Policy Blog Entries by Gigi Sohn

Yesterday’s CNET report that Verizon had secretly adopted a “three strikes” policy towards alleged copyright infringers had our office all atwitter last night - how could a charter member of our ad hoc copyright reform coalition be engaging in such radical activity? Well, it turns out they weren’t.

As their misquoted spokesperson explains here, what Verizon employs is a process for passing on warning notices to alleged infringers, but that process does not include automatic termination. My guess is that to the extent that she was talking about infringers having their internet access terminated, she was referring to people who had been adjudicated by a court to be infringing, and as such, they would be violating Verizon’s terms of service.

By many accounts, World’s Fair Use Day was a great success. We had a capacity crowd, with hundreds more joining in on the webcast. Members of the audience included staff from the White House, the State Department, the US Copyright Office and Congress. Since one of the main missions of the event was to demonstrate to policymakers the importance of fair use to our culture, our discourse and our economy, having a strong turnout from government is key.

I’ve now had a few days to reflect on the day’s events.

U2 frontman and humanitarian Bono had a page-long op-ed in this past Sunday’s New York Times, where he describes what he calls “10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil. Some are trivial, some fundamental. They have little in common with one another except that I am seized by each, and moved by its potential to change our world.” So let’s look at some issues that made the list…. a twist on cap and trade, fighting the rotavirus, new cancer research, the rise of Africa and… limiting the scourge of file sharing.

Yes, that’s right, file sharing, clearly one from the “trivial” category. Bono blames Internet Service Providers for “this reverse Robin Hooding” which he says hurts “the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales….” His “big” idea for stopping the scourge?

For the past four years, I have been the unofficial president of the pro-net neutrality debate club. During that time, I’ve probably participated in a dozen one-on-one net neutrality debates, and probably two dozen (or more) panel debates. I’ve lost count.

The debates had really gotten a bit stale until late October, when the FCC published its proposed rules to ensure an open Internet. So a new round of debates has already kicked off. Last Thursday, at the Practicing Law Institute’s 27th Annual Telecommunications Policy & Regulation Institute, I debated (for at least the 6th time), the president of the anti-net neutrality debate club, Precursor LLC President Scott Cleland.

It’s been nearly a year since Public Knowledge and the Silicon Flatirons Center held its FCC Reform conference, and the FCC has moved slowly but steadily towards addressing many of the concerns raised at the conference and the paper submitted beforehand.

The latest MPAA diatribe about Selectable Output Control is notable for two reasons. First, it utterly fails to demonstrate that anybody steals content through the analog hole or that giving the MPAA the ability to shut off both analog and protected digital outputs would have any impact at all on piracy. Second, by attacking Public Knowledge and specifically Harold’s integrity, it is a not-so-subtle effort to spin the debate over this waiver as “copyleft” Public Knowledge versus “reasonable” Hollywood, which only wants this itsy bitsy waiver so that it can provide the “pro-consumer” benefit of making movies available on video on demand a few weeks earlier than they are now.

We’ll address the first point when we file a response in the next week or so. I want to address the second.

We just got word that the Supreme Court has declined to review the Cablevision remote DVR case. This is the case where Hollywood and some cable networks sued Cablevision for providing a TiVo-like service where the copy of the recorded program resides on the cable operator’s servers rather than on a hard drive in the home. The studios claimed that both the buffer copies and the copies residing on Cablevision’s servers were a violation of its right to reproduce the program, and that the recordings sent to the customer were a violation of its public performance right. A lower court in New York City sided with Hollywood, but the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, ruling that the remote DVR service did not violate Hollywood’s copyrights.

The Court’s decision not to take the case is a huge victory for consumers and all video service providers, not just cable.

After months of waiting, the Senate confirmed two key members of the Obama communications and technology team: new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) director Larry Strickling (his official title is Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information). And not a moment too soon.

Here is what is facing the new leaders right now: NTIA (along with the Rural Utilities Service) is expected to issue its “Notice of Funds Availability” imminently for the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus money, and that “NOFA” will include the rules for applying for the grants, as well as the conditions (like non-discrimination) with which a grantee much comply.

There is a lot of talk and concern these days in the halls of Congress and at both the FCC and the FTC about how to promote greater broadband and wireless phone competition.