Interestingly, Google has rejected demands by privacy groups for more stringent protections for I.P. address records, saying that in most cases the addresses cannot be used to identify users.

Both companies have argued that I.P. addresses alone cannot be used to unmask the identities of individuals with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using other records of their online activities.[...] Mr. Opsahl also said that even records that did not include a user’s login name and I.P. address might be able to be associated with specific people. In 2006, after AOL released for research purposes the search records of thousands of anonymous users, reporters from The New York Times were able to track down one person by analyzing her search queries. Mr. Opsahl said anonymous viewing habits may similarly yield clues about the identity of viewers.

Update: This Center for Digital Democracy blog by Jeff Chester discusses other undiscussed issues in the Google/Viacom story. At Google,

"They now call YouTube a "next-generation advertising platform," something we think reflects how they really view the service. Google is pitching the branding and sellling of YouTube to advertisers. Google is now tracking YouTube views as it promotes to advertisers a scheme to take advantage of the "viral" marketing capabilities of YouTube."

Also, this Huffington Post blog entitled A few Important Stories That Are Not News (in the US) by Jamie Love of Knowledge Ecology International discusses some international intellectual property issues of note.

"ACTA: Japan, the US and the European Union are holding secret negotiations on a new intellectual property right enforcement treaty, misleadingly named the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This negotiation is making headlines in Canada and is reported in Europe, but not by the US newspapers and wire services."

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined without comment an appeal from Major League Baseball seeking to overturn an Eighth Circuit decision that protected information already in the public domain, baseball statistics, from being restricted by MLB. The case has widespread implications for the sharing and uses of information.

As the New York Times story by Linda Greenhouse, No Ruling Means No Change for Fantasy Baseball Leagues points out, the ruling means that: "the identity and performance of major league ballplayers was in the public domain and could not be cordoned off without violating the First Amendment."

IP Justice is one of the many non-profit public interest groups advocating for greater access to knowledge and greater limits on the rights of content-owners to control information. It says:

U.S. Circuit Judge Arnold writing for the majority addressed the issue concisely: "It would be strange law that a person would not have a First Amendment right to use information that is available to everyone."

More from IP Justice:

[...]How important is the High Court’s decision today to let stand the Eighth Circuit's opinion? In the brief time the opinion has been published -- and despite a then-pending petition for certiorari, the opinion has already been cited 36 times by commentators, parties and at least one other Court. [...] An obvious "win" for Free Speech advocates and "netizens" concerned with ensuring open access to information on the Internet, the case also helps the burgeoning field of Internet information consolidators who help consumers collect information and process it.

By the way, now that my top slugger Ryan Howard (1b, Phillies) has started hitting with authority (15 HR, 43 RBI for year, but 5 HR and 18 RBI for just the last two weeks), I just need my ace pitcher Aaron Harang's real-world Cincinnati Reds teammates to give him some run support so he can get some wins (he's just 2-7 with electric stuff, makes no sense) and move my team -- the Hitmen -- up in the standings!

The successful band Nine Inch Nails has released its newest album The Slip for free online. Two other things are very interesting.

From the website download page: the slip is licensed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license,

we encourage you to
remix it, share it with your friends,
post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc.

Jeff Leeds of the New York Times had a story yesterday:

In a post on the band's Web site, www.nin.com, the band’s leader, Trent Reznor, said, "Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years -- this one's on me."[...] Mr. Reznor’s new offer could serve as another test of how the easy availability of free music online affects subsequent CD sales and other money-making opportunities.

PIRG studies have shown that the average cost of college textbooks per year is now $900. That's on top of rising tuition and fee costs. That Book Costs How Much? is the title of an editorial in today's New York Times. The editorial supports our Student PIRGs Campaign to Maketextbooksaffordable.org. We are working on college campuses to urge faculty to use Open Educational Resources, such as web-based non-copyrighted books. We are working in Congress to take House-passed affordable textbook legislation over the finish line. From the New York Times:

A study being carried out by the geographer Ronald Dorn at Arizona State University suggests that students who use free online textbooks perform as well academically as students who buy expensive copies from traditional publishers. Colleges and universities should take advantage of these new developments. Cash-strapped students and their families need all the relief they can get.

