any sort of common law presumption one way or the other when a user or competitor seeks access to an existing private platform or device?

Specifics matter here and I don’t have time to get into all the case studies that Doctorow goes through. Some are no-brainers, like the infamous Lexmark case involving refillable printer ink cartridges. Other cases are far more complicated, at least for me. Does Epic, creator of Fortnite, have a right of adversarial interoperability that it can exercise against Apple and their AppStore? As Dirk Auer suggests in a new essay, this episode looks more like a straightforward pricing dispute. Epic is making it out to be much more than that, suggesting Apple is guilty of unfair and exclusionary practices that require a legal remedy.

Why not take that logic further and just say Apple’s App Store us tantamount to a natural monopoly or digital essential facility that Epic and everyone else is entitled to on whatever terms they want? For that matter, why not apply the same logic to Epic’s Fortnite platform or even its Unreal Engine? Does every other gaming developer have a right to piggyback on the juggernaut that Epic has built?

This gets to the core question about Doctorow’s concept of adversarial interoperability: Exactly what should common law and the courts say platform owners make access rights a simple pricing matter and say: “You pay or you are out.” Like Doctorow and EFF, I don’t want Apple to benefit from any special favors from laws like DMCA. Where we differ is that I would still leave the door open for Apple to exercise various other common law contractual rights or property rights in court.

I suspect Doctorow would deny any such claims by Apple or anyone else. If so, I would like to see him spell out in more precise terms exactly what Apple’s property rights and contractual rights are in this instance. Or, again, should we just treat the App Store as a digital commons with unfettered open access rights for developers? If so, would Apple be required to still manage the resource once it is a quasi-commons?

I think that would end miserably, but would like to hear Doctorow’s preferred approach before saying more. I suspect a lot rides on the distinction between “open” verses “proprietary” standards, but compared to Doctorow and EFF, I am willing to embrace a world of both open and proprietary systems, and many hybrids in between. I don’t want the law favoring one type over the other, but that means I need to endorse a generalized property right for digital operators such that they can still exclude others (even in the absence of artificial regulatory rights like DMCA creates). Again, I suspect Doctorow would reject that standard, preferring a generalized right of access, even if that means the platforms become de facto commons.

More Radical Steps

Elsewhere, Doctorow has said is that some of these questions would be better addressed through more aggressive antitrust regulation. Mere data portability or mandatory interoperability isn’t enough for him. “Data portability is important,” Doctorow says, “but it is no substitute for the ability to have ongoing access to a service that you’re in the process of migrating away from.”

In his latest online book on “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” Doctorow suggests that it is time to “make Big Tech small again” through an “anti-monopoly ecology movement.” That “means bans on mergers between large companies, on big companies acquiring nascent competitors, and on platform companies competing directly with the companies that rely on the platforms.” And he desires a host of other remedies.

So, here we have the convergence of interoperability policy and antitrust policy, with a layer of property confiscation layered on top apparently. “Now it’s up to us to seize the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under democratic, accountable control,” he insists in his latest manifesto.

What’s funny about this is that Doctorow begins most of his essays by pointing out all the ways that politics is the problem when it comes to access issues, only to end by suggesting that a lot more political meddling is the required solution. He repeatedly laments how large tech players have so often been able to convince lawmakers and regulators to pass special laws or regulations that work to their favor. Yet, in his We-Can-Build-A-Better-Bureaucrat model of things, all those old problems will apparently disappear when we get the right people in power and get rid of those nefarious capitalist schemers.

Thus, what really animates Doctorow’s advocacy for adversarial interoperability is a deep suspicion of free market capitalism and property rights in particular. In this worldview, interoperability really just becomes a Trojan Horse meant to help bring down the entire capitalist order. Am I exaggerating? “As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism.” Those are his exact words from the conclusion of his latest book.

Adversarial Innovation & Evolutionary Interop

Still, Doctorow raises many legitimate issues about interconnection and digital access rights. But we need a better approach to work though these questions than the one he suggests.

In my lengthy review of the Palfrey and Gasser Interop book, I tried to sketch out an alternative framework for thinking seriously about these issues. I referred to my preferred approach as “experimental interoperability” or “evolutionary interoperability.” I described this as the theory that ongoing marketplace experimentation with technical standards, modes of information production and dissemination, and interoperable information systems, is almost always preferable to the artificial foreclosure of this dynamic process through state action. The former allows for better learning and coping mechanisms to develop while also incentivizing the spontaneous, natural evolution of the market and market responses.

Adversarial interoperability is important, but not nearly as important as adversarial innovation and facilities-based competition. Stated differently, access rights to existing systems is an important value, but the incentives we have in place to encourage entirely new systems is what really matters most. At some point, a generalized right of access to existing systems discourages the sort of platform-building that could help give rise to the sort of creative destruction we have seen at work repeatedly in the past and that we still need today. Taken too far, adversarial interoperability threatens to undermine this goal. Why seek to build a better alternative platform if you can just endlessly free ride off someone else’s by force of law?

Thus, I prefer to work at the margins and think through how to balance these competing claims of access / interoperability rights versus contractual / property rights. My take will be too utilitarian for not only Doctorow but also for some libertarians, who want clear answers to all these questions based upon their preferred natural law-oriented constructions of rights. The problem with that approach is that it leads to all-or-nothing extremes (complete digital property rights, or virtually none) and that approach is fundamentally unworkable and destructive. We need to work harder about how to balance these rights and values in pro-competitive, pro-innovation fashion.

There is No Such Thing as Optimal Interoperability

In sum, there is no such thing as “optimal interoperablity.” Sometimes proprietary or “closed” systems will offer the public features and options that they will find preferable to “open” ones.  “There are many reasons why consumers might prefer ‘closed’ systems – even when they have to pay a premium for them,” argues Dirk Auer in a separate essay. It could be greater convenience, security, or other things. Palfrey and Gasser correctly noted in their book that, “the state is rarely in a position to call a winner among competing technologies” (p. 174). Moreover, they concluded:

“Lawmakers need to keep in view the limits of their own effectiveness when it comes to accomplishing optimal levels of interoperability. Case studies of government intervention, especially where complex information technologies are involved, show that states tend to be ill suited to determine on their own what specific technology will be the best option for the future (p. 175)

A thousand amens to that! The law should not artificially foreclose experimentation with many different types of platforms, standards, devices and the interoperability that exists among them.

“First electricity, now telephones. Sometimes I feel as if I were living in an H.G. Wells novel.” –Dowager Countess, Downton Abbey

Every technology we take for granted was once new, different, disruptive, and often ridiculed and resisted as a result. Electricity, telephones, trains, and television all caused widespread fears once in the way robots, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things do today. Typically it is realized by most that these fears are misplaced and overly pessimistic, the technology gets diffused and we can barely remember our life without it. But in the recent technopanics, there has been a concern that the legal system is not properly equipped to handle the possible harms or concerns from these new technologies. As a result, there are often calls to regulate or rein in their use.

In the late 1980s, video cassette recorders (VCRs) caused a legal technopanic. The concerns were less that VCRs would lead to some bizarre human mutation as in many technopanics, but rather that the existing system of copyright infringement and vicarious liability could not adequately address the potential harm to the motion picture industry. The then president of the Motion Picture Association of America Jack Valenti famously told Congress, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

In the eyes of the film and television producers the legal system did not have the resources to protect their copyright or hold the manufacturers and distributors of these disruptive machines properly liable for their actions. The Ninth Circuit initially sided with the producers finding that recording of television programs for home-viewing was not part of a blanket fair use exception in copyright law and that the manufacturers and distributors of VCRs could be held vicariously liable for their actions. This was overturned at the Supreme Court by a single vote.

By denying the movie industry a victory, ironically, the courts actually handed them a much bigger one. By allowing for the widespread adoption of this technology, the courts actually provided a new line of profit for the studios in home video sales and did not cripple copyright law in the process. It also though shows that the process by and large works. Individuals who pirate or distributed copyrighted video material (remember the FBI warnings at the start of tapes) could still be held personally liable for their violations. If Congress had intervened, the actions would likely have been too broad or too narrow to give appropriate remedy as common law did. Similar concerns arise today with new creative techniques such as 3D printing, but typically it is best to at least let the common law attempt to address these concerns before deeming it incapable. This illustrates how liability norms can evolve naturally over time to strike a sensible balance.

This legal technopanic also emerged around the Internet. The global and anonymous nature of the Internet naturally make it more difficult to perceive the potential harms and to identify the perpetrators and gain jurisdiction over them. Or so the legal technopanic goes. Judge Easterbrook explained in his 1996 article Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse, “the law applicable to specialized endeavors is to study general rules.” Intellectual property law and property rights more generally are relatively well defined general rules. The beauty of the common law is its ability to adapt to a specific situation. Still there are concerns which may require interventions to be made. When necessary these interventions are especially important because, as John Villasenor wrote, “While technology is usually described as an enabler … liability is often described as an impediment.”

For example, Congress preemptively limited the liability of internet service providers in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. While there always seem to be concerns over this immunity when bad things happen on the internet, by and large the courts have been able to determine when the ISP was actively contributing to the violations of state and federal laws. In fact the protection provided by Section 230 merely codified the same principles at common law which lead to the protection of the VCR.

A little protection via legislation was necessary to allow the internet to flourish, but that protection was needed in part because of a legal technopanic. Similarly, Congress intervened to establish a notice-and-takedown procedure through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), when it became apparent that existing copyright law was not evolving as quickly as technology to address both the internet host and the copyright holders concerns. While ideally the common law would have been allowed to evolve to a conclusion on the issue, the sudden rise of YouTube and other online services necessitated at least a temporary intervention. Such legislation represents a compromise that likely would have resulted in a winner or loser if it had played out in the courts. As a result, while the common law is typically preferable sometimes legislation is necessary to at least temporarily establish a norm and stem the prevention of innovation from a possible legal technopanic.

