Today Rep Cliff Stearns is holding hearings called “Digital Content and Enabling Technology: Satisfying the 21st Century Consumer”. The witness list includes executives from Tivo, Sling Media, and the Hollywood Cartels that want to shut them down.

The hearings start at 1:00PM EST and will be broadcast live on via the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection’s website.

If your Representative is on the committee, make sure to tune in and see where they stand on these important issues.

IPac will be bringing you updates throughout the hearings so those who can’t watch the stream will have the latest.

1:28 PM update:

The opening statements are over. It's pretty obvious that Mike Ferguson doesn't get it. Ferguson said that fair use rights and loosening content protection are bad for consumers.

1:35 PM update:

Blake Krikorian, the CEO of Sling Media, is giving his opening remarks. His brilliant obvservation is that constraints mean that "only once a decade do American companies bring innovative technologies to market."

1:40 PM update:

John Feehery from the Hollywood Cartels just threatened to pull thousands of jobs from Member's districts if their anti-consumer innovation tax legislation like the Broadcast Flag and the analogue hole does not pass. I guess if suing your customers isn't enough, it's time to extort Congress.

2:03 PM update:

I've encoded John Feehery's opening statement and will upload soon.

2:15 PM update:

Rep. Furgeson is at it again. He came to the aid of John Feehery, who all but admitted that the MPAA does not believe a consumer has a right to make a backup copy of their legitimately purchased movies.

2:47 PM update:

The hearing is over. I'll have audio highlights up in a bit.

Listen to John Feehery's opening statement here. (MP3)

According to the NY Times the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday in a case that pits eBay against MercExchange, a small patent holding company. At issue is not whether eBay violated MercExchange's ridiculous patent on "a feature to sell fixed-price goods online, and it included an automatic payment system...", but whether the proper remedy for ongoing patent litigation is an injunction against the allegedly infringing company. Right now courts are bound by a 1908 precedent that all but requires an injunction.

Supporting briefs from third parties, including some unlikely ones, have piled up for each side. A pharmaceutical industry trade group filed a brief in support of MercExchange, as did General Electric, Proctor & Gamble, the University of California, a group of venture capitalists and the United States government. All argued in favor of injunctions against those who infringe patents.


A brief filed jointly by Oracle, Microsoft and Intel in support of eBay argued that the injunction rule "has transformed patents into a powerful tool for litigation abuse" and "stifles innovation."

In no time the sides could be reversed, like when Microsoft starts enforcing their patents against Linux.

Not only can a company like MercExchange patent something as obvious and old as the 'goods and services for payment' business method, they have 100 years of precedent saying that any company that tries to accept payment for goods or services should be shut down until a costly court battle can be resolved. Guaranteed injunctions mean that it's almost always better to settle out of court than fight, since the risk of losing would be crippling even to big companies. For smaller companies it’s game over.

Mother Jones has published a gut-busting, eye-roll-inducing list of factoids and anecdotes about excessive copyright, trademark, and patent laws. For example:

A DAY AFTER Senator Orrin Hatch said "destroying their machines" might be the only way to stop illegal downloaders, unlicensed software was discovered on his website.

AMONG THE 16,000 people thus far sued for sharing music files was a 65-year-old woman who, though she didn't own downloading software, was accused of sharing 2,000 songs, including Trick Daddy's "I'm a Thug." She was sued for up to $150,000 per song.

ONLY ABOUT 5% of patents end up having any real commercial value.

NEARLY 20% of the 23,688 known human genes are patented in the United States. Private companies hold 63% of those patents.

IN THE LATEST ROUND of a 13-year battle over the title "Surf City USA," Huntington Beach, Calif., filed for a trademark last year. A state senator from Santa Cruz retorted, "You can't trademark a state of mind" and proposed a Senate resolution declaring his city to be the real Surf City.

"SENSORY TRADEMARKS" include a duck quacking (AFLAC), a lion roaring (MGM), yodelling (Yahoo!), giggling (Pillsbury), and a "pre-programmed rotating sequence of a plurality of high intensity columns of light projected into the sky to locate a source at the base thereof" (Ballantyne of Omaha).

PATENT LAWSUITS have more than doubled since 1992.

[Via BoingBoing]

Whaddya know? The Cato Institute has released a report on how the DMCA amounts to an innovation tax. From their release:

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.

LabCorp v. Metabolite started as a humdrum case involving unpaid royalties for a medical test, but it's snowballing rapidly:

... the Supreme Court may dredge up a bombshell question not asked when the lower courts considered the case: Have inventors been busy patenting laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas?

