FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein begins by playing harmonica with Howard Levy. Really. [As always, the following paraphrases, abbrevites, omits, and gets wrong.]

[I’m sitting next to Susan Crawford who is blogging away. Hers will be the post to read on this.]

Then he touts the E-Rate program. But “we lack a coordinated vision for success…We need to provide for all of our neighbors. This has to be a greater national priority than it is now.” A national strategy should have benchmarks. Update the current FCC definition of “high speed” as 200kb [which is laughable — dialup is 56k]. Have standards for expressing what rates customers are getting. We need meaningful competition. “We can’t let the broadband market settle into a comfortable duopoly…” We should worry about consolidation. The Congress should use tax incentives to bring access to under-served areas, and more [can’t keep up]. We should invest in basic R&D. Be creative and flexible. We need to preserve the creative freedom of the Net. “You’re all reinventing democracy, how we share music…” We need to preserve the Net’s openness. The AT&T merger brought about an agreement about Net Neutrality that isn’t the end of the story but at least refutes the notion that NN can’t be defined.

Q:(frankston) The FCC and the Net are incompatible. The Net is what we can get by connecting our home networks from the edge. The FCC defines it in terms of services instead of in terms of bits.
A: We took a step with the AT&T merger….
Q: No, you treat it as a service. We don’t need the phone companies to run the Internet.
A: We need an infrastructure. There’s a balance here. We need to be realistic.

Q: (isenberg) The chat was wondering how much power you have.
A: I’m one of five commissioners.

Q: (brough) What about cognitive radio opening up spectrum?
A: I was going to talk about that but cut it for time. Maybe I made the wrong choice. Software-defined radio is one of the most exciting developments I’ve seen and maybe the most revolutionary in spectrum use. We need to find ways to enable them to reach their full fruition. Our engineers are examining the ways they can work. It’s a way of doing more with less because, as someone said, G-d isn’t making any more spectrum. Of course, we have to be concerned about harmful interference, but in general I’m very high on it.

Q: (JH Snider) Please elaborate on what you said about the carrot-stick approach. The FCC has been 99.99% carrot. In the past few years, the FCC has given away $50B in spectrum allocation. Look at what you did with the MMDS band. You gave it away to Sprint and they haven’t built anything. Eight years later they may actually build it out. Where’s the stick?
A: It’s so much easier to give away carrots. Politicians like to do that. It’s happened time and again in spectrum policy.

Q: (Elisha McDonald): Is the definition of Net Neutrality workable? How is it enforceable?
A: It’s a baseline and opens up the possibility of having a rational discussion without sloganeering. The Chairman testified that he will enforce it, and he’s told me that too. [Joe Plotnick from the chat: “They haven’t enforced ANY PRIOR merger conditions, as Kushnick has thoroughly documented.”] [Tags: fcc net_neutrality spectrum ]

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USA Today, a newspaper I like more than do most of the people I respect, is going conversational. I haven’t had a chance to poke around much — the f2c conference is all-consuming — but I like the way they’re talking, anyway. Digg-like recommendations. Feeds from other news sources. Selected blog posts. Comments. I hope they get it right. (Features list.) [Tags: news msm blogs journa journalism everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Tom Evslin is interviewing Jim Douglas, 1the governor of Vermont. He is turning Vermont into an e-state. Anywhere you open a laptop, you will be online. [Note: As always, I’m paraphrasing, missing stuff, getting things wrong…Also, no time to re-read before posting., Ulp.]

Gov. Douglas says he’s doing this for reasons of public safety, and to help the economy. It’s also important for travel and tourism. He says Americans recognize the importance of innovation, but elected political leaders have been “fairly slow to respond.” He asks: “How do we apply technology in ways that enable innovation?” They’re up to 87% broadband availability. The last 10% will be the hardest, but it’s vital, he says. “We can’t let anyone go unserved” as Vermont uses the Net for local services. The state will partner with private providers and invest in infrastructure (e.g., fiber optic). The last mile will be provided by private providers. [Bob Frankston in the on-screen chat objects that the state should worry about coverage more than about broadband, and that the private partnerships are mistake.]

Q: What kind of things have you thought of so your providers can stay up to date?
A: That’s vital. I’m not a techie. Let’s ask Tom Evslin, who’s on the tech advisory board…
A: (tom) The goal is 3M by 2010. The goal for 2013 is 20M symmetric [download and upload…yay!]

