Several Presidential candidates are in Silicon Valley this week, trying to drum up support and money.

John Edwards endorsed several of the principles suggested by the Ad Hoc Public Interest Spectrum Coalition, a group of organizations trying to ensure that the FCC's upcoming spectrum auction results in a new, competitive national wireless broadband offering. Basically, the spectrum now used for broadcast TV will be coming available when broadcast TV goes digital, and that spectrum would be particularly good for a national broadband network.

Many groups (rightfully, in my opinion) fear that existing telecom providers will buy the spectrum rights and simply leave them unused in order to protect their existing monopolies, or create new networks that restrict what consumers can do. The coalition has therefore proposed rules to the FCC which would increase the chances of a real alternative being built that is more open than today's networks. A good roundup of the issues is here.

Back to John Edwards: just before speaking at Google last night, Edwards released a letter to the FCC calling for many of the principles suggested by the coalition. As Art Brodsky writes, this is pretty amazing stuff from a Presidential candidate. Way to go, John!

Berkeley economist Hal Varian has an op-ed in the New York Times about "orphan works", works that are copyrighted but where the original owner can't be located. This is a particularly nutty aspect of copyright law - you might want to use a work and be willing to pay for it, but can't, and if you do anyway, you'd be liable for $150,000 in statutory damages.

To Varian, an economist business-ologist, this is broken.

Read more...He praises Larry Lessig's orphan works proposal for a registry, similar to the DNS registry, operated by private companies but with a central standard ensuring interoperability. Lessig's plan would require that any copyright holder register a work after 14 years in order to retain protection, while the Copyright Office's orphan works proposal has a vaguer standard where someone wanting to use the copyright would have to conduct a "diligent search", with the precise definition of "diligent" up to courts.

Varian suggests, why wait for the Copyright Office to mandate such a registry? If there were a registry, then courts could decide that searching the registry could be enough to satisfy the courts under the Copyright Office's vaguer proposal. Given that the Copyright Office probably won't adopt Lessig's suggestion, that sounds like a great idea.

Still, I prefer Lessig's proposal. Its best asset is the way it creates a clear rule for how to determine if a work is orphan or not. Having clear rules is good, because gray areas mean litigation. Big companies can afford to fight in court, but small creators can't, and therefore the vaguer "diligent" standard will still mean that many creative works that could have been legally made won't be, because of the risk of lawsuits. Furthermore, what if you're developing technology to automatically use various works in transformative ways? Does a diligent search have to be by hand? A registry could be easily computer-accessible as well.

Creativity and innovation flourish most when the threat of lawsuits is least. Having a clear rule for which works are orphan, and which aren't, best serves the public interest.

The New York Times has some great letters rebutting Mark Helprin's piece I mentioned yesterday. It's great to see so many citizens understanding the . Some letters talk about the non-exclusionary nature of ideas: "If I invent a better way to tie my shoes, my use is not compromised by others tying their shoes in the same way. But this must be balanced against the benefit of incentives that encourage me to discover new ways to tie a shoe."

Others attack the economic arguments, and others draw historical analogies to Mark Twain, whose work is so well known because it is in the public domain but who, ironically, also made the same (bad) argument 101 years earlier.

Apparently Major League Baseball believes that it is not actually a baseball-playing organization but actually a law-making organization. Because they have taken the position that if you legitimately pay to receive the video feed of baseball games, but want to access that video while you're not actually in your house, it must be illegal to do so.

Slingbox is an innovative piece of technology allowing consumers to space-shift their TV content, but according to this piece at Ars Technica, MLB wishes it would just go away. Their general counsel, Michael Mellis, was quoted saying, "There's no guarantee that Slingbox will be around next year. It's a startup." Sorry, Michael, but whether Slingbox survives or not, innovative technology is going to continue to be around. It's best to figure out how to work with innovation, rather than simply hoping it will go away, or when that fails, suing it into oblivion.

When we founded IPac, we wrote a simple set of principles. We wrote:

We believe that technological innovation and individual creativity are vital to the future of this country. We believe that a prosperous and democratic society depends on freedom for all individuals to pursue scientific invention and artistic expression.

IPac's theme is Innovation Protection and Innovation Promotion. But what do we actually want? If we had our way, what laws would we pass, or not pass?

I have a few ideas, but first, what do you think? If you have ideas for ways IPac can be changing policy to protect and promote innovation?

Here are a few areas to get you thinking:

• Copyright. The DMCA stifles scientific research. Book publishers sue Google over book scanning. Verizon sues Google over YouTube. Disney got copyright terms extended years ago and presumably wants to do it again. The Bush administration just introduced a proposal to impose jail time for "attempted copyright infringement".
  
  
• Patents. Verizon sues Vonage. NTP sues RIM. Companies everywhere spend millions to accumulate as many patents as possible in an ongoing arms race.
  
  
• Network neutrality. AT&T, BellSouth (now part of AT&T), and Verizon have all stated that they'd love to charge one Web site to load faster than a competitor's. Is this good for innovation?
  
