Content & Copyright

• Tech Republic, Is Apple losing its cool factor with Techies? (May 7): “The company’s stubborn refusal to support Adobe Flash (which wins props with some IT pros but breaks a lot of Web sites), its draconian and ambiguous review policy for the App Store, and it’s strong-arm legal tactics with HTC and Gizmodo are having a negative impact on how young, tech-savvy professionals view Apple, according to YouGov’s BrandIndex.” What happens next – Steve Jobs gets cut from the cheerleading squad?
• FCC Media Bureau, In the Matter of Motion Picture Association of America Petition for Expedited Special Relief; Petition for Waiver of the Commission’s Prohibition on the Use of Selectable Output Control (May 7); Tech Daily Dose, MPAA, CEA at Odds on FCC Order May 7): “The FCC sided with anti-piracy groups on Friday in an order that will allow satellite and cable providers to encode content sent to set-top boxes with a signal preventing it from being distributed online.”
• Reuters, Why Hollywood should be nervous about [Kagan] (May 11): “As dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009, she was instrumental in beefing up the school’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society by recruiting Lawrence Lessig and others who take a strongly liberal position on “fair use” in copyright disputes.”
• Intellectual Property Breakfast Club Launches With Discussion of Google Book Search (May 17):  Full video of last week’s event is available.
• Roughtype, Long player: super deluxe limited-edition reissue (May 15):  Nick Carr assaults the canard that the LP album was the creation of cynical marketers and that the natural unit of music is the three-minute track: “Wallerstein in fact invented the long-player because he wanted a format that would do justice to performances of classical works, which, needless to say, didn’t lend themselves all that well to three-minute snippets.”  There is much more, delivered with his usual verve.
• U.S. District Court (SDNY), Opinion & Order in Arista Records et. al. v. Limewire (May 11): The companies mostly won on their several copyright claims against Limewire, a P2P filesharing program. Given the state of the law (Grokster, Aimster, and Napster), it is a bit unclear just why the defendant thought it could win. Public Knowledge thinks the case may foreshadow requirements of mandatory filtering if sites are to avoid liability.
• Public Knowledge, Updating Fair Use for Innovators and Creators in the Digital Age: Two Targeted Reforms (Feb. 13):  By Prof. Jennifer Urban of Berkeley. Interesting discussion.
• THR, Esq., New litigation campaign quietly targets tens of thousands of movie downloaders (March 31): Bounty hunting lives!

Software

• BSA,  Seventh Annual Global Piracy Study 2010: “In 2009, for every $100 worth of legitimate software sold, an additional $75 worth of unlicensed software made its way onto the market.”

Patents

• Tech Daily Dose, Conservative Groups Blast Senate Patent Bill (May 14):  “We urge you to place a hold on this bill until the provisions undermining basic property rights, economic freedom, the interests of small inventors, universities, and research consortia, and job creation are corrected.”

The Net

• Forbes,  The Regulatory Threat to Web Video (May 17):  Bret Swanson (DS Visiting Fellow) notes the irony of “a talented techie ‘libertarian,’ in the pages of Forbes, ask[ing] Washington bureaucrats to manage the Internet.” See also Bret’s latest comments to the FCC concerning Net Neutrality.
• PFF Blog, Cord-Cutting Continues; 25% of Homes Now Wireless-Only (May 13).
• ITIF, Tomorrowland (May 11):  Rob Atkinson & Daniel Castro say: In the city of the future, bridges will talk to engineers, roads will control cars, and parking spots will find you. In some places, it’s already here.”
• Discovery Institute, Telecom crash redux (May 7): From George Gilder:

The FCC’s newest plan for seizing control of the last-mile broadband connections we all use to access the Internet would classify broadband as a ‘telecommunications service,’ which will put the FCC under constant pressure to resurrect the “unbundling” regulations that precipitated the telecom crash of 2000 by requiring owners of last-mile links to homes and offices to share their lines with rivals.

Remember the CLECs? They were essentially a hothouse product of regulation, and they not only failed to deliver bandwidth but they brought down the whole high tech economy. As a result of that carnage the FCC drew back, last-mile bandwidth was declared to be an ‘information service,’ and thus not subject to the labyrinthine rules that were applied before as if they were voice telephone lines.

With business investment flooding into this arena ever since, the U.S. has accomplished a broadband miracle, with residential bandwidth up 54 fold, wireless bandwidth to consumers up 542 fold.

With sufficient investment in bandwidth, carriers will have no economic incentive to discriminate. If bandwidth is scarce, carriers will be forced to set priorities or else slow everything down to the lowest common denominator.