Q: What’s the role of spectrum in your broadband vision? Why aren’t the rural governors asking for spectrum reform? 95% of spectrum in VT is unused.

Q: who besides VT is working this way?
A: No one. [Chris Meyer, sitting next to me, points to the RI-WINS program for border-to-border coverage in Rhode Island.]

Q: Verizon has proposed selling its VT infrastructure to FairPoint, a tiny company.
A: We haven’t decided whether we’ll support this transaction.

Q: I’m with the American Library Ass’n. Libraries are the #1 provider of Net access in VT. What role did libraries play in your planning?
A: Libraries are important. We hope they’ll play an even bigger role. E.g., access the Oxford library.

Q: There are challenges connectings kids to the Internet in a school setting, largely because the adults are uncomfortable with it and worry that it’s out of control.
A: Parents should be parents. [paraphrase]

Q: How about if the municipality owns the backbone, with private financing. E.g., Burlington
A: There are lots of models that work.

Q: The key question is: Who’s going to own this? Will some business interest be able to put in a toll booth, and also decide when the tech gets upgraded in a given corridor? Gov’ts don’t biuld roads; they put out bids to build roads. How will the state decide when it’s time to upgrade?
A: I’m cautious fiscally.

[Micah Sifry, who is in the house, posts to the chat the Gov’s financial profile…] [Tags: f2c vermont wifi broadband net_neutrality ]

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Ethan Zuckerman and his friend Daniel Beck kick off a new cultural phenomenon: The east coast alternative to Burning Man: Freezing Man. [Tags: burning_man ]

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The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Jennifer Saranow about live blogging personal events that’s entertaining, provocative, and ends with an anecdote about the Accordian Guy, Wendy Koslow and AKMA.

It’s a nicely done piece, although I’m not satisfied with its main explanation of why people live blog everything from births to funerals. Jennifer seems to view it as a type of narcissism. But all writing in public is narcissistic —”Hey, listen to me!” — and I’m not sure that live blogging is especially so. For one thing, frequently live bloggers are writing about other people’s events.

I don’t have an alternative hypothesis to offer. Live blogging is inexplicable enough that it seems likely to be an indicator of a more important fault line in how we’re constructing public and private spaces. Or something. [Tags: live_blogging blogging blogs wsj everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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techPresident continues to be informative, opinionated and entertaining. To take an example from the lighter side, its Daily Digest today points to PrezVid where Jeff Jarvis links to two videos of John Edwards. Watch this one first (it’s funny). Then this one for Edwards’ reaction to the first one. (Disclosure: I’ve done a tiny bit of volunteer advising to the Edwards’ Internet folks. Nothing worth disclosing, except it would feel funny not to, so I am.) [Tags: youtube politics media john_edwards jeff_jarvis video]

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From the BostonNow blog:

BostonNOW is a new free daily newspaper launching this year that will incorporate both traditional and citizen journalism. Your ideas about the Boston community (news, politics, sports, the arts, etc.) will appear side-by-side with the words of BostonNOW staffers and wire service journalists. We will promote your work prominently both in the paper and on the website, not in a “local blogs” or “reader photos” ghetto.

Every day, BostonNOW will direct readers to the Web, where they will find real depth and discussion. BostonNOW will become the place to learn what folks around here really think about politics, entertainment, sports, and their fellow humans. This dialogue will create a newspaper of the people, by the people, for the people.

BostonNOW will truly be your newspaper.

Sounds good on paper, so to speak. In fact, it sounds great. They’re holding a get-to-know-the-bloggers party this Saturday, March 10:

RSVP here. (Thanks to Steve Garfield for the link.) [Tags: boston media msn journalism blogosphere blogs ]

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James McGrath Morris has an article at Law.com that tries to de-hype blogging’s contribution to news by saying what bloggers do is nothing new and pointing out that blogs are error-prone.

We’ve all been over the error prone argument forever. As for the argument that blogging is nothing new, well, nothing is really new. The importance of blogging for journalism does not rest on a claim that it’s without any precedent. In fact, James says that the blogs’ claim to a lack of objectivity is a return to the “Golden Age of Journalism,” which would mean that while it’s not new, it’s different. James is arguing against a strawperson, and thus sleighting the real effects of blogging on journalism.

Finally, he goes on to say that “blogging may be more democratic, but it’s also likely to be less read. There is a point when there are simply too many blogs. With 30 million blogs today, we may well have reached that point.”

