Open Internet

For anyone interested in intellectual property rights, there is a new must read post by the Free State Foundation entitled: "The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property," by Randy May and Seth Cooper.

It is simply outstanding. It has great clarity of thought, scholarship and wisdom.

It should become a succinct go-to piece that explains the philosophical and Constitutional underpinnings of property rights generally and intellectual property rights specifically.

Don't miss it, and please let others know about it. 

Please read my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "The FCC Transition?" -- here.

Ever wonder why there are so many never ending tech policy and political battles?

Why there are so many recurring:

• Content battles over copyright and anti-piracy enforcement?
• Software battles over open source versus proprietary software and the legitimacy of software patents?

• Broadband battles over net neutrality, data caps, and spectrum allocations?

• General battles over online privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity, and hacking?

Ever wonder why so many of the same people and entities are involved in the same tech policy and political battles over and over again?

The answer is it is an ideological struggle, but not the 20^th century kind with which most people are familiar, for example like progressive vs. conservative, or republican vs. democrat. This is a new and different kind of ideological struggle between realspace and cyberspace that is unique to the 21^st century and to the Internet Age.

Please read my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "Will the New FCC Chair Be a Modernist or Nostalgist?" -- here.

• It's Part 4 of my Modernization Consensus Research Series. 

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Modernization Consensus Series

(Note: This research series previews strategic developments that could encourage consensus to modernize obsolete communications law.)

Please don't miss my new Daily Caller op-ed: "Why IP Interconnection Would Break the Internet" -- here.

• It is a must read for anyone interested in the IP transition and the FCC.

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Obsolete Communications Law Research Series:

Rhetoric aside, the Administration drew an underappreciated and principled line in defending property rights in its deft partial support of the Free Culture petition to the White House to “make unlocking cellphones legal.”

For those paying attention to the whole Administration statement, the Administration included a critical caveat protecting property and contractual rights: i.e. one should be able to legally unlock a cellphone “if you have paid for your mobile device, and aren’t bound by a service agreement or other obligation.”

Kudos to Robert Litan and Hal Singer for the clarity-of-thought and free market policy wisdom in their new book: “The Need for Speed: A New Framework for Telecommunications Policy for the 21^st Century.” Here is the link to the book at Amazon.

As Professor Crawford continues her book tour advocating for a broadband utopia of an ultra-fast, government-subsidized, public-utility-regulated, broadband network with net neutrality, the supposed-facts undergirding her proposal, are crumbling away.

Free culture activist, Derek Khanna, has thrust himself into the limelight again with yet more misrepresentations of copyright law. His latest copyright-neutering effort is a “call to arms” to “the digital generation” to oppose a Librarian of Congress 1998 DMCA copyright ruling, that it is illegal to break into a cell-phone’s software in order to “unlock” it -- without the permission of, or payment to, the software’s owner.  

If the Internet Association is presumptuous enough to unilaterally deem itself “the unified voice of the Internet economy,” I guess we should not be surprised that on the same day that our duly-elected President delivered the State of the Union, the unelected President of the Internet Association would be presumptuous enough to deliver the “State of the Internet.”