By and large the courts have adapted disruptive technology as quickly or even more so then society, and as a result allowed the common law to see reason. Perhaps the moral of the story is as Edward Coke wrote in 1642, “The common law itself is nothing else but reason.”

It’s been over five years since Congress passed major legislation addressing copyright protection, but this hasn’t stopped copyright owners from achieving real progress in securing their expressive works. In cooperation with private-sector stakeholders, rights holders have made several deals aimed at combating copyright infringement and channeling consumer demand for original content toward legitimate outlets. These voluntary agreements will be the subject of a hearing this afternoon (9/18) before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet. This panel marks the latest in a series of hearings the committee launched earlier this year to review the Copyright Act, much of which dates back to 1976 or earlier.

Copyright consensus may sound like an oxymoron, especially in the wake of last year’s bruising legislative battle over SOPA and PIPA. But in reality, there’s no shortage of common ground when it comes to copyright protection. Despite all the controversy that surrounds the issue, copyright isn’t so much a “conflict of visions”, to borrow from Thomas Sowell, but a conflict of tactics, as I argued earlier this year on Cato Unbound.

Indeed, with some notable exceptions, most scholars, business leaders, and policymakers accept that government has a legitimate and important role in securing to inventors and creators the fruits of their labors“. Unsurprisingly, the devil is in the details, where genuinely tough questions arise regarding the government’s proper role in policing the Internet for copyright violations. Should the law hold online intermediaries accountable for their users’ infringing acts? What remedies should the law afford rights holders whose works are unlawfully distributed all over the Internet, often by profit-generating foreign actors?

Although Congress has struggled mightily with these questions, business leaders from a variety of sectors have worked together to devise several approaches to the problem of copyright infringement that go above and beyond the Copyright Act. Perhaps most notably, in February 2013, a coalition of five major ISPs and several trade associations representing filmmakers and artists announced the launch of the Copyright Alert System (“CAS”). Administered by the Center for Copyright Information, the CAS aims to educate users about copyright law—and deter them from violating it—by delivering Copyright Alert notices to ISP subscribers found to be sharing infringing files on peer-to-peer networks.

It’s too early to render a verdict on the CAS’s effectiveness, but as data accumulates in coming months and years, researchers will surely examine how the system has impacted user behavior. Similar approaches to infringement by ISP subscribers have been tried in other countries such as France—albeit on a mandatory, not voluntary, basis—and several studies have found that these so-called “graduated response” systems have indeed reduced infringement in nations where they’ve been implemented. But other studies have reached the opposite conclusion, so more research is needed in this area. Whether or not CAS succeeds, however, experimentation involving novel approaches to copyright protection is crucial for the future of creative expression, as is experimentation among business models to monetize content.

Speaking of voluntary approaches to copyright protection, Google last week unveiled a report describing its anti-piracy efforts. As Google’s Fred von Lohmann explained:

[W]e are releasing a report, “How Google Fights Piracy,” bringing together in one place an overview of the programs, policies, and technologies we have put in place to combat piracy online.

The report discusses how Google penalizes websites that receive a high percentage of DMCA takedown notices in Google’s search results, hopefully thereby directing users toward legitimate sources of content. It explains the “Content ID” system pioneered by YouTube, which enables rights holders to identify potentially infringing videos posted to the site, and gives copyright owners the choice to monetize such videos in lieu of removing them altogether. And the report points out that in 2012, Google voluntarily disabled ad service to 46,000 websites dedicated to infringement. Check out the full report for much more information on these efforts and many others that Google has taken to better secure copyrights—and for another perspective, check out a MPAA-commissioned study released today critiquing the role that Internet search engines play in helping users find infringing websites.

After today’s hearing, I’ll have more thoughts on the state of voluntary cooperation to protect copyrights, and on the debate about whether file lockers and search engines ought to do more to combat infringement.

In the past couple weeks, three bills addressing the legality of cell phone unlocking have been introduced in the Senate:

• Sens. Leahy, Grassley, Franken, and Hatch’s “Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act” (S.517)
• Sen. Ron Wyden’s “Wireless Device Independence Act” (S.467)
• Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s “Wireless Consumer Choice Act” (S.481)

This essay will explain how these bills would affect users’ ability to lawfully unlock their cell phones.

Background

If you buy a new cell phone from a U.S. wireless carrier and sign a multi-year service contract, chances are your phone is “locked” to your carrier. This means if you want to switch carriers, you’ll first need to unlock your phone. Your original carrier may well be happy to lend you a helping hand—but, if not, unlocking your phone may violate federal law.

The last few months have seen an explosion of public outcry over this issue, with a recent White House “We the People” petition calling for the legalization of cell phone unlocking garnering over 114,000 signatures—and a favorable response from the Obama administration. The controversy was sparked in October 2012, when a governmental ruling (PDF) announced that unlocking cell phones purchased after January 26, 2013 would violate a 1998 federal law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the “DMCA”).

Under this law’s “anti-circumvention” provisions (17 U.S.C. §§ 1201-05), it is generally illegal to “circumvent a technological measure” that protects a copyrighted work. Violators are subject to civil penalties and, in serious cases, criminal prosecution.

However, the law includes an escape valve: it empowers the Librarian of Congress, in consultation with the Register of Copyrights, to periodically determine if any users’ “ability to make noninfringing uses . . . of a particular class of copyrighted works” is adversely affected by the DMCA’s prohibition of tools that circumvent access controls. Based on these determinations, the Librarian may promulgate rules exempting categories of circumvention tools from the DMCA’s ban.

One such exemption, originally granted in 2006 and renewed in 2010, permits users to unlock their cell phones without their carrier’s permission. (You may be wondering why phone unlocking is considered an access control circumvention—it’s because unlocking requires the circumvention of limits on user access to a mobile phone’s bootloader or operating system, both of which are usually copyrighted.)

But late last year (2012), when the phone unlocking exemption came up for its triennial review, the landscape had evolved regarding a crucial legal question: do cell phone owners  own a copy of the operating system software installed on their phone, or are they merely licensees of the software?

Until a few years ago, the leading authority on what it means to own a copy of a computer program was the 2nd Circuit’s 2005 opinion in Krause v. Titleserv, Inc., 402 F.3d 119. There, the court held that a person owns a copy of software if he “exercises sufficient incidents of ownership over a copy of the program to be sensibly considered the owner of the copy . . . .” As the Copyright Office noted in its 2012 recommendation to the Librarian of Congress, the 2006 and 2010 rules exempting cell phone unlocking from the DMCA reflected an understanding, based in part on the holding in Krause, that a typical cell phone owner exercises a level of dominion over her device (and its digital contents) more akin to traditional property ownership than the licensed use of property owned by another.

But in 2010, the 9th Circuit took a very different approach in  Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., 621 F.3d 1102, in which the court held that a “software user is a licensee rather than an owner of a copy where the copyright owner (1) specifies that the user is granted a license; (2) significantly restricts the user’s ability to transfer the software; and (3) imposes notable use restrictions.” Because a typical cell phone owner is bound by a “click-wrap” agreement that significantly restricts her ownership rights in her phone’s operating system, she’s arguably a licensee of the software—not an owner of a copy—according to Vernor.

In light of the  Vernor-Krause circuit split, combined with pronounced trend toward more permissive carrier unlocking policies in recent years, the Librarian of Congress substantially curtailed the exemption for cell phone unlocking for all new phones purchased after January 26, 2013. Today, an owner of a new phone may unlock it only if “the operator of the wireless communications network to which the handset is locked has failed to unlock it within a reasonable period of time following a request by the owner of the wireless telephone handset, and when circumvention is initiated by the owner, an individual consumer, who is also the owner of the copy of the computer program in such wireless telephone handset . . . .”

So it is that cell phone unlocking is now in many cases a violation of federal law. (For more background, check out the writings of Timothy Lee at Ars Technica, Derek Khanna at The Atlantic, and Mike Masnick at Techdirt.)

How would the bills recently introduced in Congress address the cell phone unlocking issue? Let’s take a look at each bill.

The Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act

To begin with the simplest of the cell phone unlocking bills, Sens. Leahy, Grassley, Franken, and Hatch’s Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act (S.517) would simply amend the Code of Federal Regulations, replacing the pertinent paragraph from the Librarian of Congress’s 2012 rulemaking (codified at 37 C.F.R. § 201.40(b)(3)) with its more permissive 2010 analogue. The bill also tasks the Librarian of Congress with determining whether to extend the unlocking exemption to other wireless devices (e.g., mobile broadband-enabled tablets), based on the DMCA’s usual rulemaking criteria.

By restoring the broad DMCA exemption for phone unlocking in force from 2006 to 2012, S.517 addresses the problem at hand without going too far. It neither forces carriers to help users unlock their phones, nor limits carriers’ ability to recover damages from subscribers who breach their contracts. Rather, the bill would simply shield users who unlock their cell phones from the DMCA’s harsh penalties. In striking this balance, S.517 deserves credit for aiming to solve a discrete problem with a narrowly-tailored solution.

But would S.517’s fix last? Given that “[n]othing in [the] Act alters . . . the authority of the Librarian of Congress under [the DMCA],” S.517 would presumably leave unchanged the substantial deference enjoyed by the Librarian regarding his decisions about which circumvention tools to exempt—including cell phone unlocking tools. If, three years from now, the Librarian boldly decides that his 2012 decision to curtail the phone unlocking exemption was correct, and thus restores the language currently in force, Congress will be back at square one.