This week, U.S. PIRG joined several pro-patient, pro-safe, pro low-cost drug organizations -- the Prescription Project and the Prescription Access Litigation LLC coalition (both out of Community Catalyst) and the National Physicians Alliance -- in detailed comments opposing a wrong-headed FDA proposal that would allow greater dissemination to doctors of "truthful" but not "misleading" medical journal articles promoting off-label uses for drugs. From our submission:

This Draft Guidance lowers the threshold for the promotion of off-label uses through the distribution of published studies, thereby reducing industry incentive to conduct more conclusive trials.

Currently, FDA approval is a major incentive for companies to test and evaluate their products. Once a medication is approved for any use, drug companies have incentive to study that product for use in additional indications.

Creating a pathway to more off-label marketing reduces the incentive to obtain FDA approval for new indications.

Under the Draft Guidance, a company would be able to disseminate a trial that finds positive data for any unapproved use, thus reducing the incentive to conduct more detailed research that might contradict the initial finding...In conclusion, the Prescription Project and other organizations listed above urge the FDA
not to issue the Draft Guidance in its current form, which would encourage the pharmaceutical industry to expand marketing practices which have been found to be illegal by government fraud investigations and successful litigation by government and consumers. We urge the FDA to hold public hearings to consider under what circumstances, if any, the industry should be allowed to market products for off-label indications.

I am a panelist Friday at an interesting, free and open-to-the-public event:

This Friday, February 8, George Washington University (GWU) Law School and Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) are co-sponsoring a workshop on prizes to stimulate medical innovation.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together policy makers and experts to debate the proposal to create a new mechanism to stimulate private investments in medical R&D. We will consider the economic, management and legal issues surrounding the use of monetary prizes as an alternative mechanism to stimulate private investments in R&D. This will include, but not be limited to, a discussion of the proposed Medical Prize Fund Act of 2007 (S.2210, 110th Congress) introduced by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.

"It is natural for consumers to distrust monopolies, which can even limit access to medicine. The Prize Fund bill, from U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) shows us that we don't have to tolerate monopolies or the abuses of monopoly pricing to stimulate innovation.

In a story today -- In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy -- by Adam Liptak, the New York Times reports on efforts by Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers to challenge the bludgeoning legal tactics used by the Recording Industry Association of America in its lawsuits against illegal music file downloading. Essentially, RIAA has insisted that Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including universities, act as its agents and give up information on their subscribers, including students, or pay damages themselves. Now, on behalf of the University of Oregon, Myers is challenging whether the investigative demands and other tactics used are legal under Oregon privacy and licensing laws. From the NY Times:

In the past four years, record companies have sued tens of thousands of people for violating the copyright laws by sharing music on the Internet. The people it sues tend to settle, paying the industry a few thousand dollars rather than risking a potentially ruinous judgment by fighting in court.[...]"Certainly it is appropriate for victims of copyright infringement to lawfully pursue statutory remedies," Mr. Myers wrote last month. "However, that pursuit must be tempered by basic notions of privacy and due process."

According to the article Dutch gov blows open standards raspberry at Microsoft in The UK's Register newspaper, software giant Microsoft is upset that the Netherlands has approved legislation that will require government agencies to use open-source, non-proprietary software, starting in May 2008.

The Netherlands economic affairs ministry said last week that parliament had approved a plan that will mandate the use of open standards and open source software government-wide. It has also set an ambitious May 2008 target by which time all national agencies will be expected to use open software. State and local government organisations will be required to adopt the same rules by 2009.[...]Under the new open standards and open source policy, agencies will need to justify their use of propriety software where there is no obvious alternative. The new rules will be enforced by an "open source police" unit and an open source hotline.

Over at On the Commons, David Bollier has a short provocative blog on outsourcing of public libraries. Excerpt:

This should not be entirely surprising, given how jails, highways and even military operations are being privatized these days. Yet it does raise the distressing question -- If libraries are vulnerable, where will this momentum for dismantling our civic institutions end?

