is running an excellent interview with Sarah Deutsch, general counsel at Verizon, by Declan McCullagh. At the end of the article, she says, “It’s been an interesting time to be on the same side as groups like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We find ourselves with shared interests in making sure that fair use is preserved, that users’ expectation in new digital services are fulfilled, and that copyright is ultimately a law that involves balancing the interests of many parties. We have a 300-pound gorilla on one side of the scale. Many of us are joining together on the other, to reach that necessary balance. ”
Yet another story
about DNA evidence overturning a murder conviction. It’s commonplace now, it’s not even a surprise any more to learn that a person who has been serving time did not commit the crime. As usual, there is some indication that the police made the conviction happen through, umm, creative interrogation techniques. I’m not interested in the basic story however. We know that innocent people are convicted all the time. What’s disturbing is this seeming throwaway line in the story: “Most of the police files had disappeared…” The files always seem to have disappeared, no? I wonder if anyone is responsible for that part of things – I mean really responsible, with at least civil if not criminal penalties for losing the files. Information is power – in some cases, the power to save a falsely-convicted killer’s life. If the files that could exonerate him (or her) are lost, that would seem to me to be a big problem.
Wired News
: New Salvo in Piracy, Privacy War. “The music industry’s trade association is asking a federal district court to force an Internet service provider to turn over private information for a subscriber, heating up the legal war between technology and entertainment companies.”
More thoughts from Dave Winer
on Lessig and copyright. I don’t understand how Dave’s position is different than the RIAA or Valenti. Can someone enlighten me? He says that he diverges from the entertainment industry because they don’t pay the artists. That difference has little or nothing to do with the copyright issue, does it?
As Doc Searls
wrote today, “I gotta dig how fast and far the People Vs. Hollywood political conversation is spreading.” For the record, I’d like to throw one small point out, maybe to fill in the historical side of this a little. People are fixated upon the DMCA and its role in overturning old US copyright law traditions. It is right to be fixated on that insidious law – but it didn’t begin there.
In its own way, the Telecom Reform Act of 1996 was as important as the DCMA. Everyone focused on the Communications Decency Act back then, but that was clearly just a smoke screen from the beginning. The types of business combination that were finally allowed under the Telecom Reform Act are what has given rise to the large, monopolistic firms who are driving things currently in Hollywood.
Of course those combinations started to occur well before 1996 – but the “reforms” in 96 stripped away the barriers to companies who could own the whole pipeline and control it from head office. Before 1996 there were enough different kinds of player in the food chain that it was harder to get traction, either operationally or as a lobbying force.
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