Policy Blog Entries by Gigi Sohn

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.

As confirmation hearings go, today’s hearing on the nomination of Julius Genachowski to be the new Chair of the FCC and current Commissioner Robert McDowell to be renominated for a second term could only be called a lovefest. And why not? Both are among the most qualified individuals ever to have been nominated to serve the agency. Perhaps the most controversial exchange was the debate over how to pronounce the Chairman-to-be’s last name (for the record, it’s pronounced Gen-a-kow-ski, not chow-ski).

Genachowski sounded all the right notes - telling the story of how his father, an engineer, showed him his plans for turning text into signals so to help blind people to “read” words on paper.

Either Jenner and Block lawyers are looking for something to do in this economic downturn, or the RIAA has a direct pipeline to the Justice Department. Because the Legal Times blog is reporting that a third fourth Jenner partner (and fifth Jenner lawyer) who has represented the recording industry, Ian Gershengorn, is going to the Justice Department to be Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division with oversight of the Federal Programs Branch. I do take some small comfort from the fact that that the Civil Division has no authority to work on intellectual property matters (although if you recall, it almost got that authority last Congress when the Pro-IP Act was passed).

Like any for-profit industry, Hollywood usually trumpets its financial successes to impress policymakers, investors, Wall Street and the general public. And this is the time of year that they usually do so, before ShoWest, the annual convention of movie theater owners. But not this year, reports Variety.

According to the trade magazine, despite a record breaking year at both the domestic and International the box office in 2008, MPAA President Dan Glickman has decided not to tout his members’ success. But why wouldn’t Hollywood want to show their importance to the economy, particularly in light of the country’s financial hard times? Variety reports that the studios have been quiet because they unsuccessfully tried to belly up to the stimulus trough - to the tune of $246 million dollars in tax credits, and want to try again to get those credits this Congress.

Kudos to PK Board member Hal Abelson, who persuaded MIT’s faculty to make all of their scholarly papers available for free on the web. According to Wired, this is the “first university-wide policy” of its kind.

This decision is particularly timely, given the attacks on open access publishing by commercial publishers and their friends in Congress. In fact, the MIT decision goes beyond most other open access policies. The open access policy at the National Institutes of Health, for example, requires submission of NIH-funded research 12 months after that research is public.

There weren’t any great surprises at today’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration roundtable discussion of the non-discrimination and interconnection requirements of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (better known as the stimulus bill). The roundtable was one in a series that is designed to provide recommendations to the NTIA and the Rural Utilities Service of the Department of Agriculture about how they should spend the collective $7.2 billion dollars for broadband deployment and other related programs they have been given under the stimulus bill.

Ben Scott of Free Press and I called for NTIA to adopt requirements that go beyond the FCC’s four broadband principles and prohibit a grant recipient from degrading, prioritizing or discriminating against any lawful content, application or service over the recipients’ Internet access service, subject to a rule of reasonable network management.

Although the public has known for nearly two months that former FCC staffer and Interactive Corp General Counsel Julius Genachowski would be the nominee for FCC Chairman, the President made it official yesterday. If you listen to NPR or read the tech press, you’ll know that I’ve made no secret of our delight with the pick.

As Alex discussed yesterday, the battle over a Hollywood-backed amendment to the stimulus bill that would allow Internet Service Providers to filter their networks for copyright violations is not yet over. The conference committee for the bill is meeting as I write this, and for that reason, we have launched a new action alert to ensure that the House and Senate conferees understand why this amendment is bad as both a substantive and a procedural matter, and should not be included in the final stimulus package.

Again, the conference is happening now and is expected to conclude by day’s end. So please, act NOW. We’ll keep you updated. And thank you!