That last point sounds a bit like the Yogi Berra remark that no one goes to that nightclub any more because it’s too crowded. It ignores the research that shows there’s a short head and a long tail, which means that a handful of blogs are being massively read and — more important — there’s a huge network of nodes each of which accretes a local readership.

And then he sort of misrepresents me. The nerve! He says that I announced in an “All Things Considered” commentary that I am no longer reading many of my friends’ blogs. Not exactly. I didn’t stop reading my friends’ blogs; I gave up on keeping up with them every day. There’s a difference: I still read my friends’ blogs, just not as steadily as I once did. And, fwiw, my point was that it should be considered rude to assume that anyone has been keeping up with your blog. So, James was off a shade. But, then, we all know that articles about blogs and journalism are error-prone. (Damn humans!) [Tags: blogging journalism media citizen_journalism msm everythin everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Yes, I do occasionally search for links to my blog and mentions of my name. You may call it ego surfing or Web narcissism, but I prefer to think of it as “listening to the conversation.” Yeah, right.

It was one of those searches that turned up EgoSurf.org, a free site that shows you where you rank in each of the major search sites. It also assigns “ego points” according to a formula that’s secret, thus vitiating the feature. You can have it search for your name, your site, or any string. You may also discover, as I did, that your domain is not indexed at all by MSN.com. Zero hits on “www.hyperorg.com” at msn! (The EgoSurf faq is amusing.)

Fortunately, the site works slowly, so you won’t be tempted to check it 15 times a day, you narcissistconversation-lover, you! [Tags: search egosurf everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club, is giving a Berkman talk. Gene Koo (his ex roommate) introduces him as someone doing a form of literary remix. He’s teaching a class at Harvard Law called “Literary Visions of Copyright.” He’s going to talk about the 19th Century copyright battles. [As always, I’m approximating. Matthew speaks eloquently; live blogging generally misses the eloquence.]

The Copyright League consisted mainly of authors who “wanted to rethink and reshape” copyright. James Russell Lowell — poet and president of the League — came up with the motto:

“In vain we call old notions fudge and bend our conscience to our dealing. The Ten Commandments will not budge and stealing will still be stealing.” [Approx.]

“This became a mantra for copyright advocates.” Note the appeal to a higher authority, Matthew points out.The motto compares commercial dealings to an older and higher regime. Writers at the time — Louisa Alcott, Mark Twain, etc. — petitioned Congress in support of copyright. The US laws were pretty much are they are today, but there was no international protection: British authors couldn’t get copyright protection here. This meant US publishers could publish British authors without paying a cent. This also undermined several generations of American authors because a Dickens book only cost $0.25 but a Twain might cost $1.25. (Harper, the publisher, was “the most notorious and proud pirate,” says Matthew.)

Kipling wrote a poem about buccaneers that’s about book poetry, which someone referred to as “bookaneers.” Poe’s “Purloined Letter” is about writing stolen but left in public view, another metaphor for book piracy. Dickens, who called himself “the biggest loser” because of his lost royalties, wrote Martin Chuzzlewit about an unstable American system. Harriet Beecher Stowe sued a publisher for publishing a German translation. She lost the case, and was criticized for being against treating people as property but favoring treating books as property. [Wow. These seem to be separable issues!]

There was tentativeness among the authors supporting copyright, says Matthew. They wanted to protect authors but not crush the laborers who manufactured books; if copyright were introduced, they feared book manufacturing would move to other countries. Also, the lack of international copyright enabled cheap editions, supporting a democratic ideal. Mark Twain and Walt Whitman were especially sensitive to these concerns; Whitman’s Leaves of Grass positioned him as a friend of labor. Dickens was making tons of money on his speaking tour and was painted as greedy for wanting royalties also. Matthew compares this to current attitudes towards rich rock bands. People also argued that we needed copyright freedom in order to alter British texts for American readers, including taking out some of the lords-and-ladies feel. (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is about American hostility to that, Matthew says.)

Matthew says some of the fun of studying this is that the authors are imposing a narrative on the topic. It’s a narrative of natural rights and pirates, even though according to the law at the time, the “pirates” were doing nothing wrong. “They became pirates because that’s what we put into our rhetoric until we believed it.” “All of this gradually wore down the paradigm of a collective ownership of the works.”

