Tag: Government Mandates

If you’ve never seen the intro (original/new) to the TV show “The Outer Limits” then perhaps now is the time. Be sure to have the sound up:

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission…

Perhaps if the intro was written today, it would say, “There is nothing wrong with your television set. But do not attempt to view our movies. The MPAA is controlling transmission.”

In its “Declaration on the World Economy”, the G-8 included an endorsement of ACTA and ongoing efforts to “standardize” IP enforcement through customs organizations. “We encourage the acceleration of negotiations to establish a new international legal framework, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and seek to complete the negotiation by the end of this year,” the statement says.

So we have a major endorsement of ACTA from the leadership of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. And pressure to have this international legal agreement ready to roll at the end of the year. So what’s going to be in this critically important, possibly binding international agreement, to be completed in less than six months?

We have no idea.

There are several types of hearings. Some bring together various thinkers with various points of view to raise issues and begin hashing out solutions. Others start with a predetermined conclusion and present “witnesses” for the sole purpose of validating that predetermined conclusion. This hearing was of the latter variety. If you weren’t reading Alex’s play by play tweets, here’s a full rundown.

The Opening Statements

Video sharing sites hit mainstream a long time ago—by the time a technology is feted as part of a presidential debate, it's no longer got that same early-adopter cachet. That doesn't keep it from being useful, though.

Right now, for instance, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is asking for your input on a key meeting this month.

NOTE: My original blog post on this topic stated that the Tennessee state legislature was on the verge of passing SB 3974, a copyright industry-supported higher ed filtering bill. As discussed below, SB 3974 has been replaced with a different (and weaker) version. I regret the error.

I couldn’t say for certain, but I’d be willing to take a good guess that there are cordless phones somewhere in the homes of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate.

The next time one of the commissioners picks up that phone, he or she should give some thought to how it came to be there. Chances are someone in the family bought that phone in a big-box electronics store, picking it out from shelf after shelf of phones. Or they could have ordered it online from dozens of more choices.

Cordless phones have gone through a significant metamorphosis in recent years. They started out at 900 MHz, went to 2.4 GHz, to 5.8 GHz. They went from having a big antenna to no visible antenna. Consumers once bought one phone. Now they can buy a set of three phones – a base and two others. The speakerphone, long a staple of the business desktop telephone, is now part of the cordless revolution.

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.

On March 19, I was invited to a symposium at Penn Law entitled “Copyright and the Internet: Solutions for a Digital World.” The panel before mine was dedicated to reconciling copyright and the first amendment in the areas of filtering, takedown notices, and fair use.

The panel discussion was fascinating, and covered more ground than I can do justice to here. What I want to focus on was a particular point addressed by Jannifer Pariser, Senior Vice President of Sony BMG’s Litigation and Anti-Piracy department.

Hollywood for years has had a fascination with spies. Some are action spies, like the various incarnations of Bond, James Bond, or cerebral spies like Alec Guinness’ masterfully subtle George Smiley. All sorts of people have played TV spies, from Robert Culp and Bill Cosby to Patrick McGoohan, Robert Goulet and the fabulous Lady Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.

There have been spies who watch and listen to us without our knowledge. Gene Hackman had a creepy turn as the telephone eavesdropper (technically not a spy, although he spied) in “The Conversation” in 1974. Ten years ago Will Smith’s “Enemy of the State” played off of the then-paranoid “fantasy”, now a reality, of the all-hearing National Security Agency (NSA). The current crop of Bourne films shows a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the technical capability to listen and see anything and anyone at any time.

Last month, Public Knowledge submitted comments to the European Commission in response to this communication on online creative content. The Commission was asking for input about a variety of topics, including making DRM interoperable, creating licenses that would work across national boundaries within the EU, and how to deal with online piracy.

PK’s comments focused on just two of the 11 separate questions put for the by the Commission, about potential enforcement mechanisms against online infringement. Those questions were:

10) Do you consider the Memorandum of Understanding, recently adopted in France, as an example to followed?

11) Do you consider that applying filtering measures would be an effective way to prevent online copyright infringements?