Broadcast Flag Blog Entries

Just in time for the House Telecom Subcommittee’s May 6 hearing on Net Neutrality legislation, Public Knowledge achieved a new level of notoriety when we were prominently mentioned in a blog post on the American Spectator, the publication best known for funneling millions of dollars to investigations of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

OK. Hopefully you all realized that S. 4108, the APRIL Act of 2008, was a joke. After all, there were a few excesses in there that would indicate how ludicrous the bill is.

This mash-up video raises so many issues: copyright, fair use, DMCA, filtering, broadcast flag, and net neutrality.

Take a look below. The first one to accurately identify why for each in the comments gets a piece of PK swag of their choosing.

An NPR story yesterday captured some pungent words from soon-to-go-through-the-revolving-door Senator Trent Lott. He was commenting in disbelief about the FCC move to permit more consolidation of media companies. He said (paraphrasing):

Newspapers? Why is the FCC protecting newspapers? I don’t get why we’re crying crocodile tears over newspapers… It’s technology that’s affecting newspapers. Where I live [on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi], we use newspapers to wrap mullet.

Putting aside the fishwrap reference (oddly reminiscent of the fate of some Bach manuscripts), let’s just note the incredulity with which Sen. Lott approaches the idea that the FCC is out there regulating newspaper mergers.

We’ve decided to get aggressive about social platforms here at PK. For a while, we’ve had a facebook group, and now we’ve started a Ning Public Knowledge group. Each offers something a little different. At facebook, you’ve got the large communities of people who are already invested in the platform. I’m hoping that they allow for group administrators to embed applications into group pages (until they do, we’ll keep manually inputting our content). That’s actually what I think the Ning group offers more of, is the ability to syndicate content.

We had heard rumblings a few weeks ago that the MPAA was trying to push the broadcast flag, yet again. More recently we heard some more details that the content industry is trying to win over some in the consumer electronics industry to push for the technology mandate that would cripple many home devices and limit fair use of legally obtained content by consumers and educators alike.

You may remember the last push of the broadcast flag was buried in the series-of-tubes Senate telecommunications bill that thankfully went nowhere. That version’s language gave FCC the needed permission (which was lacking(PDF)) to instate the copy-protection scheme that would limit what you could do with over-the-air broadcast television.

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.

Much of the debate over the proposed XM-Sirius merger centers around whether terrestrial radio really provides the same service as its satellite cousins, or if its orbiting kin provide something so different that Gugliermo Marconi’s baby just can’t compete. As anyone who’s driven cross country - fiddling with the dial trying to find a station that is playing something they can stand and that won’t fade to static five minutes later - can attest, there are some advantages to satellite that terrestrial just can’t match. Users to whom those advantages are important, the argument goes, have only two places to get them: XM or Sirius. A new company aims to change that. This blog has noted the forthcoming Slacker as a potential competitor in the satellite radio market before, but details were sparse as to how the service would actually work, and thus how similar to XM or Sirius it would be.

This article reveals several new details about how exactly the nascent technology will operate, and the picture revealed is of a robust competitor to XM/Sirius - at least as far as music is concerned.

The recording industry was kind enough to invite me to join a conference call announcing a new coalition called musicFIRST, whose members include the RIAA, Soundexchange, the music industry unions and over 80 artists. The coalition’s sole goal is to eliminate the exemption that over-the-air broadcasters have from paying the same performance royalties that satellite radio and webcasters pay to the record labels and performers. Representatives from RIAA and Soundexchange were on the call, as was Martha Reeves from the Motown group Martha Reeves and the Vandellas (who is now a member of the Detroit City Council) and Rob Garza from the band Thievery Corporation. The coalition’s clear message is that as a matter of fairness to artists, the exemption should be repealed.

The US delegation is holding another roundtable on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty next month to discuss the latest draft of the treaty and the next round of negotiations. As others have noted, it's open to the public, so long as you RSVP to the Copyright office by May 5th. The official announcement of the roundtable is here.