For a more lasting solution, Congress could act under the Congressional Review Act (“CRA”) to pass a resolution expressing its disapproval of the Librarian’s 2012 rule. If both houses of Congress were to pass such a resolution, and the President were to sign it, the narrow cell phone unlocking rule would be nullified—permanently. And the Librarian couldn’t simply reissue the rule, as a rule nullified under the CRA “may not be reissued in substantially the same form.” 5 U.S.C. § 801(b)(2).

Admittedly, this would be a novel use of the CRA. Congress has historically used the law’s disapproval procedure to review rules promulgated by “ordinary” federal agencies (i.e., agencies that are entirely within the Executive Branch). Nevertheless, the Library of Congress is arguably an “agency” for purposes of the CRA insofar as it promulgates rules of general applicability. As the D.C. Circuit recently held in Intercollegiate Broad. Sys., Inc. v. Copyright Royalty Bd., when the Library of Congress exercises its “powers . . . to promulgate copyright regulations . . . the Library is undoubtedly a ‘component of the Executive Branch.'” 684 F.3d 1332, 1341-42 (D.C. Cir. 2012) (citing Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Bd., 130 S.Ct. 3138, 3163 (2010)).

The Wireless Device Independence Act

Sen. Ron Wyden’s Wireless Device Independence Act (S.467) is the only cell phone unlocking bill that actually amends the DMCA. It would add to section 1201 a clause specifying that modifying software on a mobile device so that it operates on a different network is exempt from the law. While his colleagues dance around the underlying problem—the DMCA itself—Sen. Wyden tackles it head-on. To his credit, this approach embodies Congress exercising its proper constitutional role. If the legislative branch is dissatisfied with how an agency has exercised its statutorily delegated authority, the legislature ought to respond by amending the agency’s enabling statute.

However, S.467 contains a potentially massive loophole: it only exempts from DMCA liability “user[s] [who] legally own[] a copy of the computer program” installed on their mobile phone. In other words, the bill would do nothing for users who are mere licensees of the software installed on their phone. This may not matter for residents of the three states under the jurisdiction of the Second Circuit, where Krause controls—but for cell phone owners in the Ninth Circuit, where Vernor controls, S.467 is unlikely to offer much relief. Because most mobile operating systems are accompanied by click-wrap contracts that impose significant use and transfer restrictions on users, under Vernor these users are considered licensees, rather than owners of a copy of the operating system.

If the Wireless Device Independence Act were enacted, therefore, most Americans wishing to unlock their cell phones would still face significant legal uncertainty regarding their potential liability under the DMCA. To remedy this, the bill could extend its safe harbor to encompass cell phone unlocking by licensees, as well as owners, of software.

The Wireless Consumer Choice Act

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, along with Sens. Mike Lee and Richard Blumenthal, take a very different approach from their colleagues in their Wireless Consumer Choice Act (S.481). The bill’s full text is worth posting (PDF):

Pursuant to its authorities under title III of the Communications Act of 1934 . . . the [FCC], not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, shall direct providers of commercial mobile services and commercial mobile data services to permit the subscribers of such services, or the agent of such subscribers, to unlock any type of wireless device used to access such services. Nothing in this Act alters, or shall be construed to alter, the terms of any valid contract between a provider and a subscriber.

Note the absence of any explicit amendments to the DMCA or related regulations, or any mention of circumvention tools. Instead, the bill empowers the FCC to regulate carriers’ unlocking policies, yet leaves the DMCA intact. This drafting decision has led some commentators to pan the legislation, questioning its effectiveness and scope.

While I too have serious concerns about S.481, I think Sina Khanifar (who started the White House petition about cell phone unlocking) may be incorrect to suggest the bill “doesn’t do anything at all.” It seems to me that S.481 would alter the DMCA’s unwritten contours, albeit in narrow ways.

How can a law that doesn’t even mention the DMCA effectively “rewrite” its anti-circumvention provisions? Consider that S.481 and the DMCA’s section 1201 both purport to deal with the subject of cell phone unlocking. To borrow a term from legal Latin, the two laws are in pari materia (“upon the same subject”). While section 1201 focuses on the general issue of circumvention of copyright access controls without mentioning cell phone unlocking, S.481 specifically and exclusively addresses cell phone unlocking.

So how would a court reconcile S.481 with section 1201 if a mobile subscriber were sued for unlocking his cell phone despite his full compliance with the carrier’s service contract? Here’s an excerpt from the leading treatise on statutory interpretation, Sutherland Statutory Construction, summarizing how courts have historically sought to reconcile incompatible statutes:

Where one statute deals with a subject in general terms and another deals with a part of the same subject in a more detailed way, the two should be harmonized if possible. But if two statutes conflict, the general statute must yield to the specific statute involving the same subject . . . .

2B Sutherland Statutory Construction § 51:5 (7th ed.) (internal citations omitted).

The DMCA, it seems, must yield to S.481—at least as far as contractually-authorized cell phone unlocking is concerned. As Sean Flaim points out, if you unlock your phone with help from your carrier, it cannot be said that you’ve “circumvented” a technological measure. Thus, under S.481, carriers would lose their existing ability under the DMCA (17 U.S.C. § 1203) to sue a subscriber who has unlocked his phone without breaching his service contract. Similarly, the law might deny the DMCA’s civil remedies to other rights holders—say, mobile operating system creators—against consumers who unlock their phones without breaching any contractual provisions. S.481 also purports to eliminate criminal liability in such situations; as Sen. Mike Lee explained in a joint statement announcing the bill, “[c]onsumers shouldn’t have to fear criminal charges if they want to unlock their cell phones and switch carriers.”

But courts could just as well construe S.481 to effect none of these changes. There is no such thing as  stare decisis  when it comes to statutory construction. If Congress wanted to alter the DMCA, courts might reason, Congress would have done just that. S.481 simply requires that carriers help off-contract subscribers unlock their phones, so why read into the statute a meaning that conflicts with other laws?

Perhaps there are persuasive reasons for trying to tweak the DMCA without actually amending the law, but I’m not aware of any. Given how widely courts vary in interpreting vague statutes, it’s awfully risky to gamble on judges who review S.481 correctly divining Congress’s intent if it enacts the law.

Another worrisome aspect of S.481 is its expansion of the FCC’s regulatory authority to encompass cell phone unlocking. While this grant of authority may seem innocuous, Congress should think twice before involving the FCC in mobile carriers’ decisions about when to permit subscribers to unlock their phones. If the FCC is tasked with policing carriers’ policies regarding cell phone unlocking, the agency might interpret this narrow grant of jurisdiction as a grant of  “ancillary authority” to dictate the contours of mobile service contracts (not that the FCC isn’t already eager to regulate this space). The FCC is notorious for taking an extremely broad view of its own powers; as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned, the FCC’s willingness to overreach “raises the specter of discretionary FCC regulation of the Internet not just in the area of net neutrality, but also in a host of other areas.”

Given the FCC’s historically limited understanding of how markets work, unleashing it on the wireless industry is especially unwise. This isn’t a market in need of regulation; in fact, consumers enjoy plenty of choices among devices, carriers, and payment plans. If you want to buy the latest smartphone sans carrier lock, chances are you can order it today and have it on your doorstep tomorrow. If anything, Congress should be exploring ways to shrink  the FCC’s role in the mobile communications space, among others.

Conclusion

Like co-liberator Jerry Brito, I think the ideal public policy approach to cell phone unlocking is fairly straightforward. If I own a cell phone, I should be free to modify its software (or hardware) so that it works on any carrier’s network—unless I’ve agreed in contract not to unlock my phone. If I go ahead and unlock my phone anyway, I owe my carrier compensation for its damages resulting from my breach—which are typically specified in advance in the form of an early termination fee. If the contract doesn’t specify an early termination fee, I owe my carrier damages equal to the amount necessary to put the carrier in the same position it would have ended up had I held up my end of the bargain. This is the common law in action, simple yet elegant.

Notice that the approach I’ve outlined makes no mention of the Copyright Act. That a particular type of wrongful conduct happens to involve a copyrighted work doesn’t necessarily make it proper to invoke the copyright laws. While I support robust copyright protection, tweaking the operating software installed on my own phone so that it will operate on my preferred mobile carrier is a far cry from actionable copyright infringement. The potential market for Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, or Windows Phone 8 suffers no adverse effect if a user unlocks her smartphone so she can switch carriers. As the Copyright Office explained in 2006:

[T]he access controls do not appear to actually be deployed in order to protect the interests of the copyright owner or the value or integrity of the copyrighted work; rather, they are used by wireless carriers to limit the ability of subscribers to switch to other carriers, a business decision that has nothing whatsoever to do with the interests protected by copyright.

This is not to say that carriers are wrong to limit some subscribers’ ability to switch networks. To the contrary, American consumers enjoy substantial benefits thanks to the availability of carrier-subsidized, locked cell phones, as George Ford, Thomas Koutsky, and Larry Spiwak argue in A Policy and Economic Exploration of Wireless Carterfone Regulation, 25 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L.J. 647 (2009). The question is thus not whether consumers should be permitted to unlock their cell phones, but what legal regime(s) should deter wrongful unlocking. As Jerry rightly argues, contract law affords mobile carriers a far more appropriate set of remedies for wrongful unlocking than the Copyright Act does.

Cell phone unlocking may be a fairly clear-cut issue, but the broader debate over whether, and to what extent, federal laws should ban tools that circumvent technological measures protecting copyrighted works is anything but straightforward. Critics of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions offer powerful arguments why Congress shouldn’t be in the business of banning technologies, but there remains a fine line between selling lock picking tools and helping people unlawfully pick locks. In a forthcoming essay, I’ll explore the anti-circumvention debate in greater detail.

