state51

Category: regulation

  • The US Net Neutrality Debate; Sleepwalking into Walled Gardens

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    Being an outsider to the US Net Neutrality debate, I don’t feel the pain of cable monopoly, or the blight caused by expensive and poor quality broadband. Over here in the UK we hear more about Verizon FiOS and Google Fibre, and mobile investments and megadeals, than we do about coax. In the UK, and…

  • Record Companies Should Give Up a Hard Won Right. Here’s Why.

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    When the recording industry was young there was a genuine concern that it might be strangled at birth by owners of popular songs, who might naturally wish to protect their sheet music sales and public performance fees from competition from the new no-effort and high quality music experience offered by the phonogram. As it was,…

  • The Cost of Granularity in Music Copyright

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    It might be just my very partial view on some high volume/low unit price markets, but it seems that at some point the cost of the granularity required for a royalty based remuneration system is just too high, and the wholesale market should move to upfront fees for creators, and to catalogue brokering. This assumes…

  • Music Industry Grasps Wrong End of Carrot

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    A UK Parliamentary report is out today, 26 September 2013, that represents a fierce fight back by the creative industries, led by music, against a rogues gallery of pirates, ISPs, and technology and digital advertising and media companies. No doubt it will be greeted with a few cheers, and a pint or two in the…

  • Preserving the Open Internet the Easy Way

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    No regulation is easy of course, so to start, here’s an apology for the misleading title. Sorry. But it need not be as difficult as it might seem to make the few small adjustments needed to ensure that the next decade does not see the effective end of the open and public internet which promises…

  • Netflix Explains Why The Internet Is Not Good Enough For Them

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    The migration of new digital services off the public internet is an established pattern. Driven by economics, and with real money at stake, it is not likely to slow down any time soon. To recap, large content providers such as Google (with YouTube), Facebook, Amazon (mostly driven by its Web Services division), and Netflix, among…

  • Inspiration for Privacy from Copyright and Beer

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    It is quite impossible to make informed choices about privacy, and about the uses of content and data we generate. The terms and conditions of services we use are too long and complicated to read and understand, and anyway are drafted to conceal as much as they reveal. Third, fourth, and fifth parties make their…

  • Copyright, Human Rights, Development, Privilege

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    Two things in particular I have been enjoying surprising people with recently. The first is that copyright is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All right it is near the end, so fewer people will have had the stamina to read through and find it. But it’s clear and unambiguous at Article 27.…

  • The Internet is No Longer a Duck

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    It waddles and quacks, but is the Internet still a duck? The Guardian published on March 28th 2013 an article by Cory Doctorow with the headline ‘Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet’. His argument is simple and persuasive – that the Internet has become too important to our civil, cultural, and personal…

  • Collectives versus Pools in Pursuit of Copyright Efficiency

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    YouTube’s generous approach to on-demand video streaming, while historically the cause of some friction with copyright owners, is also this year a great blessing to anyone interested in the regulation of copyright business. For it has provided a platform to view and review a length discussion between some of the key figures about Europe’s policy…