Copyright
Panelists Debate Copyrights, Open Internet in U.S. Broadband Plan
WASHINGTON, January 19, 2010 – Communication and intellectual property experts debated whether a national broadband plan is the right vehicle for addressing copyright and network neutrality issues and whether the FCC is overstepping its bounds by dabbling with copyright issues.
Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn sparred with officials from the Recording Industry Association of America, telling RIAA’s executive vice president and general counsel that the recording and Hollywood industries along with some song writers want iinternet service providers to filter networks for copyright infringement.
WASHINGTON, January 19, 2010 – Communication and intellectual property experts debated whether a national broadband plan is the right vehicle for addressing copyright and network neutrality issues and whether the Federal Communications Commission is overstepping its bounds by dabbling with copyright issues.
Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn sparred with officials from the Recording Industry Association of America, telling RIAA’s executive vice president and general counsel that the recording and Hollywood industries along with some song writers want internet service providers to filter networks for copyright infringement.
She pressed Steven Marks, of RIAA, to come clean about his group’s wishes for ISPs to adopt a “three strikes and you’re out” policy, referring to the suggestion that ia consumer would be penalized if he violates a copyright more than three times.
“It’s a nasty technique,” she said to the audience and panel, moderated by BroadbandBreakfast.com Editor Drew Clark and The Hill’s Kim Hart.
Marks responded by saying his group was seeking fair treatment of consumers, but copyright holders needed some sort of recourse that would deter potential copyright violators from committing these crimes. He reiterated throughout the panel that the RIAA is “open to discussion” about the proposal and suggested three strikes as a starting point for negotiations, but is open to other figures as well.
“We’re not [the] parades of horribles that Gigi is talking about,” said Marks. “We’re talking about moving toward something that provides people education and in a manner” that offers warnings or notices more than one time.”
Fernando Laguarda, a vice president with Time Warner Cable, which spun off Time Warner last March, said his company is interested in copyright policy because “it’s important to customers” and “protecting the importance of copyrights is essential to the economy.”
Sohn said she doesn’t believe that copyright issues have a place in the national broadband plan and while Marks didn’t explicitly say he believes they do, he said the FCC objectives in broadband policy of innovation, investment and a good consumer experience are “goals that require contemplation…and consideration of copyrighted works.”
Matthew Henry, the Internet policy counsel for Data Foundry, a data management firm protecting clients’ data, expressed his concern that if copyright filtering becomes prevalent it would lead to the comprehensive monitoring of the Internet and Americans’ privacy rights could be lost.
“On the Internet you have traditional expectations of privacy in communications…like trade secrets or confidential communications with a spouse,” he said. “Privacy serves as a foundation for free speech” and freedom of religion.”
Laguarda said Time Warner Cable does not look at people’s private communications but the firm needs to know how the network is engaging users so that it can better make plans in expanding the network. He added that Time Warner Cable does not use deep package inspepction, which is a technology that drills deeply into a network’s contents, and doesn’t know how widespread that technology is used elsewhere.
Examining how customers use the network is important, he said, noting that the top quartile of his network’s customers, which are spread throughout 28 states, consume 100 times more broadband than the bottom quartile.
Moderator Hart pointed out that cable firm Comcast has rolled out a trial tool allowing consumers to see how much bandwidth they are using and they are kicked off the network if they exceed a certain amount of usage – about 250 megabits per second (Mbps) per month.
Laguarda said his company doesn’t have a similar plan in the works, but eight months ago the firm announced a trial of consumption-based billing which led to a public and broadband community outcry. The program was discontinued.
Sohn said monitoring usage could become a real problem: “ Imagine if you have Time Warner Cable having to look into every packet to see if it’s copyrighted material…It will slow down the network.”
Sohn said Public Knowledge doesn’t oppose usage-based pricing, but is concerned that if the usage cap is low enough, there’s discrimination against high usage and high bandwidth.
“The number [of mbps] should change as technology advances,” she added.
Copyright
Public Knowledge Celebrates 20 Years of Helping Congress Get a Clue on Digital Rights