For a scholarly treatment of the interplay between the DMCA and cell phone unlocking, check out Daniel J. Corbett’s article,  Would You Like That iPhone Locked or Unlocked?: Reconciling Apple’s Anticircumvention Measures with the DMCA, 8 U. Pitt. J. Tech. L. Pol’y 8 (2008).

According to the BBC, the European Commission is apparently set to adopt formal rules guaranteeing a so-called “right to be forgotten” online.  As part of the Commission’s overhaul of the 1995 Data Protection Directive, this new regulation will mandate that, “people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms will have to comply unless there are ‘legitimate’ grounds to retain it,” the BBC reports.

I’ve written about “right to be forgotten” and “online eraser button” proposals before in my Forbes essay, “Erasing Our Past On The Internet,” a Mercatus white paper on “Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet: Finding the Right Balance.” and in this essay here on the TLF on “The Conflict Between a “Right to Be Forgotten” & Speech / Press Freedoms.” While I can appreciate the privacy and reputational concerns that lead to calls for such information controls, the reality is that a mandatory “right to be forgotten” is a recipe for massive Internet censorship.  As I noted in those earlier essays, such notions conflict violently with speech rights and press freedoms. Enshrining into law such expansive privacy norms places stricter limits on others’ rights to speak freely, or to collect and analyze information about others.

The ramifications for journalism are particularly troubling. Good reporting often requires being “nosy” while gathering facts. Journalists (and historians) might suddenly be subjected to restraints on their research and writing. The Brits have been struggling with this when trying to enforce gag orders and “super-injunctions” on media providers to protect privacy. It hasn’t turned out well, especially since new social media platforms and speakers easily evade these rules. (See my Forbes column, “With Freedom of Speech, The Technological Genie Is Out of the Bottle.”)

Thus, for a “right to be forgotten” to work, a more formal and robust information control regime will need to be devised to censor the Net and make it “forget”about the digital footprints we left online. Will the DMCA’s “notice and takedown” model be applied? Beyond the chilling effect associated with dragnet takedowns of online information, it’s unlikely that approach will really work. Keep in mind, this isn’t as simple as just telling large social media operators to delete information on demand. The reality is, as computer scientist Ben Adida notes in his essay “(Your) Information Wants to be Free,” the same forces and factors that complicate other forms of information control, such a copyright and speech restrictions, also complicate the protection of facts about you. “[I]nformation replication doesn’t discriminate: your personal data, credit cards and medical problems alike, also want to be free. Keeping it secret is really, really hard,” Adida correctly notes.

The fact is, information is instantaneously replicated online many times over on many different platforms — sometimes manually, sometimes automatically. Regulation will need to grapple with how to put the genie back in the bottle when countless others have already forwarded or commented on the piece of information someone later wants “forgotten.” And how would automated online archiving / storage services be affected? Will such sites and services be expected to find and purge every possible mention / reference of the offending information? Will they be compensated for the countless requests they receive to delete countless pieces of digital information, or are they just expected to do that out of the goodness of their hearts?

I could go on, but instead I’d just ask that you read some of the essays I’ve already cited and then take a look at this outstanding essay on “9 Reasons Why a ‘Right to be Forgotten’ is Really Wrong,” by Joris van Hoboken, a PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. It’s an outstanding critique of the notion.

Please keep in mind: Just because I raise questions like these it does not mean I’m opposed to the notion that online operators should be held to higher standards and be expected to properly safeguard our online information and perhaps even delete much of it upon request. But moving this process into the legal / regulatory arena opens up a huge Pandora’s Box of potential problems. Censoring the Net — even when it’s for a cause many favor — is very hard and will give rise to many unintended consequences.

[P.S. Here’s a podcast conversation about these issues where Jerry Brito and I discuss the ramifications of such a regulatory regime.]

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a controversial bill before the House of Representatives aimed at combating “rogue websites,” isn’t just about criminal, foreign-based sites that break U.S. intellectual property laws with impunity. Few dispute that these criminal websites that profit from large-scale counterfeiting and copyright infringement are a public policy problem. SOPA’s provisions, however, extend beyond these criminal sites, and would potentially subject otherwise law-abiding Internet intermediaries to serious legal risks.

Before moving forward with rogue websites legislation, it’s crucial that lawmakers take a deep breath and appreciate the challenges at stake in legislating online intermediary liability, lest we endanger the Nozickian “utopia of utopias” that is today’s Internet. The unintended consequences of overbroad, carelessly drafted legislation in this space could be severe, particularly given the Internet’s incredible importance to the global economy, as my colleagues have explained on these pages (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

To understand why SOPA could be a game-changer for online service providers, it’s important to understand the simmering disagreement surrounding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which grants certain online service providers a safe harbor from liability for their users’ copyright infringing actions. In exchange for these protections, service providers must comply with the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system, adopt a policy to terminate users who repeatedly infringe, and meet several other conditions. Service providers are only eligible for this safe harbor if they act to expeditiously remove infringing materials upon learning of them. Also ineligible for the safe harbor are online service providers who turn a blind eye to “red flags” of obvious infringement.

The DMCA does not, however, require providers to monitor their platforms for infringing content or design their services to facilitate monitoring. Courts have held that a DMCA-compliant service provider does not lose its safe harbor protection if it fails to act upon generalized knowledge that its service is used for many infringing activities, in addition to lawful ones, so long as the service provider does not induce or encourage users’ infringing activities.

Defenders of the DMCA safe harbor argue that it’s helped enable America’s Internet-based economy to flourish, allowing an array of web businesses built around lawful user-generated content — including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter — to thrive without fear of copyright liability or burdensome monitoring mandates.

Conversely, some commentators, including UCLA’s Doug Lichtman, argue that the DMCA inefficiently tips the scales in favor of service providers, to the detriment of content creators — and, ultimately, consumer welfare. Pointing to a series of court rulings interpreting the safe harbor’s provisions, critics argue that the DMCA gives online intermediaries little incentive to do anything beyond the bare minimum to stop copyright infringement. Critics further allege that the safe harbor has been construed so broadly that it shields service providers that are deliberately indifferent to their users’ infringing activities, however rampant they may be.

What does SOPA have to do with all of this? Buried in the bill’s 78 pages are several provisions that run a very real risk of effectively sidestepping many of the protections conferred on online service providers by the DMCA safe harbor.

Section 102

Section 102 of SOPA empowers the Attorney General to seek a court order against an allegedly infringing foreign website. Such a court order would, if granted, effectively deny the site access to payment processors, ad networks, and even parts of the domain name system. Under § 102, a foreign, U.S.-directed website is deemed a “foreign infringing site” if:

[T]he owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations [involving illegal copyright infringement, counterfeiting, or theft of trade secrets] and the Internet site would . . . [therefore] be subject to seizure in the United States . . . if such site were a domestic Internet site.

The part about websites “subject to seizure in the United States” refers to 18 U.S.C. § 2323, which states among other things that “[p]roperty subject to forfeiture” includes:

Any property used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part to commit or facilitate the commission of [criminal copyright or trademark infringement].

This definition of a “foreign infringing site” is enormously troubling. Note the absence of any requirement of actual or constructive knowledge on the part of the site operator, let alone criminal intent. Under § 102, a foreign website built around user-generated content may be deemed an “infringing site” simply because its server has facilitated the criminally infringing acts of a single user — even if the site operator neither induced nor knew of the user’s unlawful activities. While an innocent foreign site operator might eventually be able to persuade a court to vacate an order deeming it a “foreign infringing site,” SOPA imposes an astonishingly low burden on the Attorney General of showing that a site is a “foreign infringing site.” If the bill is enacted as is, foreign websites that contain any user-generated content had better watch out.

SOPA proponents defend § 102 by pointing out that its definition of infringing sites comes straight out of the 2008 PRO-IP Act, which established the aforementioned civil forfeiture provision in 18 U.S.C. § 2323. But this statute’s constitutionality is currently being challenged in federal court by a team of attorneys that includes Stanford law professor and copyright guru Mark Lemley. The law’s breadth raises serious First Amendment concerns since it permits ex parte seizures of entire outlets of speech (e.g., websites) simply because the outlet has been used in some unlawful manner. SOPA may be based on existing law, but why should Congress extend this overbroad provision of the PRO-IP Act to encompass an even broader range of websites? If anything, lawmakers should revisit PRO-IP and narrow its applicability to sites intentionally operated for the purpose of committing or facilitating criminal infringement. Via Techdirt, even Floyd Abrams, a constitutional scholar who represents content companies that strongly back SOPA, conceded in a recent letter to Congress that unanswered questions remain regarding the constitutionality of 18 U.S.C. § 2323.

Section 103

The next section of SOPA, Section 103, isn’t any better. This section provides for private rights holders to seek court orders against U.S.-directed websites — including domestic sites — to deny them access to U.S. payment processors and ad networks. Section 103 deems a website “dedicated to theft of U.S. property” if any of the following conditions are met:

1. [The site] is primarily designed or operated for the purpose of, has only limited purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator for use in, offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables, or facilitates [copyright infringement, circumvention of copyright protection systems, or trademark infringement]; or
2. [The site operator] is taking, or has taken, deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the . . . site to carry out acts that constitute [copyright infringement or the circumvention of copyright protection systems]; or
3. [The site operator] operates the . . . site with the object of promoting, or has promoted, its use to carry out acts that constitute [copyright infringement or the circumvention of copyright protection systems], as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement.

