March 2006
5 posts
Who's your daddy?
Bridget Dooling and I have an article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal. It’s the Rule of Law column and, not surprisingly, it’s on orphan works. Here’s a bit:
Fiddling with copyright terms and registration, however, would require not only the abrogation of several international intellectual property treaties, but also the political will in Congress to stand up to...
Crawford's substrate neutrality
Susan Crawford on net neutrality: “When [telcos and cablecos] say ‘internet’ they mean infrastructure. They mean substrate. They say they built the substrate and now own it. … But when users say ‘internet’ they mean relationships. We forget, because so many machines are involved, that the internet is a social world. Users don’t think about...
Lessig on orphan works
Lawrence Lessig has posted his thoughts on the Copyright Office’s orphan works report. He is largely critical of the report’s conclusions and continues to support the proposed Public Domain Enhancement Act (PDEA), which was based on his ideas. In my recent paper with Bridget Dooling, we show why the PDEA solution is unworkable. But I think it’s worth addressing some of the points...
Opposition to orphan works legislation
The American Society of Media Photographers is leading a coalition of organizations opposed to orphan works legislation. I never thought there would be much opposition to legislation that aimed to fix the orphan works problem. “Everybody wins if this is properly fixed,” I thought. In retrospect, it was naive of me to think that there is any issue in this town that doesn’t have...
Is pay-as-you-go the devil?
The WSJ reports today that “Large phone companies and telecom-equipment makers are developing plans that would blow up the flat-fee structure for high-speed Internet access and instead charge customers different rates based on how much bandwidth, or Internet capacity, they use.” This makes eminent sense to me and seems to address ISPs’ concerns about who is paying for their...
