Policy Blog
Put an End to Sports Blackouts
The following is a guest post from Brian Frederick, Executive Director of Sports Fans Coalition and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Public Knowledge works with the Sports Fans Coalition against sports blackouts because we think that the FCC should not have rules that keep fans from watching games.
Even if you’re not a sports fan, you should be concerned about how professional sports owners are manipulating the system to take in massive public subsidies and privatize the profits. Sports leagues receive benefits from the public that no other businesses do, such as the right to collectively negotiate their broadcast contracts. In the case of the National Football League (NFL), those contracts will earn the league $6 billion per year starting in 2015. Owners are then able to use this monopolistic power to force cities to build expensive stadiums that are horrible wastes of taxpayer dollars.
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What's Actually in the TPP?
The blogosphere is abuzz with speculation that the Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) is much worse than SOPA. Is this true? Since the text is currently top secret, there is no way to tell. Of course, that’s part of the problem. But, after tracking international intellectual property (IP) issues here a PK for a number of years, I can try to make an educated guess about what may be in TPP’s IP chapter and how it may affect you.
Prison Phones: Making Millions by Draining Families
It is cheaper to call Singapore at 12 cents a minute from your Verizon cell phone than it would be to speak to someone in prison in this country. The burden of having a family member or loved one in prison is already heavy, making matters worse is the reality that families are continuously wrung dry by expensive calls which include profitable “kickbacks” to the prisons themselves.
Hollywood Can't Handle The Truth About SOPA and PIPA
Earlier today, a most extraordinary group of people sent a letter to Capitol Hill, in the latest round of the fight over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), telling Congress it was time to reject the well-worn lobbying of the big media companies.
More than 70 grassroots activist organizations and emerging Internet companies got up the nerve to show Congress that it was time to stop fooling around with bills that helped to generate the largest online protest in recent memory. More than 100,000 Web sites participated in the Jan. 18 blackout day. Tens of thousands of people called and visited their Congressional representatives, all with one message: These bills are dangerous, and shouldn't be allowed to proceed.
Weekly Recap and Preview - 2/6/12
Recap of Last Week
Last week, negotiators met in LA behind closed doors to discuss the intellectual property chapter of a new international trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. The TPP is the frightening sequel to another international trade agreement in the news recently: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, known as ACTA. Simultaneous to the private TPP negotiations, a separately organized public interest briefing on concerns with the TPP was actually kicked out of the hotel where it was supposed to have taken place.
Let's Get the Future of TV Right
One of the benefits of the FCC's often-laborious process of rulemaking is that it allows new issues to be discovered and resolved. This is what has happened in the Commission's proceeding on a seemingly-arcane issue: "encryption of the basic tier."
preservesthe openness of the Internet and the public's access to knowledge, promotes creativity through balanced copyright, and upholds and protects the rights of consumers to use innovative technology lawfully.