The first prong of this definition encompasses any website that “has only limited purpose or use other than . . . engag[ing] in, enabl[ing], or facilitat[ing]” copyright infringement, circumvention of copyright protection systems, or trademark infringement. This language comes from 17 U.S.C. § 1201, also known as the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions. Just how “limited” of non-infringing uses must a site have to meet this definition? It’s hard to say. As Rob Pegoraro cheekily observed in a recent Roll Call op-ed, “‘[l]imited’ is one of those wonderfully elastic words — notice the ever-longer yet still ‘limited’ copyright terms granted to artists and creators?” This section of SOPA would be more clear if it relied on the “capable of substantial non-infringing uses” test originally articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its famous 1984 Betamax opinion, Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., which has since been interpreted by numerous federal courts in copyright infringement cases.

The second prong of the § 103 definition, which covers websites that take “deliberate actions to avoid confirming a [high probability of infringement],” is perhaps the most worrisome of the three prongs. This language appears to have been lifted directly from a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision,  Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A. In that case, a patent infringement lawsuit, the Court found the defendant liable for inducement on the grounds that it took willful steps to blind itself of the existence of the patent at suit. The Court held that “willful blindness” exists when (1) a defendant subjectively believes that there is a high probability that a fact exists; and (2) the defendant takes deliberate actions to avoid learning of that fact.

Note, however, that Section 103 omits the first prong of the Global Tech willful blindness test, the subjective belief element. This omission might simply be an oversight — or it could reveal the intent of the bill’s authors to cast aside the subjective knowledge standard (which currently applies to service providers in the context of knowledge for purposes of the DMCA) and replace it with an objective, “reasonable person” standard. If plaintiff bringing a SOPA action is only required to show that a website operator should have known of its users’ infringement from the perspective of a “reasonable” operator, and that the site’s operator acted in some manner that had the effect of contributing to its ignorance of infringing activities by users, a vast array of websites that currently enjoy the protections of the DMCA safe harbor may face significant new legal risks. After all, website operators make design decisions all the time that might foreseeably impact on their awareness (or lack thereof) of user’ potentially infringing activities. Who knows what sort of well-intentioned, albeit deliberate, decisions might amount to”avoiding confirming a high probability” of infringement?

As David Sohn of the Center for Democracy & Technology has pointed out, “[t]his seems like a backdoor way of imposing a monitoring obligation on any website that allows users to post content.”  Temple Law Professor David Post, writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, observed that the bill might make it a “violation of law to keep the prosecutors from ‘confirming’ that you’re violating the law — all the prosecutor has to show, to make you vanish from the Net, is that you’ve somehow tried to keep the prosecutor off of your website!”

Why SOPA Could Endanger the DMCA Safe Harbor

SOPA proponents have dismissed concerns that the bill would risk undermining the DMCA safe harbor. U.S. Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante, testifying in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on SOPA on November 16, told members of Congress that it was extremely unlikely that any actions brought under SOPA would impact websites otherwise shielded by the DMCA safe harbor. Techdirt reports that Viacom executive Stanley Pierre-Louis recently argued that SOPA would not “[expand] the scope of secondary liability claims and [diminish] DMCA protections,” noting that “[t]here is no rule that permits ‘willful blindness’ of obvious wrongdoing under U.S. law, and nothing in the DMCA or any other statute has been deemed to hold otherwise.”

Technically, Pallante and Pierre-Louis are correct; SOPA’s provision at 102(c)(2)(A)(iii) appears to leave existing doctrines of copyright liability vis-à-vis the DMCA safe harbor untouched.

In practice, however, SOPA has the potential to effectively usurp the DMCA safe harbor in important respects. If the bill is enacted, online service providers would face a new worst nightmare: being cut off from payment processors, ad networks, and possibly even Internet service providers. As Eric Goldman recently explained, if a “website goes offline because of cash flow problems caused by the cutoff attributable to a single UGC content item, all of the UGC on that website goes dark because of a single content item.”

To avoid such an outcome, website operators will likely do everything they can to avoid falling under SOPA’s definitions — even if that means going above and beyond the requirements of the DMCA safe harbor. While I’m all for websites voluntarily taking prudent and measured actions to combat unlawful user activities (e.g., YouTube’s Content ID system), there are good reasons to be very skeptical of any legislation that effectively imposes on site operators any duty or obligation to monitor, or facilitate the monitoring of, user activities.

Fair concerns have been raised by thoughtful commentators about the DMCA’s limitations and shortcomings. Those concerns deserve a serious examination in the halls of Congress, and perhaps may even merit some careful, targeted tweaks to the DMCA. But the extraordinary remedies provided contained in SOPA should be reserved for genuine rogue sites that willfully flout U.S. laws with impunity and are beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement authorities. While there are U.S.-based websites out there that violate copyright and trademark laws, extraordinary remedies (such as “going after the money”) should not be the primary method of penalizing such sites. If a rights holder believes that a domestic website is infringing on its copyright or trademark, the proper means of obtaining recourse is to file a civil lawsuit and, when appropriate, seek injunctive relief. The U.S. Marshals Service is tasked with enforcing civil judgments and other court orders entered against domestic actors by federal courts, and parties may obtain writs of execution to order law enforcement intervention against American individuals or businesses that violate court orders.

We Have To Pass The Bill To Find Out What’s In It

Reasonable people read SOPA’s provisions in very different ways. For instance, Terry Hart, writing at Copyhype, has eloquently defended SOPA’s definitions, arguing that “[t]he actions that would subject a provider to SOPA’s provisions are the same ones that would subject it to a copyright infringement suit under existing law and are actions that would not be protected under DMCA safe harbors.” But while SOPA’s definitions are based largely on well-established, time-tested statutes and precedents, some of the language isn’t as clear-cut as it might seem at first glance, as I explain above.

As a result, it’s tough to predict how SOPA would actually impact online service providers. Federal judges vary widely in the methods they employ in attempting to interpret vague statutes. There is no such thing as stare decisis when it comes to statutory construction; some judges focus on the plain meaning of a statute’s language, while others pour through committee reports and hearing transcripts in hopes of divining the legislature’s true underlying intent.

With apologies to Nancy Pelosi, what this means is that we probably won’t know what’s in SOPA until it’s passed. Even then, only after years of costly litigation will the contours of the bill’s provisions likely begin to approach a state of clarity. Consider that the DMCA, now thirteen years old, continues to engender serious disagreement among federal courts to this day. (For instance, courts disagree on what it means for a service provider to take “volitional acts” that encourage users to engage in infringement.)

SOPA’s potential breadth is especially problematic given that its potential victims are small, entrepreneurial Internet start-ups that lack the resources to pay a team of lawyers to examine their operational decisions for potential SOPA violations. As leading high-tech venture capitalist Fred Wilson has argued, “venture capitalists will think more than twice about putting $3mm of early stage capital into startups if they know that the vast majority of the funds will go to pay lawyers to defend the companies instead of to hire engineers to create and build product.”

Lawmakers Should Tread Carefully

While combating rogue foreign websites that violate U.S. laws flagrantly and with impunity should be a priority for lawmakers, SOPA’s definitions and remedies are simply too broad and too vague in their current form. They would cast a cloud of legal uncertainty over America’s innovative, startup-driven Internet economy. It would be a grave mistake to grant such powerful new tools to Justice Department and rights holders and assume that federal trial judges will interpret SOPA’s provisions as narrowly as is necessary to ensure legitimate Internet companies do not suffer adverse effects.

The recent House Judiciary Committee hearing on SOPA made clear just how much work remains to be done to craft an effective but targeted approach to rogue sites. Serious questions remain unresolved — not only about SOPA’s impact of the DMCA safe harbor, but also about cybersecurity, due process and free speech. Additional hearings are needed to explore these important issues with Internet engineers, law professors, and venture capitalists. Marking up the legislation before the end of 2011 — as Chairman Lamar Smith desires, according to the National Journal — would be a serious mistake.

For more on SOPA and rogue websites legislation; see: 

• Ryan Radia, Preliminary Thoughts  on Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
• Ryan Radia, Congress Should Amend SOPA to Address Cybersecurity, Due Process Concerns
• Ryan Radia, Congress takes another stab at combating Rogue Websites with the PROTECT IP Act
• Ryan Radia, Five Ways Congress Can Fix COICA Copyright Bill
• Joint Letter from Public Interest Groups to the House Judiciary Committee on the Stop Online Piracy Act
• Timothy B. Lee, ArsTechnica, The Stop Online Piracy Act: Big Content’s full-on assault against the Safe Harbor
• Letter from Sens. Ron Wyden, Rand Paul, Jerry Moran, and Maria Cantwell to Congressional Leadership objecting to the PROTECT IP Act
• U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s Opening Letter on SOPA
• Prof. Eric Goldman, Why I Oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)/E-PARASITES Act
• Prof. David Post, How About Occupy Hollywood?
• Fred Wilson, Protecting The Safe Harbors Of The DMCA And Protecting Jobs
• Terry Hart, SOPA: New remedies for existing liability
• Rob Pegoraro, Online Piracy Act is Copyright Overreach
• Center for Democracy & Technology, The Stop Online Piracy Act: Summary, Problems and Implications
• Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge, House Version of Rogue Websites Bill Adds DMCA Bypass, Penalties for DNS Workarounds
• Techdirt’s SOPA coverage
• Parker Higgins, Electronic Frontier Foundation, What’s On the Blacklist? Three Sites That SOPA Could Put at Risk
• Corynne McSherry, Electronic Frontier Foundation, SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet
• Larry Downes, TechFreedom, SOPA: Hollywood’s latest effort to turn back time

User-driven websites — also known as online intermediaries — frequently come under fire for disabling user content due to bogus or illegitimate takedown notices. Facebook is at the center of the latest controversy involving a bogus takedown notice. On Thursday morning, the social networking site disabled Ars Technica’s page after receiving a DMCA takedown notice alleging the page contained copyright infringing material. While details about the claim remain unclear, given that Facebook restored Ars’s page yesterday evening, it’s a safe bet that the takedown notice was without merit.