At stake, attorneys on both sides of the case say, are 25 years of patent law and literally tens of thousands of patents on drugs, medical devices, computer software and other inventions. If the court reins in what can be patented, they say, it could be among the most important patent law decisions ever made.

What's fascinating here is that the Court raised the issue when it asked the Solicitor General's office about whether Metabolite had patented "a law of nature, natural phenomenon or abstract idea." All of those things are unpatentable, but the argument wasn't a part of the lower court proceedings. So even though the SG told the court that these topics couldn't properly be discussed in this particular proceeding, it shows that the Court harbors some significant concerns about the reach of our patent system.

Thanks, Jim!

The Hollywood Cartels are so scared of their customers that they would rather kill them than allow DRM to be broken. In a recent submission to the Copyright office about potential exemptions to the DMCA, the Hollywood Cartels argued that allowing any DRM to be removed should be illegal even if it endangers people’s lives:

They’re worried that there might be “serious doubt” about whether their future DRM access control systems are covered by these exemptions, and they think the doubt “would be even more severe” if the “exemption would turn on whether access controls ‘threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives’.”

…

And here’s the really amazing part. In order to protect their ability to deploy this dangerous DRM, they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives.

If Sony’s next DRM debacle enables a virus to cause havoc on the internet? Too bad, Hollywood would rather shut down vital infrastructure.

Your doctor needs to break DRM to get access to your medical files in an emergency? Too bad, Hollywood would rather let you die.

On Sunday Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, and others wrote an Op-Ed for the New York Times describing the absurdity of our current patent system.

For example, the human genome exists in every one of us, and is therefore our shared heritage and an undoubted fact of nature. Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned. The gene for diabetes is owned, and its owner has something to say about any research you do, and what it will cost you…Do you want to be told by your doctor, "Oh, nobody studies your disease any more because the owner of the gene/enzyme/correlation has made it too expensive to do research?"

If that weren’t crazy enough, Crichton describes how our courts are being used as Idea Police. A case before the Supreme Court, LabCorp v. Metabolite Laboratories, revolves around who owns ideas.

[T]he 13th claim of the patent is more general: it covers a way of determining vitamin deficiency by first testing blood or urine for homocysteine by any means and then correlating elevated levels with a vitamin deficiency.

What the court is deciding is not whether a company can patent a new test, that’s not at issue it’s about whether a company can patent the idea of the results of that test.

But Crichton ends with this chilling thought:

It means nobody can write a dinosaur story because my patent includes 257 items covering all aspects of behavior, like item No. 13, "Dinosaurs attack humans and other dinosaurs."

That’s right. Crichton was convinced by the Hollywood Cartels to patent the ideas in Jurassic Park. Now every child in school that dreams about dinosaurs is facing a patent infringement suit. And if we know anything it’s that the Hollywood Cartels love to sue children.

Another interesting bit from digg:

Amazingly, 25 years ago someone recorded a dial scan of their radio on the night John Lennon was murdered. A fascinating way to capture history, and something that might become impossible if the Radio Flag legislation goes through.

There are a million uses of culture between the law and the street, but proposals like the Broadcast Flag would kick them all to the curb. In the world envisioned by some content holders, every imaginable use of music/movies/text will be controlled. And anything they can't imagine today will simply be precluded by some combination of law and Orwellian technology. These kinds of incidental uses of media may be hard to quantify, but they're valuable nonetheless.

[Via digg]

BBC contributor Bill Thompson has a thoughtful essay on the promotion of Digital Rights Management (DRM):

The problem is that digital rights management relies on locking content away, and as long as we have general purpose computers capable of running whatever code someone cares to write then there will always be ways around those content locks.

[...]

That might change if we get "trusted" computers which will only run approved programs, but even then nobody is going to come round and collect today's PCs from our homes, so there are going to be enough open systems around to cause problems for any DRM systems out there.

Well worth reading. [Via digg]

Hello IPac supporters.

As you have seen, I've been hired as IPac's Executive Director. I’m excited to put the issues we care so passionately about onto the political agenda.

Many of you have contributed to our ‘Your Senator needs an iPod’ campaign. I’m extremely pleased to announce that it has been a tremendous success. We’re about to send out 13 iPods filled with public domain and Creative Commons content.

In the mean time, I’d like to extend an invitation to help shape our message and priorities.

Please take some time to think about where IPac should be focusing its efforts and what issues are most important. I’m open to all suggestions and ready to work with you to make IPac the force that it can be.