Deeplinks Blog posts about Policy Analysis
The FCC may give consumers full control of their set-top box and that scares a lot of companies.
As the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continues working on breaking up the TV set-top box monopoly, the onslaught by large companies who have zero interest in promoting a competitive open technology environment has been fierce. Cable companies, the movie industry, the recording industry, and their parakeet allies are regularly misrepresenting the bounds of copyright law to Congress and the FCC in an attempt to secure powers that copyright law does not provide them.
Why are they doing this? Because they are hoping that the FCC will repeat the same mistake it has in the past when attempting to break up the TV set-top box monopoly, which is to leave them with enough control over the design and features of personal TV hardware and software so that choice becomes an illusion.
The Board of Supervisors of Santa Clara County, a jurisdiction in central California, is currently weighing a series of local surveillance reforms that could establish a model for other counties and municipalities. At a hearing last Thursday—one of many so far—I spoke in support of the proposed ordinance and submitted a letter with suggested amendments.
Facebook has responded to an October 5 open letter from a global coalition, including EFF, about its broken “authentic name policy.” Facebook’s response is a step in the right direction. It's also not the last change to the policy we’ll see, since Facebook notes “we’re making changes now and in the future.” Facebook says it “want[s] to reduce the # of people asked to verify ID.” Facebook and the Nameless Coalition share that goal, and these suggestions will help achieve it. But they still leave some users out in the cold.
Yesterday, EFF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, pushing back against a district court decision that expanded state law copyrights in pre-1972 sound recordings. This may sound familiar: we recently filed a similar brief in the Second Circuit. In both cases, a company called Flo & Eddie has convinced district courts that state copyright law restricts public performances of pre-1972 sound recordings, even though such a restriction has never before been recognized.
The working group at Internet Corporation for Assignment of Names and Number (ICANN) that has been tasked with designing a new domain registration database can’t seem to wrap its head around why privacy matters when it comes to domain registration services. ICANN’s Expert Working Group on gTLD Registration Directory Services (EWG) issued a Preliminary Issue Report on Next-Generation gTLD Registration Directory Services to Replace WHOIS in July, and EFF has submitted comments. Our bottom line is this:
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