Understandably, Ars Technica wasn’t exactly pleased that its Facebook page — one of its top sources of incoming traffic — was shut down for seemingly no good reason. Ars was particularly disappointed by how Facebook handled the situation. In an article posted yesterday (and updated throughout the day), Ars co-founder Ken Fisher and senior editor Jacqui Cheng chronicled their struggle in getting Facebook to simply discuss the situation with them and allow Ars to respond to the takedown notice.

Facebook took hours to respond to Ars’s initial inquiry, and didn’t provide a copy of takedown notice until the following day. Several other major tech websites, including ReadWriteWeb and TheNextWeb, also covered the issue, noting that Ars Technica is the latest in a series of websites to have suffered from their Facebook page being wrongly disabled. In a follow-up article posted today, Ars elaborated on what happened and offered some tips to Facebook on how it could have better handled the situation.

It’s totally fair to criticize how Facebook deals with content takedown requests. Ars is right that the company could certainly do a much better job of handling the process, and Facebook will hopefully re-evaluate its procedures in light of this widely publicized snafu. In calling out Facebook’s flawed approach to dealing with takedown requests, however, Ars Technica doesn’t do justice to the larger, more fundamental problem of bogus takedown notices.

As Mike Masnick explains on Techdirt, U.S. federal laws strongly discourage online intermediaries from trying to figure out if takedown notices are legitimate or not. If Facebook were to refuse to comply with a copyright takedown notice that subsequently turned out to be meritorious, it would lose its safe harbor provided for in 17 U.S.C. § 512(c). Should Facebook err in its judgment, therefore, it would potentially be on the hook for harsh copyright infringement penalties. In effect, the DMCA incentivizes what Masnick describes as “massive overreactions” by online intermediaries.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some simple steps Facebook could take to combat bogus takedown notices without exposing itself to additional liability, especially in “easy” cases, as Ars and others have argued. Verifying that takedown notices are associated with valid email addresses is one such step that Facebook apparently does not currently employ. Facebook could also be more responsive to users whose content has been disabled, at least when the content in question is highly visible.

Perhaps more importantly, Facebook should adopt a system for enabling users who believe their content has been wrongly disabled to file a counter notification. YouTube, for instance, has a slick online system that lets users challenge wrongful takedown requests. Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(g), an online service provider may restore previously-disabled content between 10 and 14 days after receipt of a valid counter notification if the content owner hasn’t initiated legal proceedings. It’s odd that Facebook hasn’t adopted an online counter notification system, especially given that service providers are shielded from liability if they respond to counter notices in accordance with section 512(g).

While it would be great if Facebook were to manually and thoroughly screen all user complaints and requests, expecting online intermediaries to pay for a live human being — say, an intellectual property lawyer or a paralegal — to vet the legal merits of each takedown notice is simply unreasonable. Facebook has more than 600 million active users, but a mere 2,000 or so employees (although that number may soon grow substantially). That’s over 300,000 users per employee!

And let’s not forget that Facebook is a free service. The company generated a scant $4 of revenue per user in 2010. Facebook’s going to have to do a much better job of monetizing its platform before we can reasonably expect it to vet legal requests on its users’ behalf. Even Google — with a head count and revenue more than ten times Facebook’s — is frequently chastised for not doing enough to identify bogus or otherwise invalid takedown notices. Based on some of the “horror stories” that have been reported recently, Ars Technica is lucky that Facebook restored its page within a day of its removal.

Even if Facebook improves its system, however, the underlying problem of bogus takedown notices is probably here to stay — that is, until Congress acts. Reopening the legislative debate over the DMCA is a risky gambit, but at least in theory, Congress could improve the statute by adopting some relatively minor tweaks.

First, the DMCA should do more to deter parties from filing invalid or bad faith DMCA takedown notices. Courts rarely punish parties for filing illegitimate takedown notices, as it is very difficult in practice to show  that a notice was filed in bad faith. All in all, the overwhelming majority of incidents of bogus takedown notices go unpunished, as I’ve discussed before on these pages.

Wendy Seltzer of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy chronicled the chilling effects of DMCA takedown abuses in a recent Harvard Journal of Law & Technology article. She suggests a few legislative fixes to 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) to better balance the interests of users and rightsholders:

The law should require greater diligence: declarations on penalty of perjury to match those required by the respondent, and perhaps even a bond against erroneous claims. . . . Strengthening the counter-suit provisions could encourage a plaintiffs’ bar to take up these cases as private attorneys general. Stiffening the penalties against claimants who obtained takedowns through misrepresentation of infringement would encourage claimants to verify and support their claims of infringement or penalize them for failure to do so rather than allowing them to shift that burden to service providers and posters.

Congress should also create a safe harbor, notice-and-takedown system for online trademark infringement, as Elizabeth Levin has argued. While copyright takedown notices receive most of the attention in the IP debates, there’s no DMCA-esque process established in statute to provide for online intermediaries to disable and repost allegedly trademark-infringing content.

In the ongoing copyright debates, areas of common ground are seemingly few and far between. It’s easy to forget that not all approaches to combating copyright infringement are mired in controversy. One belief that unites many stakeholders across the spectrum is that more efforts are needed to educate Internet users about copyright. The Internet has spawned legions of amateur content creators, but not all of the content that’s being created is original. Indeed, a great deal of online copyright infringement owes to widespread ignorance of copyright law and its penalties.

For its part, Google yesterday unveiled “Copyright School” for YouTube users. As Justin Green explains on the official YouTube blog, users whose accounts have been suspended for allegedly uploading infringing content will be required to watch this video and then correctly answer questions about it before their account will be reinstated:

Of course, boiling down the basics of copyright into a four and a half minute video is not an easy task, to put it mildly. (The authoritative treatment of copyright law, Nimmer on Copyright, fills an 11-volume treatise.) Copyright geeks and fans of “remix culture” will appreciate that Google’s video touches on fair use and includes links to in-depth resources for users to learn more about copyright. It will be interesting to see how Google’s effort influences the behavior of YouTube users and the incidence of repeat infringement.

Update: EFF’s Corynne McSherry has an essay up on the Deeplinks blog arguing that YouTube’s Copyright School video omits several important facts about copyright. She raises several very good points, but the unfortunate reality of copyright law is that uploading content that’s not substantially original — even in cases that might constitute fair use — is legally risky, particularly for those who aren’t familiar with copyright law. While I’d love to see YouTube create a follow-up video that explains fair use doctrine in an accessible manner, Google’s decision to urge YouTube uploaders to err on the side of caution is quite reasonable in light of the severity of the statutory penalties for copyright infringement.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it a crime to circumvent digital rights management technologies but allows the Librarian of Congress to exempt certain classes of works from this prohibition.

The Copyright Office just released a new rulemaking on this issue in which it allows people to “unlock” their cell phones so they can be used on other networks and “jailbreak” closed mobile phone operating systems like the iOS operating system on Apple’s iPhones so that they will run unapproved third-party software.

This is arguably good news for consumers: Those willing to void their warranties so they can teach their phone some new tricks no longer have to fear having their phone confiscated, being sued, or being imprisoned. (The civil and criminal penalties are described in 17 USC 1203 and 17 USC 1204.) Although the new exemption does not protect those who distribute unlocking and/or jailbreaking software (which would be classified under 17 USC 1201(b), and thus outside the exemption of 17 USC 1201(a)), the cases discussed below could mean that jailbreaking phones simply falls outside of the scope of all of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions.

Apple opposed this idea when it was initially proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, arguing that legalizing jailbreaking constituted a forced restructuring of its business model that would result in “significant functional problems” for consumers that could include “security holes and malware, as well as possible physical damage.” But who beyond a small number of geeks brave enough to give up their warranties and risk bricking their devices, is really going to attempt jailbreaking? One survey found that only 10% of iPhone users have jailbroken their phones, and the majority are in China, where the iPhone was not available legally until recently. Is it really likely that giving the tinkering minority the legal right to void their product warranties would cause any harm to the non-tinkering majority that will likely choose to instead remain within a manufacturer’s “walled garden“? I don’t think so. If, as a result of this ruling, large numbers of consumers jailbreak their phones and install pirated software, the Copyright Office can easily reconsider the exemption in its next Triennial Rulemaking.

While the ruling is heartening, it is not surprising. In Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Techs., Inc.,  the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that trafficking in a circumvention device violates Section 1201(a)(2) only if the circumvention enables access that “infringes or facilitates infringing a right protected by the Copyright Act.” The Chamberlain case involved unlicensed third-party garage door opener remotes. The Sixth Circuit came to a similar decision in Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., a case involving a software “handshake” between Lexmark printers and Lexmark-branded toner cartridges meant to keep third-party replacement toner cartridges off the market. The Copyright Office’s ruling is just another example of policymakers recognizing that Copyright law exists only to protect copyrighted works, not business models based on excluding access.

But self-help is a two-way street: Companies are, and should be, free to continue using their own “self-help” technical protection measures to prevent (or merely discourage) customers from reverse-engineering their products. This highlights what Larry Lessig describes as the distinction between East Coast Code (laws) and West Coast Code (software). It makes perfect sense for companies to avail themselves of all possible methods (software and laws) to protect their revenue streams, but lawbreakers, by definition, don’t respect laws. Although most technical protection measures have been woefully inadequate to date (see, e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, to name a few), cryptographically-secure code is much more likely to be effective in the long-term than laws.

