Stretching The FCC's Mandate: FCC Should Not Be Involved In Copyright Enforcement

from the beyond-the-mandate dept

Fri, Feb 26th 2010 3:05pm — Mike Masnick

We were a bit concerned last year when the FCC held hearings which were technically about the national broadband policy, but instead focused on copyright, something that is clearly well outside the FCC's mandate -- something the FCC already got in trouble for a few years back with its attempt to mandate a "broadcast flag." However, there are now some additional concerns that this administration is ignoring the limits of the FCC's mandate. As you may recall, a few weeks back, the Justice Department -- at the urging of the entertainment industry -- set up a special IP task force to deal with "the rise of intellectual property crime." However, some are quite worried about how this task force intends to go about this.

Copycense points us to a letter sent to the Justice Department by the Center for Democracy and Technology, which noticed that, in the announcement of this new task force, the Justice Department said it intends to work with the FCC on intellectual property enforcement. That's a problem:

What's wrong with that? It's an invitation to major mission creep. The FCC's job is to execute and enforce federal communications law. It has no authority and no role in enforcing other laws. Lots of unlawful activity -- from intellectual property infringement to racketeering to securities fraud to deceptive advertising -- may occur over or using communications networks. But that doesn't make it the FCC's job to police such activity. The FCC's focus is, and should remain, promoting the availability of high quality communications capabilities in the United States -- not policing what users do with those capabilities.

In addition, the only reason to involve the FCC would be to force the entities the FCC regulates -- communications providers, and in particular ISPs -- to start actively policing I.P. infringement. Having government force ISPs to take on this new role should raise serious red flags. The idea that ISPs don't serve as gatekeepers or content censors, and aren't themselves responsible for what users do on the network, has been a bedrock principle that underpins the Internet's open and innovative nature. Casting it aside would be a serious mistake and a radical departure from U.S. communications policy.

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Filed Under: copyright, enforcement, fcc, ip task force, justice department
Companies: fcc

13 Comments

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Grammah Correction Specialist, 26 Feb 2010 @ 3:19pm

1.) Use a more accurate adjective than "quite."
2.) Also, avoid contractions in formal righting. "that's, "what's", "don't" should be "That is", "What is", "do not" and such.
3.) Is that the correct use of "It's"? Why not use "its" in "It's an invitation"

For moar grammah tips, tricks, help, and training, please visit this Facebook group-
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Taylorsville-UT/Daily-Grammar/36339933998
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- Anonymous Coward, 26 Feb 2010 @ 3:33pm
  
  Re:
  "Also, avoid contractions in formal righting."
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- Esahc (profile), 26 Feb 2010 @ 3:37pm
  
  Re:
  I don't think internet slang like "moar" would be considered good grammar:
  http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moar
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  - btrussell (profile), 26 Feb 2010 @ 3:58pm
    
    Re: Re:
    I agree!
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- Anonymous Coward, 26 Feb 2010 @ 7:31pm
  
  Troll
  Ignore
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- Any Mouse, 26 Feb 2010 @ 10:16pm
  
  Re:
  1) Your spelling is simply atrocious. Please, use a spellchecker.
  
  2) The blog seems to be more informal than formal. Regardless, such things aren't weighed as heavily as they were 30 years ago.
  
  3) 'Its' is a possessive form. 'It's' means 'it is', so 'It is an invitation' is correct and proper.
  
  Self-promotion is much better if you're not being an ass about what you're promoting.
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- Anonymous Coward, 26 Feb 2010 @ 10:40pm
  
  Re:
  at least these links have rel="nofollow" on them... seems a waste of time to blog spam and not even get any page rank out of it
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- Anonymous Coward, 2 Mar 2010 @ 6:58am
  
  Re:
  Language, spelling and grammar are simply methods or tools used to convey meaning. When you become more concerned about the tool itself than the meaning you intend to convery then you become a pedantic jobsworth and an idiot. I doubt anyone is impressed with your knowledge of grammer, because just about everyone recognises the general unimportance of such.
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Nick Mc, 26 Feb 2010 @ 3:56pm

Grammah Correction Specialist
And the specialist can't even spell "grammar" properly.

BTW, where the heck has TAM been lately? Haven't heard a peep from him for a few days.

It's seems to be up to the "little Michial" (is that a real spelling?) to irritate everyone right now.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Feb 2010 @ 4:01pm

Net Neuter-Reality
How many times do We The People have to fight off the corporate powers before our elected officials will stand up for us? Banks, Pharma, Cable, Healthcare, Telcom, Insurance, Entertainment, etc. are all out of control and Teddy Roosevelt’s doppelganger needs to emerge and kick some big time ass.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Feb 2010 @ 4:09pm

What a waste of taxpayer money and prison space, to put people in prison for something as minor as infringement just to enforce malicious laws designed to unfairly benefit the top one percent at public expense.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Feb 2010 @ 5:12pm

if the fcc were to somehow get isp's to police thier networks wouldnt that effectively allow them to not be "dumb pipes" anymore, and as such allow them to skirt around net neutrallity, ie "we only slowed down our competiters VOD service because we wernt 100% sure it wasnt infringing" and "our customers can only use bittorrent software that we provide so we can effectivley police it without them having to give up an effective way to download and distribute files, and anyway our software only requires an additional $20 to the subsciption to use" and so on and so forth....
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Chris Brand, 1 Mar 2010 @ 12:01pm

"the rise of intellectual property crime"
This one always amuses me. You pass a law (say the DMCA) making more things illegal, and then decry the corresponding "rise in crime". There's no actual change in behaviour, you just moved the bar so that more things fall into the "illegal" side of it...
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