Matthew says that we should learn at how we’re creating our own narrative of piracy. E.g., the FBI warning at the beginning of DVDs even though copying a DVD for your own use is legal. E.g., Disney recently bought the copyright to Oswald the Rabbit (its pre-Mickey character) even though Oswald’s first three cartoons are out of copyright and thus Oswald is out of copyright; Disney is shaping the narrative. Google Books is now also trying to shape the narrative.

Q: [me] Were there moral arguments in favor of not having international copyright?
A: The most effective argument was that it would hurt our workers.

Q: What about logical consistency, protecting authors everywhere?
A: There was a different sense of boundaries. We assume a globalized world. But people were not embracing the natural rights argument. Copyright didn’t come out of a rights argument originally, in the Constitution. Someone said it was about copy privilege, not copy right.

Q: (ethanz) In other parts of the world, they make an argument that they need pirated texts in order to go to university. The US violated British copyright when it was developing, so it’s right for India and China to do so now. How would Twain et al. have replied to this?
A: Fascinating argument. We didn’t have a national literature in the 19th C. Moby-Dick was dismissed. All we can do is imitate, it was thought. One argument was that we need easy access to the British texts until we’ve established our own American literature.

Q: Would people have paid more if there were a different copyright regime?
A: They get into the minutia of it in the Senate arguments. There’s no agreement. The introduction of public access libraries in the middle of the century threw the pricing up into the air.

Q: Was there a parallel rhetoric in Europe?
A: There wasn’t much market for American books in England (Cooper and Twain were exceptions), so the British were all for copyright. The government got involved.

Q: Dickens and others acknowledged that they got wider distribution because their earlier books were pirated in the US.
A: Same thing with Google Books: You’re getting attention for your books, especially for books that are out of print.

Q: Did people argue that writers wouldn’t write or wouldn’t share it with the public?
A: Yes. You see this in the Senate hearings. Without copyright, you couldn’t professionalize writing enough to enable writers to earn a living, it was argued. Twain said that writers should go live in England for a bit before publishing to get British copyright protection; he was out of touch with what writers can do.

Q: Initially, copyright protection went to printers, not authors. How did that transition happen?
A: (Simon) In the Renaissance, patrons gained prestige from the affiliation. In 18th C Ireland, Swift was able to prosper without copyright. It’s an interesting to compare cultures that have and do not have copyright protection.

Q: When did we go from writing to being a professional writer?
A: (Simon) It’s hard to pinpoint. [He mentioned a 1774 copyright decision that I missed.]

Q: The audience wasn’t receptive to the economic argument, because it came from rich authors. How about the reaction to the moral argument?
A: It’s hard to say because the public wasn’t a part of the conversation. Women weren’t even part of it.

Q: (cbracy) What was the relation between the authors and their works?
A: Authors still tend to have control over their books than musicians generally do. If you publish a book, you own the copyright. That’s not the case with screenplays: You sell the copyright. But publishers want to reinforce the idea of single authorship; they don’t even like long acknowledgements.

Q: [me] The piracy narrative doesn’t hold up in even on its own terms now; now we can’t even use works we’ve bought all the ways we want, and “piracy” just doesn’t work as a metaphor. Do you see any other narratives around that might work better?
A: The commons? There’s so little discussion of public domain in these 19th C discourses. I’d love to read a history of the concept of the commons (which Louis Hyde is doing).

A: (ethanz) There are developments in the UK that might make Beatles albums public domain in 2012, which will recreate the 19th C situtation in which cheap British imports compete against US music. a: “Sharing” is a counter narrative.

Q: (Gene) You have made a career out of both sides of the copyright issue (i.e., copyrighted works about copyright)…
A: I definitely do feel Jekyl and Hyde about copyright. I’d enforce my copyright if it came up, and we complain when the royalty statements from the Chinese publishers are wrong, but all we can is complain. “I even write the copyright notice for my books.” The notice originally said that no characters are intended to resemble people living or dead.

Q: (egeorge ) How would you feel if I did fan fiction based on your work?
A: I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about that. They’re writing a screenplay of my book, and it’s nothing like the book. I’m getting paid to let them alter my text. If I’m not getting paid, I guess I’d feel that so long as it’s non-commercial, I’d be fine about it. It gets word out about your book.

Q: The difference in prices between American and British was multiples. Why?
A: You wouldn’t have to pay an advance. Competition. And there was variance.

Q: Who’s your next book about?
A: It’s secret.

[Great talk. And a very likable, modest fella.] [Tags: copyright copyleft matthew_pearl everything_is_miscellaneous]

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