February 27, 2021 – The non-profit advocacy group Public Knowledge celebrated its twentieth anniversary year in a Monday event revolving around the issues that the group has made its hallmark: Copyright, open standards and other digital rights issues.
Group Founder Gigi Sohn, now a Benton Institute for Broadband and Society senior fellow and public advocate, said that through her professional relationship with Laurie Racine, now president of Racine Strategy, that she became “appointed and anointed” to help start the interest group.
Together with David Bollier, who also had worked on public interest projects in broadcast media with Sohn, and is now director of Reinventing the Commons program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, the two cofounded a small and scrappy Public Knowledge that has become a non-profit powerhouse.
The secret sauce? Timing, which couldn’t have been better, said Sohn. Being given free office space at DuPont Circle at the New America Foundation by Steve Clemmons and the late Ted Halstead, then head of the foundation, was instrumental in Public Knowledge’s launch.
The cofounders met with major challenges, Sohn and others said. The nationwide tragedy of September 11, 2001, occurred weeks after its official founding. The group continued their advocacy of what was then more commonly known as “open source,” a related grandparent to the new “net neutrality” of today, she said.
In the aftermath of September 11, a bill by the late Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, D-S.C., demonstrated a bid by large copyright interest to force technology companies to effectively be the copyright police. Additional copyright maximalist measures we launched almost every month, she said.
Public Knowledge grew into something larger than was probably imagined by the three co-founders. Still, they shared setbacks and losses that accompanied their successes and wins.
“We would form alliances with anybody, which meant that sometimes we sided with internet service providers [on issues like copyright] and sometimes we were against them [on issues like telecom],” said Sohn. An ingredient in the interest group’s success was its desire to work with everyone.
Congress didn’t have a clue on digital rights
What drove the trio together was a shared view that “Congress had no vision for the future of the internet,” explained Sohn.
Much of our early work was spend explaining how digitation works to Congress, she said. The 2000s were a time of great activity and massive growth in the digital industry and lawmakers at the Hill were not acquainted well with screens, computers, and the internet. They took on the role of explaining to members of Congress what the interests of their constituents were when it came to digitization.
Public Knowledge helped popularize digital issues and by “walking [digital information] across the street to [Capitol Hill] at the time created an operational reality with digitization,” said Bollier.
Racine remarked about the influence Linux software maker Red Hat had during its 2002 initial public offering. She said the founders of Red Hat pushed open source beyond a business model and into a philosophy in ways that hadn’t been done before.
During the early days of Public Knowledge, all sorts of legacy tech was being rolled out. Apple’s iTunes, Windows XP, and the first Xbox launched. Nokia and Sony were the leaders in cellphones at the time, augmenting the rise of technology in the coming digital age.
Racine said consumers needed someone in Washington who could represent their interests amid the new software and hardware and embrace the idea of open source technologies for the future.
Also speaking at the event was Public Knowledge CEO Chris Lewis, who said Public Knowledge was at the forefront of new technology issues as it was already holding 3D printing symposiums before Congress, something totally unfamiliar at the time.
Copyright
In Google v. Oracle, Supreme Court Hears Landmark Fair Use Case on Software Copyright

October 12, 2020 – The Supreme Court on Wednesday publicly struggled with the copyrightability of software in a uniquely contested case between Google and Oracle, the outcome of which could play a significant role in the future of software development in the United States.
The oral arguments were the culmination of a battle that started 10 years ago, when tech company Oracle accused Google of illegally copying its code. Oracle owns the copyright to the Java application programming interface that Google utilized to establish a new mobile operating system.
The company has sued Google for more than $9 billion in damages.
Yet Google claimed a “fair use” defense to its copying. Google copied less than 1 percent of the Java code. Even though the law generally treats computer programs as copyrightable, Google’s attorney before the Supreme Court, Thomas Goldstein, said that by adapting Oracle’s code to serve a different purpose, Google’s use was “transformational,” and entitled to fair use protections.
Goldstein said that this form of unlicensed copying is completely standard in software, and saves developers time and lowers barriers to innovation.
He referenced a famous Supreme Court precedent about public domain works, Baker v. Selden, which in 1880 declared that once information is published to the public, the public has a right to use it.
“Google had the right to do this,” said Goldstein.
Still, Oracle attorney Joshua Rosenkranz asserted that the Java code is an expressive work eligible for copyright protections. Rosenkranz further argued that Google’s use of the code was not transformational.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared to suggest that jurors in the lower court case properly found Google’s use to be transformational because it took the APIs from a desktop environment to smartphones.
“Interfaces have been reused for decades,” said Goldstein. Google had to reuse Oracle’s code to respond to interoperability demands.
“It has always been the understanding that this purely functional, non-creative code that is essentially the glue that keeps computer programs together could be reused, and it would upend that world to rule the other way,” he said.
Supreme Court observers said that the high court appeared leaning toward upholding the 2016 jury verdict vindicating Google’s fair use defense.
Copyright
Fair Use is Essential But its Enforcement is Broken, Says Senate Intellectual Property Subcommittee

July 28, 2020 — “Fair use” is an essential doctrine of copyright law that is unevenly applied, said participants in a Senate Intellectual Property Subcommittee hearing Tuesday.
The hearing, “How Does the DMCA Contemplate Limitations and Exceptions Like Fair Use,” saw participants discuss whether the Digital Millennium Copyright Act still permits fair uses of copyrighted content that would be otherwise infringing.
The DMCA, passed in 1998, criminalizes the manufacture, sale or other distribution of technologies designed to decrypt encoded copyrighted material. This ban on anti-circumvention tools does not appear to account for fair use.
The fair use exception to copyright law allows the republication or redistribution of copyrighted works for commentary, criticism or educational purposes without having to obtain permission from the copyright holder.
However, Joseph Gratz, partner at Durie Tangri, said that fair use often clearly applies but is not enforced, leaving users of the legally obtained content to deal with automated content censors.
“Fair use depends on context, and machines can’t consider context,” he said. “A video, for example, that incidentally captures a song playing in the background at a political rally or a protest is clearly fair use but may be detected by an automated filter.”
When an automated filter detects a song on a platform like YouTube, it redirects advertising revenue from the creator of the video to the creator of the song, often erroneously.
Rick Beato, who owns a music education YouTube channel with over one-and-a-half million subscribers, said that he does not receive ad revenue from hundreds of his videos.
“One of my recent videos called ‘The Mixolydian Mode’ was manually claimed by Sony ATV because I played ten seconds of a Beatles song on my acoustic guitar to demonstrate how the melody is derived from the scale,” he said. “This is an obvious example of fair use, I would argue.”
Grammy-winning recording artist Yolanda Adams testified that she sees the problems of fair use employment as about more than simply receiving money.
“As a gospel artist, I’m not just an entertainer,” she said. “I see my mission as using my gift to spread the gospel — so for me, fair use is not just about money. It’s about access.”
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