  
• Wireless innovation. You can only use phones on a mobile network that the carrier sanctions. Verizon restricts what apps you can install on your phone. Sprint threatens to sue application developers for using the GPS that's already on their phones. The iPhone will only work on Cingular.
  
  
• Cable set-top boxes. Cable companies also restrict what devices you can buy to hook up to your cable. TiVo has to go through contortions like "IR blasters" to interoperate with the existing boxes. The CableCARD standard might fix this but cable companies are resisting.

Which of these areas matter most to you? Are there other areas where innovation is being threatened, or doesn't exist at all?

In the coming days I'll go into more detail about each of these. Our end goal is to develop an agenda we can ask Congressional and Presidential candidates to endorse. And your help will make this a better agenda. Comment, or email us at info@ipaction.org.

In the legal field, patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets are collectively called "Intellectual Property".

This is a bad phrase. It suggests that if you have an idea, you own it. How many times have you had some friend say "I just thought of something! We should have a way for people to <insert idea here>! I should copyright it!" But ideas can't be patented or copyrighted - only specific inventions can be patented, and only specific works of creativity can be copyrighted. Yet the name "Intellectual Property" leads us astray.

Read more..."Intellectual Property" reminds us of real property. If I own a house, I own it forever, until I sell it, and if I die I can bequeath it to someone else. But the Constitution specifically states that patents and copyrights can be granted for "limited times." You can't come into my house without my permission for the purpose of criticizing it, or teaching others about it (though you can take a picture of it from outside), while you can copy part of a copyrighted work for such purposes.

A copyright or patent is not really property, it's more of a temporary monopoly granted by the government, like a contract to build and operate a dam to generate power. (To be pedantic, there are plenty of restrictions on real property too, like zoning and eminent domain, but your property doesn't simply "expire" at the end of a period of time.) It's good that we give these monopolies - it encourages more creativity by helping creators and innovators earn money so they can create and innovate more and so others want to do it too. But it's not "property" like a house is property.

So what? What if we call this thing "property"? It's still what it is no matter what we call it. But words have power. Congress was fooled by the false metaphor of "property" into extending copyright terms 20 years in 1998. Commentator Mark Helprin wrote a New York Times op-ed suggesting copyright should last forever. But even his title shows that he has been tricked by the language: his piece is titled "A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn't Its Copyright?" But ideas aren't what's copyrighted in the first place! (Public Knowledge has a thoughtful rebuttal here, and Lessig has set up a wiki to create a collaborative response.)

IPac was originally called the Intellectual Property Action Committee, but we changed our name after we realized the danger inherent in the phrase. Now IPac is the Information Policy Action Committee, because the way we grant temporary monopolies is a question of policy, not an intrinsic right like "property". (You may notice a similar bias in the word "copyright".) And our core mission is Innovation Protection.

IPac, therefore, is all about influencing Information Policy, resisting excessive expansion of Intellectual "Property", and all for the purpose of Innovation Protection.

Sprint sells phones that have built-in GPS. But Sprint doesn't think you should be able to use the GPS. At least, not unless it's in the exact way they want, and in a way that makes them more money.

A mobile Java app called Mobile GMaps connects the built-in (or Bluetooth) GPS and Google Maps to show you where you are on a map. Simple, and thanks to the somewhat-standardized environment of Java, it doesn't require Sprint's explicit okay.

Too bad Sprint, like all U.S. wireless carriers, doesn't like users doing things without their explicit permission - because if they don't have to give permission, they can't withhold it to make app developers pay them. So Sprint has threatened the Mobile GMaps developers with a lawsuit unless they make it harder for users to use the GPS.

Sadly, wireless carriers are consistently placing themselves as gatekeepers standing in the way of mobile innovation.

Happy Memorial Day and welcome to the unofficial beginning of summer! Along with warm, sunny weather, another change you're going to see starting right now is new energy from IPac for the 2008 campaign season.

I started IPac in 2004 because out-of-control copyright, ridiculous patents, mobile carrier gatekeepers, and many other issues were threatening technological innovation. Great groups like EFF, Public Knowledge, Creative Commons, and others are doing terrific work defending our rights legally, or pushing policies in Congress. But these issues are not a part of the debate in political campaigns, and therefore when we choose new representatives to Congress or a new President, we have little idea whether they will protect innovation or bend to the wishes of the gatekeepers and grant unnecessary government monopolies. This campaign season, IPac will be working hard to get our candidates on record on the issues you care about, so you can make the most informed decision about what to do with your votes, your dollars, or your volunteer hours.

I personally have been working as a Product Manager at Google for the past five and a half years. As of this weekend, I'm no longer working for Google, in order to devote the time and energy to IPac that it needs. There are lots of exciting projects in store for IPac, but I can't do it alone - we're going to need your help. (We is me, Ren, and Eric - IPac's board). We want you to participate in discussions on this blog about what policies are most important. We'll be asking you to get in touch with your Congressional or Presidental campaigns near you to ask them how they feel about protecting innovation. And we'll need you to spread the word to your friends, and help us keep going financially.

And I'll be blogging here on the IPac blog each day - so watch this space for more exciting developments!