Policy Blog Entries by Alex Curtis

Today, American University’s Center for Social Media and AU Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, together with Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project have put together a straight-forward video on what fair use is and isn’t in the world of online video (and beyond). The video is a 7 1/2 minute synopsis of what you’d learn if you had read their Code of Best Practices released in July 2008 which we covered here, and makes understanding fair use, and its importance in our society, easy.

Embedded below is the video. Kudos again to all that were involved.

You may have read that this past week SlingMedia finally released its much anticipated SlingPlayer for the iPhone. It’s an application that lets you remotely stream video and remotely control your home television, from your computer, mobile device, and now iPhone. However the app has been relegated to only working on the iPhone via WiFi, not the available 3G data network, at the request of AT&T. AT&T’s justification for this is as follows:

Every three years, the Copyright Office holds hearings to listen to commenters suggestions for exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on circumvention of access controls. We’ve previously written about the handful of exemptions that the Office has granted (which expire and must be renewed every three years). This year, we’re on the ground and live-twittering what’s going on. Today, Mehan is manning the Public Knowledge twitter account picking out a number of choice quotes and responding to questions.

But we’re not alone at the hearing. A number of twitterers are there, and you can follow the related tweets using the #dmca1201 tag.

And now, thanks to Kristen for sharing her CoverItLive, we now have an embedded client so you can read the tweet-reports of what’s going on at the hearing live below:

Back in March, Reps. Bono Mack, Barrow, and Barton introduced H.R. 1319, The Informed P2P User Act, a bill that was intended to “prevent the inadvertent disclosure of information on a computer through the use of certain “peer-to-peer” file sharing software.” The bill tries to respond to the problem you may have read about or seen on TV where people have installed file sharing software on their computer and unintentionally exposed their private and sensitive information to the public. The bill will be at least part of what’s discussed at today’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. While the bill maybe well intentioned, it’s flawed in a number of ways:

Today, Prof. Pam Samuelson and co-author Tara Wheatland have published a draft of an article that puts forth the need for copyright reform, specifically to statutory damages. I have to confess I’m still digesting it, but I wanted to put this post up so others could learn about it and comment.

The article gives the reader an amazingly thorough understanding of copyright damages (primarily statutory, but there’s lots of background on actual damages, too) under US law as it’s evolved. All of that provides a context for the authors’ case for how to reform statutory damages, as the “regime has evolved in a manner that results in too many arbitrary, inconsistent, unprincipled, and grossly excessive awards and that reform is needed.” Samuelson and Wheatland provide ways to refocus the purported legislative goals of statutory damages of “compensation, deterrence, and punishment” so that statutory damages are realigned with principles of due process.

The article makes a number of suggestions for how to address the problem, including principles to guide courts’ interpretation of the statute and what Congress could do to make the code clearer. The article, too, questions whether statutory damages even serve a useful purpose under copyright law, and whether they should be limited to owners who have registered claims.

Statutory damages are a very important facet of the current copyright debates, and are likely to be in the spotlight during this 111th session of Congress. This article will provide its readers an amazing depth of understanding of how we got here and useful guidance on how to address some of the problems. Kudos to its authors.

The New York Times reports today that despite the hard times we’re all experiencing, box office ticket sales are up 17.5% this year. That’s great, it’s clear that people need some entertainment right now and there’s a lot of engaging and escapist films out right now. But how does this jive with the lobbying efforts by the MPAA to combat online file trading, like the recent push for copyright filtering as part of the stimulus package or last years PRO-IP enforcement bill? The studios’ arguments just don’t add up, while studio revenues clearly do.

Maybe we don’t say it enough: “There’s nothing wrong with making money from creativity!” That’s arguably what at least part of copyright is about. But the studios keep arguing to law and policy makers that their lost control over their content equals lost revenue. Thus, they need

Not much to write beyond the title of this post, but here’s a glimpse at the broadband provision of the final stimulus package bill.

After our Action Alert this morning, we are still on red alert at PK. Thank you for your efforts to fax to and call Congress. It looks like the proposed amendment did not slip into the stimulus bill but the bill now goes to the closed-door conference process. Here’s an attempt to get you up to speed.

Substantive Arguments on Copyright Filtering

We’ve been talking about the topic for some time now, but some of you may not be up on the subject. The idea is that ISPs, using deep packet inspection, would match the files sent in the traffic of Internet users to a database of known movies and music (provided by Hollywood studios and the record labels).

We just sent out an Action Alert to let you know about a proposed amendment to the stimulus package. This amendment, put forth by Sen. Feinstein, would allow ISPs to “deter” child pornography and copyright infringement through network management techniques. The amendment is very, very controversial for a couple of reasons:

1. Infringement can’t be found through “network management” techniques. There are legal uses for copyrighted works even without permission of the owner.

2. It would require Internet companies to examine every bit of information everyone puts on the Web in order to find those allegedly infringing works, without a hint of probable cause.

Today we have some bad and good news. First the bad news: Cox Communications announced that it has a new way to manage it’s network traffic; the problem is, Cox decides which packets go ahead of others. The story says Cox will prioritize the traffic it deems to be “time-intensive, like Web pages, streaming video and online games.” Other services may be slowed: FTP, network storage, software updates, P2P, and Usenet.