Mass Communication Law – Page 31 – Thinking Out Loud, aka The Broad Gaze

Old news

A few stories of interest after a weekend away:

Comcast Beginning ‘Net Neutrality’ Testing (Wired): Comcast is beginning to throttle the bandwidth of heavy users at peak time.
Epic fail: FCC gives Tucson a “failing station” TV duopoly (Ars): This site has been doing some great FCC coverage lately. Here’s an interesting analysis of what it takes to qualify asÂ a “failing” TV station.
“Douchebag” blog post costs senior her student council seat (Ars): This is an interesting student speech rights case. My only question is how the school-as-state impeded the student’s speech.
Video: Cass Sunstein and Eugene Volokh on Information Cocoons: Kind of a weird format–two great legal minds discussing on either side of a split screen, but a good discussion nonetheless.

Catsup

Some of these go way back…

Best Buy challenges FCC over analog TV sales penalty: If this continues it could become a defining case in the reach of the FCC.
YouTomb: “YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.” Great idea!
Fight shaping up over Oregon’s state law copyright claims: “State laws are not themselves copyrighted, of course, but Oregon claims that all the ancillary material in the Revised Statutesâ€”including section numbers and headingsâ€”is copyrighted.” Can a body of law be useful without organization? Can a state copyright that organizational work product? I’d argue laws should be completely “open source” for reasons of transparency and legitimacy.
How YouTube’s sucking up to Modest Mouse (and other giants of media):Â Uploads [to YouTube] of music videos from the band by non-official sources now carry a link reading “Contains content from Sony BMG…” Very interesting permissive, automatic copyright licensing.

Catching up

Catching up on the news feed today. It seems to take so much longer when there’s lots of interesting stuff to read.

Facebook crowd blamed for trashing English garden (C-Net): These net-based crowd gatherings (like Frozen London) are an interesting bridge between the on- and off-line worlds. I wonder if these types of gatherings get more chaotic if the powers that be will consider restricting them.
New bill ties net neutrality to antitrust law (Ars): Since antitrust has in some cases been arguably under-enforced, this headline scared me a bit. Yet, some of the details of this bill sound promising (the part in italics sounds especially smart):

The bill is intended to “promote competition, to facilitate trade, and to ensure competitive and non-discriminatory access to the Internet.”

It does so by outlawing discriminatory fees for providing content, applications, or services over the ‘Net. Internet providers also have to interact fully with the networks of their competitors and provide equal access to all users and any devices they wish to put on the network. Network providers would be allowed to provide favored service to specific types of data but, if they do, they have to provide that same favoritism to anybody transmitting the data, and couldn’t charge for it.

FCC 2.0: Change we can believe in? (Ars): An interesting overview of what could happen at the FCC should a democrat Obama be elected (here’s a riddle: who was president in 1996?).
Chief RIAA Litigator Named Colorado Judge (Wired): The RIAA’s “top litigator” as an appeals judge. This might not seem as troublesome (he’s said to be a top notch lawyer) if the tactic of suing thousands of file sharers weren’t so legally and socially controversial.

Billboards outlawed?

Yesterday’s Times had an article about a dispute over a billboard that ran afoul of Vermont’s ban.

In February, a state board ruled that the painting, finished in October, runs afoul of the stateâ€™s billboard law, and must be removed. In response, the legislature passed a measure on Saturday that exempts this mural and ones like it â€” hand-painted signs that urge drivers to visit a designated downtown â€” from the law.

I had no idea 4 states had outlawed billboards entirely. This seems like an example of two problems frequently experienced by a complete speech ban such as this: first, that this is a classic example of a type of speech a majority would prefer to ban, and second that someone always wants to make an exception. I have to claim ignorance on the history and details of billboard bans, but it seems like a good old “time-manner-place” speech restriction might work better here.Â Sure, nobody likes seeing billboards on a senic drive, but it might avoid the “exception game” and it would better stand up to Constitutional scrutiny.