Investment is what determines whether there is abundance or scarcity and whether network neutrality in practice is just a carnival for lawyers to litigate telecom and Internet companies.

Nothing can so wither broadband investment as murky mandates from Washington.

• Precursor Blog, FCC’s Dysfunctional Retransmission Rules Harm Consumers (May 17):  Surprise! Scott Cleland finds that 20-year-old FCC rules do not reflect the current technological and business situation.
• Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) introduced (May 11) H.R. 5257, the Internet Investment, Innovation, and Competition Preservation Act, which addresses the FCC decision to recognize broadband as a Title II service. Explained Stearns, “This bill would require the FCC to conduct a rigorous market analysis before mandating new network regulations.”  The AT&T Public Policy Blog likes it: “As the FCC proceeds down the path of regulating the Internet by applying 75 year-old laws developed for the black rotary telephone we are hopeful that the Congress will take a more prudent path. . . . it’s critical that laws are in place that incent infrastructure investment and job creation; not over regulatory maneuvers that would create uncertainty and harm investment, innovation, jobs, and consumers.”
• Silicon Flatirons (Univ. of Colorado), Exploratory Workshop on Institutional Responses to Network Management Issues (March 31):  “This workshop brought together a number of technical experts from various providers operating in the Internet ‘ecosystem’ to engage . . . in a high-level discussion on the intersection of network management techniques and regulation.”
• Competitive Enterprise Institute, Stay Classy, Sacramento! (March-April):  Since the tech world runs on energy (duh!), it is not clear just how all this will work out.  “The centerpiece of California’s energy policy is the absence of energy. . . .

New nuclear power plants cannot be built because of a moratorium.

New coal plants are illegal.

Large scale hydropower is unthinkable for California’s environmentally sensitive voters, because it harms fish.

Natural gas plants emit half as much carbon as coal plants, but they are banned in much of California because they cannot get air quality permits for particulate emissions.”

Competition

• Asian Competition Law and Economics Centre (ACLEC) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Competition Digest: a monthly e-newletter (Issue 1 – May 2010): News from all over the world.
• FTC Extends Public Comment Period on Proposed Revised Horizontal Merger Guidelines Through June 4 (May 6):  Here is the proposal.

Innovation

• American Enterprise Blog, The Morality of Capitalism (May 12).

China

• McKinsey, China’s state capitalism and multinationals: An interview with the president of Eurasia Group (May): “the changing rules of competition in China, where the state is the principal actor and arbiter in the economy.”
• Industry Comments on the Draft Notice Launching the National Indigenous Innovation Product Accreditation Work for 2010 (May 10):  23 industry associations express their concern.  More at Tech Daily Dose, Firms Urge China To Repeal Indigenous Innovation Policy (May 10), and Reuters, U.S. to press China on innovation policy at meeting (May 10).

Events

• PFF, Can Government Help Save the Press? (May 20; DC).
• TechCrunch Disrupt (May 24-26; NYC).  “Three-day, single-track conference and startup competition to immerse you in the debate about what’s changing in media and technology right now, what’s causing it and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real time.” (Via Don Dodge, nee Microsoft, now Google.)
• GIPC Speaker Series: The Global Trade of Counterfeit Medicines and the Developing World (May 27; DC).
• CSIS, Cyber Security Discussion with LTG Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency (June 3; DC).
• Broadband Breakfast Club, New Retransmission Consent Battles and Licensing Video Content (June 8; DC): “Retransmission consent rules were intended to level the playing field between local broadcasters and large cable operators. Decades later, some argue the rules are a significant hurdle to a smoothly operating marketplace, with competing distribution platforms (cable, DBS, telecom) and distribution business models (linear, on-demand, internet).”
• USTelecom & Connected Planet, Building a Better Internet (June 22; DC):    “In-depth looks at consumer expectations for the Internet, domestic and International efforts to expand broadband, and ways of creating a more efficient Internet for delivering a broad range of current and new services to consumers and businesses.”
• The ninth Supernova Forum 2010: Perestroika (July 30; Philadelphia).  Three key themes: Evolving Digital Infrastructure: Everything is a Platform? / Networked Business Innovation: Models and Vision / Crossing the Abyss: Transforming (or Replacing) Established Institutions
• Summer Tech Events:

In Seattle, Aug. 17-19: pii2010 (which stands for privacy, identity, innovation), a tech policy summit by the proprietors of Tech Policy Central.

In Aspen, Aug. 22-24, the Technology Policy Institute Aspen Forum.

[The explanation of the title Firehose is here.]