Better late than never, I’ve finally given a close read to the Notice of Inquiry issued by the FCC on June 17th.  (See my earlier comments, “FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man”.)  In some sense there was no surprise to the contents; the Commission’s legal counsel and Chairman Julius Genachowski had both published comments [...]

I dashed off a quick analysis of the Bilski decision for CNET yesterday (see “Supreme Court Hedges on Business Method Patents”), a follow-up to a piece I wrote for The Big Money when the case was argued last fall.  (See “Not with my Digital Economy, You Don’t.”) The decision was a surprise for me.  I [...]

I’m late to the party, but I wanted to say a few things about the District Court’s decision in the Viacom v. YouTube case this week and.  This will be a four-part post, covering: 1.  The holding 2.  The economic principle behind it 3.  The next steps in the case 4.  A review of the [...]

I’ve added almost twenty new posts to the Media Page from April and May. These were busy months for those interested in the dangerous intersection of technology and policy, the theme of The Laws of Disruption. A major court decision upended the Federal Communications Commissions efforts to pass new net neutrality regulations, leading the Commission [...]

I had a long interview this morning with the Christian Science Monitor .  Like many of the interviews I’ve had this year, the subject was Google.    At the increasingly congested intersection of technology and the law, Google seems to be involved in most of the accidents. Just to name a few of the more recent [...]

I write today on CNET (see “Gripes over Google Books go Technical”) about the Department of Justice’s filing last week in the Google Books case.  The Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA), released in November, will be discussed by the parties at a fairness hearing on Feb. 18th. The DoJ continues to object to the settlement, but [...]

An interesting tempest in a teapot has emerged this week following some overblown rhetoric by and in response to celebrity causemeister Bono. There’s a deeper lesson to the incident, however, one with important implications for the net neutrality debate. (More on that in a moment.) In a New York Times op-ed column on Jan. 2, [...]

The copyright war just isn’t dramatic enough to warrant a good novel, let alone a big movie deal. Consider a few recent stories from the on-going battle between content owners and consumers: In October, sources reported to CNET’s Greg Sandoval that part of the document exchange between Viacom and YouTube in the on-going $1.1 billion [...]

I’m fascinated by the firestorm that has erupted over what sounds on paper like the most boring combination of a legal and technical discussion: the recent appeal by Hollywood for a waiver from the FCC’s Selectable Output Control (SOC) rule. First a little background, greatly simplified. (Those wanting the gory details can read the excellent [...]

I’m starting to feel like the only person who thinks the Google Books settlement with authors and publishers is a good deal. One voice that seems not to be heard, however, over the din of Google competitors, panicky law professors, and regulators who wouldn’t know a workable solution to a copyright problem (created by regulators) [...]