On March 6, the House Judiciary subcommittee with jurisdiction over intellectual property issues approved H.R. 4279, a bill aimed at strengthening intellectual property (I.P.) enforcement. But first the subcommittee made an important modification — it agreed to delete a highly controversial section concerning statutory damages in infringement cases involving compilations.

This is a welcome change. As I described in an earlier blog post, raising potential statutory damages in compilations cases is unnecessary and would increase risks for innovators. The Copyright Office hosted a roundtable discussion on this specific issue in January, at which many parties aired concerns. Meanwhile, proponents were unable to point to any actual cases where current law caused damages to be unreasonably low.

The subcommittee made a few other useful tweaks. For example, it offered a clarification of provisions calling for forfeiture of property used to commit infringement, requiring law enforcement authorities to show a “substantial connection between the property and the offense.” The full list of language modifications can be found by clicking this link..

All of this represents significant progress. Going forward, it will still be important to carefully consider the bill’s reorganization of the federal government’s I.P. enforcement structure. The bill would create a new division within the Department of Justice focused solely on I.P. enforcement, and a new “U.S.I.P. Enforcement Representative,” modeled on the existing U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). CDT supports vigorous enforcement of I.P. law, but these kind of major changes warrant more discussion. DoJ, for example, has cautioned against them.

One footnote to the subcommittee meeting is that the Chairman, Rep. Howard Berman, stated that he intends to hold a hearing and then move legislation on the “orphan works” problem. It would be good to see the subcommittee return to this issue.

Washington, D.C. recently joined the club of cities, including Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, that conduct live monitoring of citizens through closed circuit television cameras (CCTV).

Hundreds of millions of dollars granted by the Department of Homeland Security to state and local governments has greatly expanded the use of CCTV in the U.S. since 2001. Yet there are no national standards to ensure that video surveillance programs are effective and do not trample our right to privacy and other civil liberties. In light of the questionable efficacy, and a myriad of privacy concerns associated with CCTV, the leadership within DHS needs to step up and take the lead in implementing appropriate use policies.

The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department has followed the national trend of greater surveillance in public areas. It has installed 73 CCTV surveillance cameras since August 2006, and as of November of 2007, has been live-monitoring 54 of them. And in 2008, it will use $630,000 of DHS grant money to replace 18 cameras in the downtown area. D.C. officers can rotate angles for a different view, zoom in on faces, and pick up license plates from cars several blocks away. Live monitoring has been widely criticized due to the large number of criminal and institutional abuses that have taken place. Widely noted abuse cases have sprung up both in the U.S. and around the world where officers have gathered evidence through CCTV ogle women, look into bedroom windows, watch couples in romantic situations, to target minorities, and monitor political activities - just to name a few.
(more…)

This week, I was fortunate to moderate a panel called White House 2.0 at the Politics Online Conference in Washington this week. The panel asked the question — If Web 2.0 technology has pervaded the campaigns this year, how will the technology be used to govern in the future? Panelists had a diversity of views — Tom Steinberg of My Society demonstrated that this has already been done to widespread approval in the UK with No. 10 Downing Street’s popular petition Web site; Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation suggested that there was so much that could be done in the name of accountability because the Bush Administration has done so little; Former Rep. Rick White said that elected officials really don’t run on technology issues and that is part of the reason that they are slower to use them; and Former White House Internet and E-Communciations Director for the Bush Administration, David Almacy, who now works for Waggner Edstrom, regaled us with tales of how difficult it actually is to get anything accomplished on the whitehouse.gov Web site. Ideas such as a US petition site and a Wiki budget site were raised as well.

Andrew Feinberg took nice photos and political consultant David All got David Almacy’s ideas on what the next president should do up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.