Content & Copyright

• TechDirt, ACTA Negotiators Respond To Questions About ACTA; More Of The Same (June 28): TD is not a fan.

• City Journal, A Media Welfare State? We need a WPA for the press, Robert McChesney and John Nichols insist (June 28): Adam Thierer reviews The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.

• Capitalism Magazine, ‘File-Sharing’: It’s Not Stealing Because I Don’t Want It to Be (April 10): The author thinks that “We, as consumers, should be eager to repay those who produce products and services that bring immense value to our lives.  The people who make our favorite movies and our favorite music are not our slaves or servants. They work to produce those goods and, just like everyone else, they expect and deserve to be paid by those who use their products.  And it is to our benefit to repay these individuals—it is, after all, this payment that motivates and enables them to keep producing those very goods for us to enjoy.”

• Verizon Public Policy Blog, Verizon Urges FCC to Stop Cablevision’s Illegal Withholding of Regional Sports Programming (June 28): “Under new FCC rules, Verizon . . . asks the commission to require Cablevision and Madison Square Garden, L.P. to sell Verizon access to the high-definition sports feeds of the MSG and MSG+ networks. . . . on nondiscriminatory terms. While Cablevision supplies the high-definition sports programming to itself and certain other providers – including the other cable incumbents – it refuses to provide access to Verizon and its subscribers on any terms.”

• Gizmodo, Quitting Facebook Sure Is Hard (June 29) : The thin line between reality and parody.

• PFF, Tom Sydnor has a series of posts on intellectual property issues:  Why Copyright Industry Costs-of-Piracy Studies Correctly Ignore the “Positive Economic Effects” of Criminal Racheteering (June 18): Wow: A Bipartisan, Legislative/Executive Call for Private Solutions to the Challenges of Internet Counterfeiting and Piracy (June 23 ); Viacom v. YouTube: Why Are We Re-Litigating Grokster? (June 24); Send In the Clowns: A Review of Oberholzer-Gee and Stumpf’s Copyright and File-Sharing (Part 1) (June 24).

Patents

• Bilski roundup on Patently-O.
  

The Net

• ACLP, Net Neutrality, Investment & Jobs: Assessing the Potential Impacts of the FCC’s Proposed Net Neutrality Rules on the Broadband Ecosystem (June): DS Visiting Fellow Bret Swanson and co-author fear that “The innovative vibrancy evident throughout the broadband ecosystem is in danger of being undermined by FCC proposals,” Nick Brown reviews the piece on our blog, here.

• The White House, Presidential Memorandum: Unleashing the Wireless Broadband Revolution (June 28): The plan to make more spectrum available for mobile uses. The Cisco High Tech Policy Blog likes it:  “Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (“VNI”) estimates that mobile data traffic is doubling every year through 2013.” So does AT&T, which is especially struck by the fact that the announcement was made by Larry Summers, the Administration’s economic chief, in a talk on Technological Opportunities, Job Creation, and Economic Growth. EconLog has some reservations, asking, “isn’t this just a partial solution to a problem that is entirely government created? That is, we have this legacy regulation that assigns spectrum to particular use, rather than allowing whoever owns the spectrum to use it any way they want. Basically, the solution is to abolish all FCC regulations other than assigning clear and strong property rights to spectrum,” and expanding on the idea here.

• Free State Foundation, Not Mao Zedong or a Communist…But a Socialist (June 22):  Randy May looks at Free Press founder Robert McChesney – “There are many on the Left who take umbrage when those who criticize their policies characterize them as “socialist” – they might even huff and puff about McCarthyism. They apparently think the characterization harmful to their cause. Not Robert McChesney. I don’t know whether he would or would not be pleased with being called Mao Zedong or a Communist. But I know he doesn’t shy away from the Socialist label, or from advocating what he calls socialist policies.” Precursor adds: “The disturbing common thread here that deserves much more attention from freedom-loving people everywhere, is the deeply (and scarily successful) anti-free-enterprise, anti-property, anti-individual-freedom efforts by FreePress in promoting a de facto government takeover of both the media and broadband communications infrastructure.“

• Precursor, The FCC’s ‘Blight Touch’ and ‘Muddle Ground’ (June 22): Hard to improve on the title.

Cybersecurity & Privacy

• SurprisinglyFree, Tim Stevens on cyberwar (June 28): Expert thoughts on the current cybersecurity climate.

• ZDNet, Report: A fifth of Android apps expose private data (June 23).

Health Care, Medical, Genetics, Agriculture

• XConomy, Fixing the Broken [Drug Development] Model: Look Inside Your Company (June 24): Many drug failures stem from ineptitude at dealing with the regulatory system, not from flaws in the drug itself. For commentary, see Snowflakes in Hell, which also links back to a post on Why Government Can’t Do Pharma R&D (Sept. 2009), which in turn links to the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle on this very topic.  Returning to the original topic, one wonders why the FDA takes a not-my-problem approach to difficulties in dealing with its system instead of regarding it as part of its job to help creative but regulatorily naïve researchers.

• Fierce Biotech, Pharma pipelines mired by poor productivity, shrinking R&D budgets (June 28): “drug approvals for new chemical entities [are] running at about half the level of the peak registered in 1997. . . .  And overall R&D spending dipped 0.3 percent last year, as the momentum behind cuts in pharma pipeline budgets continued to gain speed.”

Innovation

• Kauffman Foundation, Understanding the Economy, One Business at a Time (June 29): “Many of our limitations in understanding the complexities of entrepreneurship stem from a lack of meaningful data — something the Kauffman Foundation and many others are working to change.” And see Kauffman Foundation Research Series: Firm Formation and Economic Growth, including High-Growth Firms and the Future of the American Economy – “In any given year, the top-performing 1 percent of firms generate roughly 40 percent of new job creation. — Fast-growing young firms, comprising less than 1 percent of all companies, generate roughly 10 percent of new jobs in any given year.”

• National Science Foundation, U.S. Businesses Report 2008 Worldwide R&D Expense of $330 Billion (May).

• All About Finance, Deals vs Rules: Capturing regulatory burdens (June 22): “The costs of excessive regulatory burdens can stifle incentives for firms to innovate, invest and grow. . . . The first thing to notice is just how much variation there is – within individual countries. There are favored firms for whom it takes a couple of days to obtain permits or clear customs – and disfavored firms, for whom the wait can be weeks or even months. . . . The second thing to notice is that variation in how policies are actually implemented also bears little significant association with how long compliance is supposed to take.”

China

• Google Public Policy Blog, An Update on China (June 29): Google figures out how to stay in China.

Events

• Phoenix Center, The Broadband Credibility Gap (July 8; DC): “The question, therefore, is whether the FCC has the credibility to live up to its [forbearance] promises.” Paper is here.

• Broadband Breakfast Club, The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Treaty (July 13; DC).

• Excellence in Government, Open Government (July 19; DC).

• Broadband Breakfast Club, The Smart Grid, Telecommunications and the Electric Infrastructure (July 20; DC).

• 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.

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

• Technology Policy Institute Aspen Forum (Aspen, CO; Aug. 22-24).

• TheBerkshireForum (Sept. 14-16; Pittsfield, MA):  “ three-day conference promising inspiring ideas and stimulating dialogue led by a remarkable network of business owners, economists, social innovators, technology visionaries, cultural enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and thought leaders.”

• Institute for Policy Innovation, Communications Summit (DC; Oct. 6).

[The explanation of the title Firehose is here.]