Coyote Blog

Via Ernest Miller:

Civil and consumer rights groups have won in the Broadcast Flag case!...

...For those who are unfamiliar with the Broadcast Flag, it was ... it was a regulation promulgated by the FCC
at the request of Hollywood that would have required all HDTV receivers
to incorporate certain copy controls. Starting this July, all HDTV
receivers sold in the US would be required to enforce restrictions on
copying HDTV broadcasts that were tagged with the "Broadcast Flag."
Although you might be able to record HDTV shows, you wouldn't be able
to make additional copies for personal use (such as watching in another
room) without a lot of hassle, if it was possible at all, not to
mention taking a copy to watch at a friend's house. The ramifications
of this authority grab by the FCC were enormous, since it would have,
among other things, essentially given them the power to control
significant aspects of the design of anything capable of using HDTV
signals, i.e., modern PCs.

Good.  Now, will someone address letting me copy DVD's to play on a handheld, hard-disk based device like this one.

Television and Radio have always had a very different regulatory regime than any other type of media.  Unlike, say, newspapers or cable TV companies or satellite providers, television and radio companies have to get and continue to renew licenses and are expected operate in the public interest, whatever the heck that is.  TV and radio stations get access to what has become very valuable bandwidth for free, the only cost being that they have to give regulators what amounts to a veto over their content.  Because of this regulatory structure, you get goofy stuff like this:

The Federal Communications Commission's enforcement bureau has asked NBC for tapes of the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics, apparently in response to one or more indecency complaints.

Its fun to laugh at this stuff, and it drives me crazy, but at the end of the day the problem is not the FCC or Bush or red states or fundamentalists.  The problem is the first-amendment defying concept that the Feds should have any say in media content.  Period.  The FCC is actually in a difficult spot - by law, they have to enforce decency standards, but when they do so, they look like moralistic thugs.

I do not know the history here, but for some reason the US government, perhaps because it was in the throws of the socialist/fascist New Deal era, abandoned all of its traditional and successful models for allocating a newly discovered or accessible resource (in this case, parts of the spectrum) in favor of this public service liscencing approach.  I can think of at least three different models that the US government has used in similar circumstances and that have all worked much better:

• The Homestead Act:  This established the principal of being the first to stake out and improve a resource (in this case parcels of land) in allocating government lands in the west.  Perhaps the best piece of legislation in the history of the country.    Could have easily followed this principle in the broadcast spectrum - an individual or company would have to broadcast continuously on a certain frequency for 2 years to gain permanent ownership
• Mining Law: In some ways similar to the Homestead act, again it grants ownership of a resource to people who add value to it (in the case of mining, to the people who prospected for it and discovered it).
• Outright Sales:  The government does this all the time, including land sales, mineral lease sales (e.g. offshore oil) and more recently cell phone spectrum sales.

Lets end this regulatory structure now:

1. Grant all current licensees ownership of the spectrum they are currently using.  Drop all content-related regulation. 
2. There are many non-licensed outlaw low-power stations operating.  Create a set of homestead requirements that they can get access to their bandwidth if they meet certain requirements within a certain time frame
3. Acknowledge that technology today allows more of the spectrum to be used than channel spacing of the 1950's allowed.  Open up more of the holes in the spectrum for use.
4. Sell the newly available spectrum