While this decision probably doesn’t matter much for the average, non-tinkering consumer, tinkerers will be comforted by the fact that their hobby is no longer a crime, and without the threat of criminal sanctions, there should be more publicization of what the new mobile phones are really capable of. That, in turn, should put additional pressure on phone manufacturers to take off the training wheels and be a bit more open about what apps they allow on their devices.

While Apple is correct in pointing out that some users with jailbroken phones still call Apple’s technical support lines, it is quite impossible to accidentally jailbreak your phone and all of the websites with instructions on how to do so have extensive disclaimers warning about the possible consequences. At some point, consumers should be responsible for their own actions. The Librarian of Congress is willing to give them that responsibility. And whether they want to or not, phone manufacturers will to.

The “Cyber Privacy Act”? No it ain’t!

Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R) has introduced a bill to create a take-down regime for personal information akin to the widely abused DMCA process. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act established a system where copyright holders could as a practical matter force content off the Internet simply by requesting it.

McCotter’s proposal would similarly regulate every Internet site that has a comment section. He thinks it’s going to protect privacy, but he’s sorely mistaken. Its passage would undermine privacy and limit free speech.

I’ll take you through how McCotter’s gotten it wrong.

The operative language of H.R. 5108 is:

Any Internet website that makes available to the public personal information of individuals shall– (1) provide, in a clear and conspicuous location on the Internet website, a means for individuals whose personal information it contains to request the removal of such information; and (2) promptly remove the personal information of any individual who requests its removal.

The Federal Trade Commission would enforce the failure to abide by requests as it does unfair and deceptive trade practices. (Meaning: penalties.)

So if someone posts his or her name in a comment section and later regrets it, the operator of that web site would have to take it down. Sounds nice—and that is the right thing for webmasters to do when the circumstances warrant. But what about when they don’t?

Let’s say you run a site that receives hundreds or thousands of comments per day, many of them from anonymous visitors. Let’s say the site deals with controversial issues, and some visitors are angry at each other—they’re even angry at the site for hosting the discussion. Those visitors start working to undermine the conversation. They personally attack others, adopt false names, tell lies, and use vulgarities. This kind of person is well known on the web. They’re called “trolls.”

What would trolls do if federal law required webmasters to take down personal information by request? Simple: They would post the personal information of others. They would pose as others and falsely ask to have information taken down.

It’s a great way to attack a site: require it to consider hundreds or thousands of personal information take-down requests, each one backed by the threat of federal penalties.

What do you do as a webmaster to counter that? You require all comments to be tied to a fixed identity. Require a log-in before site visitors can comment. Then you can figure out later if the person requesting a take-down of personal information is the person who it pertains to.

What’s the result of that? Web sites collect and store more information about visitors. Then they turn around and use it for tracking and marketing. The information is available to litigators and government investigators, of course, through subpoenas and warrants.

Are you doing the math? McCotter’s “Cyber Privacy” bill is a proposal to increase Internet surveillance. Maybe he intends to improve Internet courtesy and decency. But decency is not a federal government project. It’s bottom-up, not top-down.

I write, of course, as a spare-time webmaster myself. The bills on WashingtonWatch.com get hundreds of comments per day. Many bills get lots of comments, but one in particular—subject of dispute, controversy, and trolling, along with productive political organizing—has over 130,000 comments.

I do a lot to foster a good visitor experience, consistent with maintaining the space available for free speech. I advise people about how to deal with trolls, I allow people to register so their stable identities can build trustworthy reputations, I proctor commenters about controlling vulgarities—sometimes strongly editing comments when they don’t, and I allow users to block commenters and words they don’t want to see.

When the context warrants it, I do remove personal information at the request of people that I believe are making honest, good faith requests. I think it’s part of what builds allegiance to the site.

But if I were required by law to do this, it would be an entirely different calculation. Each request would present me with a veiled legal threat, not a small customer service opportunity.

As trolls figured out how to exploit the law—the way some copyright holders exploit the DMCA—they could inundate small sites with requests. Webmasters would be right to treat all requests with suspicion. Confirming requests would require them to convert to greater surveillance. A percentage of the small sites and blogs that are hobbies or money-losers would just shut down comments rather than deal with the nonsense.

Representative McCotter’s plan to regulate Internet communications this way is no “Cyber Privacy” act. It’s anti-privacy, and it’s anti-free-speech.

We’ve discussed extensively the controversy that recently erupted when Apple rejected Google Voice applications from the iPhone App Store. With the FCC sniffing around and tech pundits around the blogosphere weighing in on the merits of possible government intervention, it’s important to remember that jailbreaking an iPhone may be illegal under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). In other words, if you use a hack or workaround that enables you to run banned apps like Google Voice on your iPhone, you could be violating federal law.

The DMCA hasn’t stopped millions of iPhone owners from jailbreaking their phones and installing Cydia, an unofficial alternative to the official iPhone App Store. Cydia, which lets users download banned iPhone apps like Google Voice, has been installed on a whopping one in ten iPhones, according to its developers.

But jailbreaking programs and applications like Cydia are in risky legal territory. Developers who circumvent the iPhone’s copy protection systems are at risk of being sued by Apple, as are users who run jailbreaking software. Apple maintains that jailbreaking software is illegal under federal law, though it has not taken legal action against any unauthorized iPhone developers to date.

To clear up the muddy legal waters surrounding iPhone jailbreaking, Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked the U.S. Copyright Office to grant a legal exemption to iPhone jailbreaking on the grounds that users should be able to install apps of their choice on the phone without risking civil or criminal sanctions. In a recent DeepLinks post, von Lohmann argues that the FCC should throw its weight behind EFF’s call for exempting jailbreaking from anti-circumvention rules.

Von Lohmann has a point. Unofficial software that reverse engineers copyrighted software for interoperability purposes shouldn’t be illegal. As former TLFer Tim Lee puts it, “Because reverse engineering is so important in transforming closed standards into open ones, we should be especially worried about laws that stand in the way of that process.”

Jailbreaking should be legal, but that doesn’t mean that Apple should have to make it easy for iPhone owners to jailbreak their phones. Rather, iPhone owners should be able develop and use jailbreaking software free from undue governmental interference. If Apple manages to concoct a bulletproof method of locking down the iPhone, or if AT&T wants to ban jailbreaking in its wireless terms of service, that’s fine. But the burden rests on Apple and AT&T to design adequate technical countermeasures against jailbreaking. At worst, the penalties for jailbreaking should not exceed the contractual terms that users accept when they buy an iPhone.

On the flip side, however, if independent developers devise a method of jailbreaking iPhones that Apple cannot block or detect, that’s Apple’s problem — not government’s. As Ed Felten argues:

The best policy is for government to stay out DRM decisionmaking altogether. Let companies like Apple develop DRM schemes. Let others interoperate with those schemes, if they can figure out how. Ensure competition, and let the market decide which products will succeed, and which DRM schemes are viable.

Granting a DMCA exemption for iPhone jailbreaking is a good start. Fundamentally, though, the real culprit here is the DMCA itself. Congress should reform the DMCA by overhauling its ban on circumvention technologies. Doing so would allow developers to freely distribute iPhone jailbreaking apps without running the risk of getting in legal trouble.

A good example of what DMCA reform ought to look like comes from the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act (DMCRA), a bill which was introduced unsuccessfully in Congress in 2003 and again in 2005. The bill would re-establish the legality of breaking copy-protection schemes for legal, non-infringing uses. It would also protect scientific research into copy protection technologies. (The DMCRA also contains some troubling provisions that deal with CD labeling, but that’s a separate matter).

I was very interested to read Berin’s post about the Boxee, a device I had not heard about until today. I’ve been asking for years why there are no good video jukebox products on the market, so I’m always interested to see new entrants in the market.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Boxee is a fork of the XBMC Media Center, which I first wrote about way back in 2006. The reason you may not have heard more about the XBMC Media Center is that it sits in an uncomfortable legal grey area. Thanks to the DMCA, one of its most inportant features—the ability to play and rip DVDs—is illegal. And there are probably other DMCA- and software-patent-related legal impediments to releasing a product like the XBMC. As a consequence, the major consumer electronics manufacturers have released relatively crippled set-top boxes that have not caught on with consumers.

Boxee’s wikipedia page suggests that Boxee uses libdvdcss, a cousin of the DeCSS library that the courts ruled to be an illegal “circumvention device” back in 2001. And the DMCA holds that someone who “trafficks” in a circumvention device “willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain” should be fined up to $500,000 and imprisoned for up to 5 years.

Now, the NYT article says that “Lawyers say that Boxee does not appear to be doing anything illegal,” although it doesn’t quote any actual lawyers, nor does it say which legal issues those lawyers examined. It’s possible that Boxee stripped out libdvdcss and replaced it with code that has been approved by the DVD founders. Moreover, it seems that Boxee’s strategy is to just build cool technologies and let the legal chips fall where they may:

Mr. Ronen said that like many start-ups, Boxee was definitely leaping without looking. “Don’t assume we have lawyers. That’s expensive,” he said.

This is a very risky strategy, both from a business perspective and for Ronen personally. But it’s also likely to pay off. If Ronen is able to get enough customers before the MPAA can be roused into taking legal action, they have a pretty good shot at winning the resulting PR war and forcing the MPAA to back down, even if the MPAA has the law on its side. And indeed, that may be the only way to break into this market, because if he plays by the rules he’ll never get the studios’ permission to build a set-top box the studios don’t control.

