Policy Blog Entries by John Bergmayer

There’s a lot that’s interesting in the recent controversy over Hasbro and Mattel, joint owners of the Scrabble trademark, asking Facebook to remove the third-party application, Scrabulous. On the academic side of things, it’s fascinating to think about to what extent various aspects of board games are protectable by different areas of intellectual property law.

Public Knowledge opposes the uses of network filters as a means to curb widespread copyright infringement on the Internet. These are technologies that analyze network traffic and selectively block it, either if the content being transmitted is determined itself to be infringing, or if the traffic is being sent by a protocol or application pre-determined to be “illegitimate.” The first kind of filter looks at your traffic and blocks if it is, for example, Spiderman 3. The second kind of filter looks at your traffic and blocks it if it is, for example, BitTorrent (regardless of whether you’re transmitting SpiderMan 3 or Ubuntu ISOs. While we agree that copyright infringement is a problem that needs to be addressed, we’ve argued that network filtering technologies (such as deep packet inspection) come at too high a cost for too little gain.

In the 700 MHz debate, a lot of attention was given to the needs of public safety, and the goal of an interoperable public safety radio network. Rightly so: It’s a bad situation when a major disaster hits and first responders, often from different jurisdictions, have no means of electronically communicating with one another. Chaos and complexity are the unfortunate—and it is hoped, not inevitable—result of the fact that our country’s public safety teams—police, fireman, paramedics, and so on—are very decentralized, answering to many different state, local, and federal government bodies, or to private entities. It is extraordinarily difficult to coordinate different public safety agencies, who answer to no one master.

Particularly since FCC Chairman Kevin Martin started circulating his plan for “open access lite,” there’s been a lot of confusion about what Open Access is, and why different groups are calling for it. In a recent letter, the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition and several high-tech companies united around a single definition of what Open Access is—you can read our letter here. In this post, we’re going to talk about some myths that have grown up around Open Access—pieces of propaganda that have been put forth by the incumbents and which are sometimes recycled as fact. Here’s a document we’ve put together that addresses some of these Open Access myths.

A company called Steorn has been in the news recently. It claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine. Its recent demonstration of that machine, of course, failed. The laws of thermodynamics do not like to be trifled with.

There’s another company much like Steorn. It also claims to have done the impossible—but instead of inventing a machine that gets 485% efficiency, it claims to have invented an “infallible” network filtration technology that generates “no false positives.”

A few weeks ago, NBC Universal filed comments in the FCC’s proceeding on “Broadband Industry Practices.” It asked that the FCC require that Internet Service Providers institute “bandwidth management tools”—its code for network filters—to try to screen the Internet of copyright infringement. Yesterday, we filed our response, joined by Consumer Federation of America, EDUCAUSE, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, FreeCulture.org, Free Press, Knowledge Ecology International, Media Access Project, New America Foundation, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Cable companies are saying they will raise rates following the FCC’s decision last Friday not to waive the set-top box integration ban. Details are scarce, but it appears likely that the rate hike will take the form of increased rental fees for cable-owned set-top boxes, and will take effect January.

The FCC recently denied NCTA’s request for a blanket waiver of the set-top box integration ban. The FCC press release states, “The [Media] Bureau finds the arguments NCTA[] makes are not adequately novel or changed from assertions that it has made to support previous extension requests to justify further relief and [do] not reflect developments in the market.”

John Eggerton at Broadcasting & Cable gives some details:

The cable industry has argued that the deadline will force them to deal with the old technology of CableCARD security hardware, which plugs into the boxes or TVs, while it is in the midst of developing a downloadable security system that is cheaper, easier, and more elegant.

Open Access is an idea that serves the public interest in a lot of ways. Fundamentally, it’s a way to ensure that there will be competition in the wireless broadband market, regardless of who ends up controlling the spectrum. Open Access rules turn the license holder into a wholesaler, who provides connection to retailers behind the towers. This model is simple from an engineering perspective, and a moneymaker for both the wholesalers and retailers from a business perspective.

• Former FCC Chief Economist Thomas W. Hazlett issued a study which points out that the very opposition of broadcasters to the XM/Sirius merger is evidence that they are afraid of competition. A stunning example of the NAB’s disingenuousness: Despite broadcast’s vast lead over satellite in terms of number of listeners, the NAB bandies about figures that make it seem as though satellite already has a lock on the market. According to the NAB, in a given market XM might control 51% of the radio market, while Clear Channel controls only 1.5%. This is because it considers each one of XM’s 150+ niche programming channels to be equivalent to a radio station. Defining markets in this way is disingenuous and does not serve to advance the debate.