[I missed the beginning due to an interesting hallway conversation with an FCC guy.]

Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge was finishing up when I came in. She was asking why the FCC keeps holding back policy to protect the 10% of Americans who don’t have cable. Bruce Mehlman of the US Dept. of Commerce says that the broadcast flag is a reasonable solution to the problem of copyright violation. And he likes technology that keeps digital recorders from working in theaters.

Blair Levin of Legg Mason likes all that stuff too because Wall Street would like it.

Bruce says that the tech community needs to speak in one voice. He also refers to the 750,000 messages to the FCC as “spam.” [Why should we have one voice?]

Q&A

Arnold Kling says that he’d rather subsidize content producers directly than pay an indirect tax that will affect behavior.

Cory tells Bruce that he’s proud of file sharers because we’ve made accessible the 80% of creative works that are no longer published but have been locked away by copyright. Where in history have we had a successful regime in criminalizing a sixth of the population for a federal crime that you say should be investigated by the FBI. Bruce replies that authors expect and deserve to be paid for their labors. Cory says that DRM won’t put a nickel into the pockets of an artist because 90% of people with contracts make less than $600. Compulsory licenses like the one we did for Internet radio puts money into the hands of artists.

Someone follows up: Why should I respect the rights of copyright holders when they don’t respect our rights by asking that copyright be expanded into perpetuity. Bruce replies that this is the law that Congress passed. Compulsory licenses are worth discussing. It’s good to protect IP; the question is (Bruce says) whether the protections undo the point of protecting IP in the first place. [By gum he’s got it!] If there were a reasonable marketplace, Bruce says, file sharing wouldn’t be an issue.

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