The statement, co-authored by Victoria Espinel, the IP Enforcement Coordinator, Aneesh Chopra, the Chief Technology Officer, and Howard Schmidt, the Cybersecurity Coordinator, affirms the message that legislation tampering with the DNS poses real risks to the security and stability of the Internet.

It was suggested that a Scannebago should be driving around the United States scanning public library works to make them available online. (I envision the Scannebago as a cross between a Winnebago, a Google Street View car and the pickup truck from Twister, but you might picture a more creative image.) Regardless of the process, many public libraries have scanned works over the past few years and now it is time to organize the digital works for public access across the country—and eventually internationally. Last year, the Berkman Center for Internet and Technology, with funding from the Alfred P.

Today, Public Knowledge, joined by a wide variety of consumer, civil rights, and civil liberties groups, urged the FCC to immediately pass rules that would prevent local authorities from ordering a shutdown of wireless services the way that BART did earlier this month. As Harold’s earlier blog post points out, we don’t even need to get to the (extremely pressing and important) First Amendment issues to find that BART’s actions violated the law—the Communications Act, to be precise.

I suppose I am really a telecom lawyer at heart. My reaction to the news that the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police shut down cellphone networks in a number of stations on August 11 had nothing to do with democracy, the First Amendment, Tahrir Square, etc. With all deference to the importance of these concerns, my reaction was WHAT DO YOU MEAN THESE IDIOTS MESSED WITH THE PHONE SYSTEM? From my perspective, and the perspective of traditional telecom law, BART could just as well have turned off the local central office and all this chatter about whether or not BART is a public forum is just a distraction.

DNS Security

The first major problem is the tension between DNS filtering and the DNS Security Extensions, or DNSSEC.

Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights, is stepping down at the end of this year.  That means that very soon, for the first time since 1994, there will be someone new in charge of the Copyright Office.  Transitions are always an opportunity to think about setting new goals, but it seems especially appropriate at this important time in copyright policy.  That is why today we are releasing our newest white paper A Copyright Office for the 21st Century: Recommendations to the New Register of Copyrights.

Today we, along with EFF and the Open Technology Initiative, filed comments in the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force Inquiry on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Internet Economy.  The Task Force, run by the NTIA is the Department’s attempt to start thinking about Copyright issues and how they impact the economy.  Our filing might be interesting for you because it summarizes many of the major issues in copyright policy today.

In my last post, I discussed the implications of Mattel v. MGA Entertainment on the idea-expression dichotomy in copyright law.  Even before getting to the issue of what was copyrighted and whether there was infringement in the case, however, the Ninth Circuit first had to address who owned the copyrights, trademarks, and other concepts underlying the Bratz doll line. 

I hope someone made a videotape of my debate with Ray Gifford at NARUC. For my money, it provided the most succinct and straightforward framework for arguing about FCC broadband authority and where we ought to go from here. Ray framed it quite well as a conflict in vision between a classic Progressive Era philosophy and “economic analytics.” While I’m willing to debate in the economic analytics world (the two are not mutually exclusive, and economics informs progressive philosophy as much as concerns about public safety and consumer protection inform economic analytics), I think this makes a fairly good framework for how to approach these issues. Indeed, as a result of framing this as a difference in worldview, we avoided a lot of the acrimony and repetition that usually defines these debates.