February 2007
17 posts
That's an awfully nice merger you have there, it'd...
On the podcast last week I mentioned that if Kevin Martin’s FCC approves the XM-Sirius merger, one of the conditions it could impose is that the new entity accept indecency regulation that satellite radio is not currently subject to. Adam called this “regulatory blackmail,” and now I’m seeing a pattern.
The WSJ reports that Spanish-language broadcaster Univision agreed to...
Frontline Wireless joins the interoperability...
Yesterday I filed a public interest comment (PDF) in the FCC’s proceeding to create a national public safety broadband network in the 700 MHz band. Not coincidentally, so did Frontline Wireless, a new company started by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and former NTIA Administrator Janice Obuchowski among others. In their filing they propose a new plan to build a national wireless...
Media and neutrality regulation: contradictions?
Susan Crawford asks a good question: How does one reconcile being both “for” network neutrality regulation and rules against media concentration?
To be “for” network neutrality, it seems natural to have the view that the internet is displacing many prior forms of communications modalities—the press is in a free fall, people are watching much less broadcast...
Gigi Sohn on XM-Sirius
Net neutrality being such a hot issue right now, we haven’t had a chance lately to agree with our friends at Public Knowledge. But when we do agree, we really agree. (Speaking for myself, that includes orphan works and fair use.) Today PK President Gigi Sohn blogs about the XM-Sirius merger and opposition to it by the NAB. The post is too good to excerpt only a piece, so here it is in its...
Martin Cooper lecture tomorrow
Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone, is giving a talk tomorrow on spectrum policy for the 21st Century as part of Tom Hazlett’s “Big Ideas About Information” lecture series. It’ll take place at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, VA. More info here. According to Wikipedia,
Cooper is considered the inventor of the first portable handset and the...
Cable competition apparently not working fast...
Sunday’s Washington Post featured a story entitled, “Cable War Fails to Offer Rate Relief in Montgomery.” The gist of the story is that Comcast, the incumbent cable provider in Montgomery County, Maryland, is raising rates by 4 percent and residents are distraught that the much vaunted competition from Verizon has done nothing to curb prices.
So much for the idea that...
American.com
You should bookmark The American, a new daily online and quarterly print magazine from AEI. In the few weeks I’ve followed it, it has surprised me with lots of good stories and ideas, usually by young writers, and quite often about technology. Just this week there’s a piece by Jens Laurson and George Pieler nominating Milton Friedman as the patron saint of blogging since the...
Spectrum and the definition of deregulation
Today Lawrence Lessig released the second in his series of presentations about what Congress should do on internet policy. The first installment was about orphan copyrights, and I addressed it here. Today, Lessig writes about “deregulating spectrum,” which is an apt title if by deregulating you mean regulating. Lessig likens the current command-and-control system of spectrum regulation...
Search, cache, and copyright
Google has lost its copyright appeal against Belgian newspaper publishers. There seem to be conflicting reports about what exactly Google was found liable for. Here’s the WSJ:
A Belgian court ruled Tuesday that Internet search engine Google Inc. violated Belgian copyright law when it published snippets and links to Belgian newspapers on its Web site without permission.
And here’s the...
Cartefone for wireless?
Tim Wu will be presenting his paper “Wireless Net Neutrality” at an FTC workshop on network access tomorrow on Wednesday. (BTW: The workshop is free and open to the public.) Basically he’s arguing for Carterfone to be applied to the cell phone industry. The Washington Post has a write-up of the ideas behind the paper and reaction from both sides of the debate.
Until federal...
WaPo: 'WiFi Turns Internet Into Hideout for...
The Washington Post runs an article today about police tracing online criminals—mostly pedophiles—to a physical address only to find an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot and not the criminal. The good news in the article is that the police seem to understand that just because something illegal happened over your IP address, it doesn’t mean you did it. The bad news is the “there...
What congress can do about interoperability
Yesterday I explained that in my view first responders don’t need more spectrum to address their interoperability problem, but instead a different approach to using the spectrum they already have. So if Congress shouldn’t allocate more spectrum for public safety, what should it do to address the problem?
Cyren Call is absolutely right about a lot of things: That we should opt for...
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Public safety doesn't need more spectrum
Ahead of tomorrow’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on public safety communications, the Consumer Electronics Association released a report (PDF) it commissioned from Criterion Economics analyzing the Cyren Call plan. The report concludes that the Cyren Call plan would upturn Congress’s carefully crafted DTV transition scheme. It also calls into question whether the private sector...
Lessig's orphan works proposal unworkable
Lawrence Lessig has a new half-hour presentation on his blog where he outlines his opposition to the Copyright Office’s recommendations on orphan copyright works that were the basis for the proposed Orphan Works Act of 2006, and which were very similar to the proposal Bridget Dooling and I made. He also proposes his own alternative solution, which is much like the proposed Public Domain...
McCain signs on to Cyren Call plan
I’ve written on this blog before about Cyren Call, Nextel founder Morgan O’Brien’s venture to create a national wireless broadband network for first responders. Its plan calls for 30 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band that are slated for auction. A couple of months ago the FCC turned down Cyren Call’s petition, saying Congress’s instructions were quite...
DRM on 9/11 Commission Report
This is nothing new, but it’s something that grinds my gears to no end, and that’s how the DMCA makes it illegal for me to use works that are completely in the public domain. Researching my previous post, I had occasion to download and read a PDF of the 9/11 Commission Report. This is a report created by the federal government and therefore has no copyright; it is in the public domain....
On interoperability, is it worth implementing the...
Implementing the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations was the House Democrat’s top priority during their recent “first 100 hours” legislative spree. One of the recommendations addressed in the resulting H.R. 1 bill had to do with public safety communications interoperability. The 9/11 Commission found that communications between firefighters, police officers, and other...