Fortunately, courts tend to be swayed by the perceived “legitimacy” of a technology’s designers. Remember, for example, that just 7 years after suing to keep MP3 players off the market, the recording industry insisted to the Supreme Court that everyone knew MP3 players were legal. There weren’t any changes to the law in the interim. Rather, MP3 players had become a familiar technology and so judges intuitively “knew” that any interpretation of the law that ruled out MP3 players must be wrong. If Boxee can grow fast enough, and can cultivate a “good citizen” image, it may be able to pursuade judges that any interpretation of the DMCA that precludes Boxee must be wrong.

The more fundamental point, of course, is that it’s ridiculous that Ronen has to worry about these legal issues in the first place. The copy protection technologies Ronen is circumventing haven’t stopped piracy, they’ve simply given Hollywood a legal club with which to bludgeon technology companies it doesn’t like. Had the DMCA not been on the books, we likely would have seen a proliferation of XBMC-like device and software on the market several years ago.

Readers of Tech Liberation Front may be interested in a new breakfast series that BroadbandCensus.com has recently begun.

The next event in this series, “Should Government Funding Be Part of a National Broadband Plan?” will be held on Tuesday, November 18, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., and will include Stan Fendley, the director of legislative and regulatory policy for Corning, Inc., Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), and John Windhausen, Jr., president of Telepoly Consulting. I will moderate the discussion.

Two weeks after Election Day, this Broadband Breakfast Club meeting will consider one of the hottest topics in telecom: can and should funding for broadband work its way into a pending fiscal stimulus package?

Future meetings of the breakfast club (December 2008 through March 2009) will consider the role of broadband applications in harnessing demand, how the universal service fund will be changed by high-speed internet, the role of wireless in universal broadband, and the extent of competition in the marketplace.

The Broadband Breakfast Club meets monthly at the Old Ebbitt Grill, at 675 15th Street, NW, in Washington. (It’s right across the street from the Department of the Treasury.)

Beginning at 8 a.m., an American plus Continental breakfast is available downstairs in the Cabinet Room. This is followed by a discussion about the question at hand, which ends at 10 a.m. Except for holidays (like Veteran’s Day), we’ll meet on the second Tuesday of each month, until March 2009. The registration page for the event is http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com.

Because of the limited size of the venue, seated attendance will be reserved the first 45 individuals to register. There are no restrictions on who may register to attend. With the exception of speakers, there is a $45.00 charge (plus a modest Eventbrite fee) to attend. The events are on the record.

We kicked off this series earlier this month with a well-attended breakfast on “10 Years Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Success or Failure?”

I started the Broadband Breakfast Club for the same reason that I started BroadbandCensus.com earlier this year: I believe that American consumers, policy-makers and broadband providers need better information about the issues surrounding high-speed internet access.

Today, broadband is (or could) the driver of citizen engagement, commerce, democratic participation, education, entertainment, health care and potential environmental gains through wider telecommuting. And yet basic information about where particular broadband company offers service – and at what price and at what speed – is not conveniently available in a single, public source. The free web service BroadbandCensus.com aims to change that by going directly to individual internet users for their feedback.

Our Broadband Breakfast Club series is directed more at Washington policy-makers and influencers. But again, we are seeking to broaden the discussion by allowing all to participate. The goal of this breakfast series is to bring an informed consensus – or, failing that, an informed disagreement – around key broadband policy questions.

With the dawn of a new administration – and the prospect of a systematic approach to high-speed internet issues for the first time in nearly a decade – now is the time to undertake these discussions.

Further, the breakfast events that we’re hosting now will lead up to our Spring 2009 conference, “Broadband Census for America: The New Administration.” The Spring 2009 conference – bringing together federal, state and local officials, academic researchers and other interested parties around the issue of broadband data – is tentatively scheduled for Friday, March 27, 2009, here in Washington.

If you have questions or thoughts about upcoming events in the Broadband Breakfast Club series, or about the Spring 2009 conference, “Broadband Census for America: The New Administration,” or about BroadbandCensus.com in general, feel free to contact me: drew at broadbandcensus.com, or at 202-580-8196.

As with everything on BroadbandCensus.com, this blog post is under our Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License. That means you can copy, send, repost and redistribute it. Please do so! The URL for this post is http://broadbandcensus.com/blog/?p=923, and the URL for the registration page is http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com.

I reviewed the Veoh case for DRMWatch recently:

The user-generated video site Veoh achieved a victory in court on August 27th when California District Judge Howard Lloyd ruled that it was entitled to the protection of the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. Veoh was accused of copyright infringement by IO Group, a maker of adult films…

Like eBay v. Tiffany, another case in which one might trumpet a tech-side win… the tech gets at least some protection from liability. But only in a context in which the tech is already taking substantial steps to help the plaintiff trademark/copyright owner with their enforcement problem, steps that would have been hard to conceive of a decade ago, and that many would have grandly declared to be too ambitious and too invasive for online services to attempt. Prediction: the case law is now much more mature, but the business side is just getting started. More and fancier filtering to come.

It’s funny and scary how many of our grand ideas about justice, rights, freedom, fairness and property come down to what we can become accustomed too.  Bad, in the sense that one can easily lose the customary baselines against which freedom is measured in a generation or so. Good, in the sense that one is not limited to identify freedom with just one historic mythical Golden Age; a free society has somewhat more leeway.

I’m fond of paradoxes these days. Tedious things. Almost as annoying to other people, I am sure, as those characters (you know who you are) who make puns all the time.

A U.S. district judge got it right yesterday when he refused to dismiss a lawsuit against Universal, ruling that copyright holders should take into account fair use prior to issuing DMCA takedown notices. The dispute arose last year when a woman received a takedown notice over a YouTube video featuring a kid dancing to a Prince song owned by Universal.

Over at Ars, fellow TLFer Tim Lee has a good overview of the issue in which he explains how the various legal arguments played out. EFF, which represents the plaintiff in the case, offered several compelling reasons why ignoring fair use in a takedown notice might actually constitute “bad faith” under the DMCA.

As Cord discussed a few months ago, my employer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recently received a meritless takedown notice for a global warming ad we posted on YouTube which featured about seven seconds from a copyrighted video clip. Our use of a trivial portion of a copyrighted video was clearly both transformative and non-commercial, yet the content owner still deemed it worthwhile to try to get the video removed.

I have no idea if the notice was sent with the intent to silence us, or if the content owner was simply ignorant of the fair use defense. Regardless, for several days, until we filed a counter-notice, our YouTube account was suspended, making over 100 CEI videos were inaccessible. (We learned our lesson about putting all your eggs in one basket—we now maintain a separate library of all of our videos on cei.org.)

Fortunately, CEI has a vigilant and experienced general counsel who promptly filed a counter-notification (as per the DMCA.) Still, we shouldn’t have had to allocate time and resources to defending a video that no reasonable person would consider copyright infringement.

It’s not too much to ask that content owners consider whether a potential infringement is fair use before sending a takedown notice. Of course, many copyright disputes are murky, so expecting copyright holders to perform a conclusive legal analysis of each unauthorized file is unfair. But when the potentially infringing content in question blatantly falls under fair use, copyright holders should be subject to penalty if they send a takedown notice anyway.

Hopefully Judge Fogel’s ruling will put an end to the status-quo’s flawed takedown system in which infringing content is fingered by computers, rather than live human beings. The burden of going after copyright infringement has traditionally rested with the content owner—so why not add one more step to the process to thaw the chilling atmosphere surrounding the fair use of copyrighted material?

In the latest C:Spin over at CEI’s website, I examine the record industry’s latest Internet copyright battle and the shortcomings it reveals about U.S. intellectual property laws:

The next potential casualty of America’s deficient copyright regime is MP3Tunes, a San Diego startup founded by Web entrepreneur Michael Robertson, which lets users store digital music files in a secure, Web-based locker they can access from anywhere. MP3Tunes lets listeners access only music they have uploaded themselves. Like a handheld MP3 player, MP3Tunes frees music lovers from dragging around massive album collections on physical discs. But now Robertson’s service has run into a major obstacle. EMI, a major British record label, has sued MP3Tunes for copyright infringement. EMI contends that since users are transferring their music to a third party without getting permission from the record label, MP3Tunes is violating EMI’s exclusive right to distribute its music. MP3Tunes faces tough odds given past rulings in copyright infringement cases. EMI’s argument seems tenuous. MP3Tunes doesn’t “share” files with anybody but the original owner, and paying a third party to act as a custodian does not imply a transfer of ownership. Individuals can already store digital files online using myriad services from Flickr to Mozy. We increasingly back up our entire lives to online repositories, and the individual, not the website, remains the owner.

I also discuss ways that media companies could embrace emerging technologies in ways that are mutually beneficial to consumers and producers:

Content owners have rights, but those should not extend to shutting down music storage websites that are not abetting copyright infringement. And nothing is stopping EMI from developing its own digital locker service. That a Web startup dreamt up an innovative business model to complement consumers’ busy lifestyles is no cause for judicial intervention.

MP3Tunes is neither facilitating piracy nor discouraging people from buying music in any way. In fact, by making music collections more accessible and therefore more valuable, MP3Tunes might actually cause people to buy more music.

This is an old story, familiar since Napster burst upon the scene: Instead of fighting sites like MP3Tunes, major labels would be wise to embrace new ways of delivering value to consumers. Rather than fight Silicon Valley startups, the big music labels could partner with them.

The digital era presents a golden opportunity for consumers and producers alike, if only companies and courts can keep pace with the breakneck pace of technology. Listeners’ appetite for compact discs may have waned, but not so with digital media files. ITunes recently announced that is has sold over 4 billion songs. In addition, the runaway success of satellite radio and online music subscription services point to a bright future for new music distribution media .

Later, this C:Spin discusses the potential pitfalls of sweeping Congressional regulation in the digital age where technology evolves at an unforeseeable pace.