Innovation Policy Post

Repertoire Group Slapped With Infringement Suit for Performing Cage’s 4'33"
Plaintiff Says Musicians Played Minimalist Composer’s Silent Piece “Note for Note”

Washington -- John Cage broke new ground with his 1952 experimental piece 4’33”, featuring a musician sitting quiet and motionless at a piano for precisely four minutes and thirty three seconds.  Now the famed silent composition is at the center of a copyright suit brought by the Recording Industry Performers Ombudsman Freedom Foundation (RIPOFF).   The group claims the Kaleidoscopic Symphony performed the work without permission at a March recital.

How should the government free up bandwidth and balance the interests of those involved? Panelists weighed in at a Brookings Institution event Wednesday “A Framework for Innovative Federal Spectrum Policy.”

Panelists including James Cicconi of AT&T, Blair Levin of the Aspen Insitute, Adele Morris of the Brookings Institute, Richard Whitt of Google, and Roger Entner of Recon Analytics agreed that the wireless broadband market is facing a “spectrum crunch.” They offered their thoughts on what the demand will mean for the prospects and outcomes of any future spectrum incentive auction as mobile broadband providers compete for spectrum.

Recent events in Egypt and the role of the Internet make the future of governing it in terms of technical management and coordination more critical than ever.

First some history…

The FCC’s National Broadband Plan, released on March 17, 2010, turned a year old this week.  Although the Plan is designed around a ten-year timeframe, as PC Mag notes, you have to start somewhere.  So, just what has the FCC done, and not done, with its first of ten years?

President Clinton spoke last night at the 40th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), currently convening in San Francisco. He urged the members of the international non-profit, which manages the domain name system to keep “stumbling forward” and to remain adaptable as it ages.

Sprint, T-Mobile and associations representing rural wireless carriers are asking the FCC to put action on data roaming on its April agenda. In its National Broadband Plan released almost a year ago, the FCC indicated a need to issue rules on data roaming to make customers’ wireless service more reliable and interoperable while preserving consumer choice among carriers.

The FCC already has adopted a voice roaming rule, but data service, which allows customers to email, text message and use apps like Twitter is the future.

USTR Ron Kirk testified yesterday before the Senate Finance Committee on the President’s 2011 Trade Agenda and the three pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.  

Disagreement remains between the Obama Administration’s stated intent to submit the KORUS FTA to Congress first, and the position of Republican Senators like Sen. Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Coburn, R-Okla., who refuse to approve KORUS unless it is packaged with the other two.  Yet the fact that the debate has moved to how to get these FTAs approved represents something of a spring thaw compared to the winter freeze that had existed since they were signed -- 2006 for Colombia and 2007 for Korea and Panama.    

Months after the FCC’s December vote to approve the Open Internet Order we’re still talking about net neutrality.  Nonstop.  

The House Committee on Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology holds a hearing today on a resolution to express disapproval of the net neutrality rule and, at the hearing’s conclusion, immediately markup and vote on that resolution.

The British Library hosted a ‘Copyright for Creativity’ (C4C) event in London with Members of European Parliament (MEPs) and UK Members of Parliament (MPs) Feb 10. The goal was to highlight and understand the complexity caused by an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) system, which was invented before the Internet was even thought of. Representatives from libraries, universities, and the music industry joined the policymakers in order to provide a better understanding of the underlying problems from a cultural, educational, and artistic perspective.