Intellectual Property Law

It’s a public convenience

By Susan Crawford

I spent the morning doing a short program with DueProcess.TV, a Michigan-focused program that is taped in Detroit.  Much of the conversation seemed to be along alarmist lines - there’s this wild Internet thing, people are out there commenting on blogs, saying all kinds of stuff! and what can we do about all this information that’s available publicly! shouldn’t there be a law? My God, what is it doing to newspapers!

My role, I decided, was to acknowledge all the fears and try to say something positive about the Internet.  Enormous public benefits, new ways of making a living (particularly good thing for Michigan), new ways of working with people across distance and time. . . it’s not all bad, surely.

It did feel like a conversation from 1996 or so.  There was even a journalist there with vivid memories of monitoring his newspaper’s Compuserve forum comments.  I brought out the news that there was now a federal statute that protects online newspapers from liability for comments the paper didn’t originate.  They looked interested.

Anyway.

AdAge is pointing out that there is rich cooperation between newspapers and Google/Yahoo.  Jeff Jarvis has everyone thinking about what is replacing the article - and suggests a curatorial approach, akin to the radar screen filtering we used to talk about a few years ago.  (I wrote about this in 2005 here and here.)  But more humanistic.  And here’s a nice implementation:  Yahoo Pipes.  It’s exactly the radar screen approach, aggregating many different feeds, videos, pictures, you name it.  And here’s a mainstream aggregation-tied-to-domain-name-registration move from GoDaddy:  SmartSpace.

Phew.  All of this looking and linking has cheered me up.  It’s not all fear and doubt out there!

In fact, it’s a good day in history of the U.S. approach to high-speed Internet access.  Jim Baller’s newsletter lets me know that a judge in Monticello, Minnesota has said quite strongly that, yes, cities in Minnesota are allowed to raise money to build their own fiber installations with the help of private partners.  (ArsTechnica story here; decision here.)  It’s a public convenience, that fiber - it will “make a city a better place to live.”  It’s also true that the telco gambit of filing suit has achieved the victory it wanted:  Delay.

So - if someone asks you what new laws are needed for the Internet, don’t hesitate.  We need new laws that make it clear both (1) that cities and states can install their own fiber and (2) that these fiber installations should be open-access.

We can’t write a law protecting journalists, but the journalists are finding ways to protect themselves.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on October 13, 2008 (boomark / email).