In this week’s Radio Berkman podcast, I interview Stephen Schultze about the FCC’s auctioning off spectrum to a national provider who would be required to use 25% of it for free, nationwide wifi. There’s only one catch: That wifi would have to only connect to sites and services that are safe for minors (defined as people between 5 and 18).

After we had recorded this interview last week, the FCC postponed voting on the proposal, and since it’s the baby of the outgoing Chair, it’s probably postponed forever. Still, the idea raises some really interesting issues. Steve and I focus on the free speech considerations, although the opposition from other spectrum-holders certainly could not have encouraged the FCC.

[Tags: berkman fcc wifi wi-fi spectrum free_speech censorship kevin_martin podcast stephen_schultze ]

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In the wake of yesterday’s repudiatathon of the WSJ.com’s misleading, inaccurate, biased, and wrong article on Net neutrality, the NY Times weighs in with a crisp, clear, and right-headed editorial.

[Tags: net_neutrality wsj policy nyt obama ]

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Blown to Bits is an excellent, clear, thoughtful, fair, readable explanation of how the Internet works, the effects it is having on our society, and the effects we may want our society to have on it. And now, six months after publication, it’s available for free download under a Creative Commons license.

[Tags: blown_to_bits creative_commons copyright copyleft ]

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Once every three years, the copyright office considers proposed exemptions to the DMCA’s forbidding of attempts to circumvent Digital Rights Management (DRM) protections. Yesterday at 5pm was the deadline for this cycle’s bids.

And there have been some really interesting ones.

Some Berkman folks have asked for the right to Hack the Dead, although they don’t put it like that. If you have software that checks on line to make sure you are authorized to use it, and if the company has now gone out of business, you can no longer use stuff you paid for. So, the Berkman team has proposed that in those circumstances, hackers should be allowed to hack your content free of the dead grip of the defunct business. Chris Soghoian, one of the petitioners, explains it well.

Chris also explains some of the other 18 requests for exemption, including an EFF (did you remember to join?) request to allow users to jailbreak their iPhones so they can run software that Apple has not approved, and a request to allow academics to hack DRM’ed DVD’s to make compilations that are legit under the Fair Use exemption.

Unfortunately, it’s likely that the copyright office will emerge from its three year slumbers, see its own shadow, and put its head straight back up its own rectum. [Tags: berkman crm dmca copyright copyleft eff chris_soghoian ]

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In the latest Radio Berkman podcast, Prof. Charles Nesson and Joel Tennenbaum explain their countersuit against the RIAA, claiming that the RIAA should be forbidden on Constitutional grounds from suing people for sharing music files. Charlie’s analogy is to Congress passing a law that charges $750-$150,000 for each mile we go over the speed limit, and then allows a private company to fund itself by enforcing the law, and allows them to take bribes (“settlements”). He says the RIAA is using the federal courts as a collection agency. If the law is a criminal statute, which Charlie argues it in effect is, then private parties should not be able to pursue civil suits to enforce it.

If Charlie and Joel win, it would shut down the RIAA’s hyper-aggressive tactics. And, although Charlie does not say this, it seems to me that it might open up some interesting class action suits from those who have had to pay up.[Tags: podcasts radio_berkman charlie_nesson charles_nesson joel_tennenbaum riaa copyright copyleft ]

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Harold Feld steps through the various scenarios of how the FCC will go through its transition next year. You’d think it’d be a straightforward process. Hah! Harold lays it all out. Does Martin step down? How many new commissioners will Obama get to appoint? If the Republican commissioners were replaced by 19th century French Impressionists and the Democrats were replaced by unicorns, who would win the touch football match? Harold considers every possibility …

[Tags: fcc harold_feld ]

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Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach are heading Obama’s FCC transition team.

OMG. This makes me so happy. Not only are they amazingly knowledgeable about the issues, they also share Obama’s political temperament: Strong beliefs, an ability to listen, a respect for others that is manifested as gentleness, and a practicality that carries them past mere ideology.

Change is coming to the FCC.

[Tags: fcc susan_crawford kevin_werbach obama net_neutrality ]

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (did you remember to join?) has blogged about the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty that won’t seem to stay dead. (Great backgrounder and eval by Nate Anderson at Ars Technica.)

The new treaty would mean that to record or reuse a broadcast of a TV show, you would have to get rights not only from the company that created the show, but also from the broadcaster whose signal you recorded. The Europeans have supported this since they backed the Rome Convention in 1961; the proposed treaty would globally standardize this new layer of rights/restrictions.

The EFF has argued that if passed, it would mean that it would be illegal to record even a Creative Commons licensed broadcast; the creator of the work may be fine with it, but the broadcaster might not be. There are no “fair use” exceptions in the proposed Treaty, although it allows signatories to carve out exceptions based on their own copyright laws; the EFF claims that this would create confusion that would chill innovation and speech, as different countries implement different exceptions.

The US delegation has taken up again its call for “broadcast” to include transmissions over the Net.

The new push for the treaty, according to an update by Nate at Ars Technica, is likely to fail because there seems to be an irreconcilable split among countries that want to add this new layer of rights and those that would solve the problem of people stealing and reselling broadcasts simply by using existing laws to prosecute the people who do it.

Yay.

[Tags: wipo broadcasting copyright copyleft media eff ]

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Obama has posted his tech policy.

It’s like someone who understands and values technology and the Internet was elected president.

By the way, the Change.gov site welcomes our comments.

[Tags: obama net_neutrality e-politics democracy technology ]

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The Obama campaign changed its tech policy statement, raising concerns that it was backtracking on its commitments. Now the campaign has explained that the changes were an attempt to de-geek the language and the original policy statement is still up on their site. The campaign says:

We’ve been updating the entire website to ensure consistency across the pages. The full tech plan is still available on the page, so there is absolutely no substantive change to our policy — folks who want more information can click to get our full plan.

To my reading, the explanation is consistent with the edits.

[Tags: obama tech_policy campaign ]

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