Public Knowledge Policy Blog
What Does NebuAd Know About You? What Doesn't It?
While the full United States Senate on Wednesday (July 9) takes up the subject of wiretapping by the government, the Senate Commerce Committee will take up the subject of wiretapping by private industry. It’s a tossup which one is more scary.
The Senate votes July 9 on the bill to grant the Executive Branch almost unlimited authority to wiretap private citizens without any judicial oversight. The Commerce Committee will hear testimony from Robert Dykes, the chairman of NebuAd, a controversial company recently in the news because his group came up with a novel way of getting detailed information about Internet users. NebuAd wasn’t satisfied to get information only from a customer’s use of one Web site. Instead, they want to see everything that a Web surfer does online.
Here’s Dykes pitching his company at a conference in New York earlier this year:
iPhone 3G and the Problem with AT&T's "Subsidy"
I’m the sucker who just over a year ago got up at 5AM to sit in a line until 6PM to buy an iPhone. There are a lot of people like me, I met many of them in line that long day. It was actually a lot of fun, but had I known that if I had just shown up at the Apple Store at 7PM that night, I could have walked out with the same iPhone, since there was plenty of supply, I think I would have done the latter. Since June 29, 2007, I have been incredibly in love with this new computing platform called the iPhone, and I’ve written about it a bit before.
Comcast's Right Hand Admits FCC Jurisdiction, Left Hand Declines to Comment
For months, Comcast spokespeople have been deny, deny, denying that the FCC has the power to do anything about Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic. Now, in papers filed as part of a class action lawsuit against Comcast, Comcast has gone the opposite direction, asserting that because “these issues are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the FCC, and because the FCC is actively investigating them,” the judge should put the suit on hold until the FCC renders a decision. The court has agreed, staying the case until the FCC acts.
Be Careful About Whose IP Policy You Sleep With
Last week, a French court found eBay liable for allowing “counterfeit” Louis Vuitton and Dior Couture merchandise to be auctioned on its site. The price tag: almost $65 million. This comes on top of the $30k fine eBay was handed a few weeks ago for allowing fake Hermes bags to be sold on its site. Other than confirming that France seems compelled to be idiosyncratic—even if it involves idiocy—and that it is hyper-protectionist with its his home-grown brands, these cases are bracing warning to be careful who you proverbially sleep with in international agreements.
Fair Use Best Practices Guide for Online Video
Is this video fair use?
You shouldn’t have to have a lawyer to know whether or not a user is fair. The good folks at the American University’s Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic and Center for Social Media have done it again and developed a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. It is a short 16 pages and easy to read, so you have no excuse to go check it out!
In this best practices, the experts go beyond the typical “four factor test”
It ain't FUD if it's true.
In last week’s post, I discussed the MPAA’s petition for waiver of the FCC’s ban on selectable output control (SOC).
At the end, I suggested that one possible outcome is that a content provider could shut down ALL your existing standardized output plugs, forcing you to buy a new TV, DVD player, and DVR with a special “MPAA-approved” connector plug in order to view their content.
To some people, it might have sounded like FUD, but this time the truth comes a little close for comfort.
What I Would Have Said
The reason, incidentally, that I was in Korea last week wasn’t just to attend the Seoul Ministerial, but to moderate a panel at the Civil Society Stakeholder Forum this past Monday. Due to the vagaries of the air transport system, I arrived a bit late to my panel—by about twelve hours or so.
I had been asked to introduce the topic of convergence, open standards, and network neutrality—a broad topic—and had prepped a short piece to open the panel and introduce the panelists—who, by all accounts, gave fascinating presentations that I would gladly have given up my hotel and meal vouchers to have seen.
Theory and Facts
Recently, I was in South Korea, attending the OECD’s Ministerial on the Future of the Internet Economy. Rather than try to give a blow-by-blow account, I’ve tried to package some of my thoughts in a series of posts. Here’s one:
A few days ago, I picked on Chairman Martin’s speech at the plenary session of the OECD Seoul Ministerial. Among the various deregulatory policies Martin cited as enhancing competition (and thus the United States’ position in terms of broadband pricing and deployment) was the removal of unbundling requirements for broadband.
Martin used the removal of unbundling requirements as one of many examples in creating a (false, I think) dichotomy between competition and regulation.
Orphan Works: Separating the Orphans from the Difficult to Find
Here I go again, trying to be constructive. But before I get there…
This Isn’t About You
I’d like to know what it would take to convince you, a visual artist, alive and creating today, that orphan works policy was not meant to apply to you? There are clearly tens of thousands of artists who are being scared out of the woodwork to write their representatives to stop orphan works legislation. If you’re one of these artist, who are savvy enough to know how to go to a website and click a button to write your member of Congress, then more than likely, if someone wants to use your work, they’re going to find you. Why? Because you exist. You’re with-it enough to be part of this debate, which in all likelihood means that after a user puts effort into finding you, you will actually be found.
FCC Commissioners Call For National Broadband Strategy
After graduating from college in 2005, I spent a year living in a small fishing village in Aomori Prefecture, on the northern tip of Japan’s main island, Honshu. Aomori is one of Japan’s poorest and most rural prefectures and its defining characteristics are cold weather, mountains and a lot of snow (I often jokingly refer to it as the “Wyoming of Japan”). My apartment in Aomori was lacking a number of amenities that we Americans take for granted—air conditioning, central heating and insulation being the most notable among them. One thing that I did have, however, was a 100 Mbps fiber-optic Internet connection, for which I paid the equivalent of around $30 USD per month. Fast forward to today. Verizon, the first major U.S. carrier to roll out fiber-to-the-home, has started selling its FiOS Internet service in a handful of U.S. markets. Unfortunately, you can’t yet get FiOS in places like Wyoming—so far, deployments have been mostly limited to urban areas like New York City and the suburbs of Washington D.C. You also can’t get 100 Mbps service—FiOS currently tops off at 50 Mbps. And how much, you ask, does that 50 Mbps service cost? $144.95 per month.