Our colleagues at Knowledge Ecology International have sent a sharply worded letter to the Senate opposing two James Imhofe (R-OK) amendments to the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill (S.1710) that would weaken open access to NIH (National Institutes of Health) funded research.

Both amendments are naked attempts to eliminate public access to government funded research, in order to protect a handful of publishers.[...] Amendments like these are shocking reminders that citizens have to fight for access to the very research they have paid for as taxpayers. [...] Americans pay about $100 per capita to support the NIH, and deserve policies that promote access. When everyone has access to the research, science advances faster, and the expanded dissemination of new knowledge benefits doctors, patients and others who make more informed decisions.

On Monday, I will participate in an international conference in Geneva, Switzerland, sponsored by the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (tacd.org). The conference concerns the activities of the powerful, but obscure, UN agency known as the World Intellectual Property Organization. The Reform of WIPO: Implementing the Development Agenda will examine WIPO's well-known potential to make access to medicine and access to knowledge more affordable for billions of citizens across the globe. The question has always been: But does WIPO have the political will? The event is one in a series of TACD conferences on reforming intellectual property laws.

In the story today After Protests, City Agrees to Rewrite Proposed Rules on Photography Permits the New York Times reports:

Responding to an outcry that included a passionate Internet campaign and a satiric rap video, city officials yesterday backed off proposed new rules that could have forced tourists taking snapshots in Times Square and filmmakers capturing that only-in-New-York street scene to obtain permits and $1 million in liability insurance.

Cory Doctorow, activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, has a new column over at Media Guardian, the website for media professionals of the British newspaper The Guardian. His first column is on digital rights management schemes, and as you'd expect, Doctorow pulls no punches in his message to content providers:

The wheat won't grow under Lysenkoism, and you can't stop people from copying files on a computer. But you can still get rich -- just sell the same stuff, without the DRM. We're the same customers, and we'd buy just as many DVDs if there was no anti-copying magic on them.

Knowledge Ecology International, the advocacy and research group at the center of many international efforts to promote and preserve access to both knowledge (a2k) and medicine, has announced its new peer-reviewed online journal Knowledge Ecology Studies.

KE Studies is an online publication that focuses on the creation, dissemination and access to knowledge goods. It is a multidisciplinary journal that draws on a number of specialties: sciences, technologies, public policies, the laws of intellectual property, business, free speech and privacy, telecommunications and other related knowledge disciplines.

The journal is open-access (free to read with no delays) and published under a combination Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License and a Knowledge Ecology Studies Developing Nations License copyright mechanism.

The Knowledge Ecology Studies Developing Nations License will provide the members of the public accessing the Work from a developing country--any country not classified as high-income economy by the World Bank--with the option to obtain all the rights granted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License on a commercial basis (See: http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses), as long as they implement reasonably effective mechanisms to prevent access to the Work by members of the public located in high-income economies as classified by the World Bank.

Latest from the student loan scandal firehose: In Fortune Magazine, Bethany McLean outlines powerhouse Sallie Mae's latest "unpleasant" efforts to block PIRG-backed reforms that will cut subsidies to lenders and help make college more affordable. From McLean's Fortune story Saving Sallie:

"And right now, Sallie's lobbying involves a particularly unpleasant form of racial politics.[...]Sallie has been reaching out to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, implying that a decrease in its subsidies will mean that the company will be forced to cut back on loans to students who attend historically black colleges and universities."

Worth checking out if you care about how innovation and access to knowledge and culture will work in the digital future: Internet and copyright guru Larry Lessig is in the process of posting video blogs (he calls them presentations) on big policy issues. It looks as if he intends to update the links to each presentation in his original post here). He's done two so far:

Copyright: Orphan Works

Copyright: Remix Culture

Network Neutrality (we call it Internet freedom)

Spam

Harmful to Minors Material

Deregulating Spectrum (that is, creating unlicensed white space)

Brooklyn Law professor Wendy Seltzer is blogging her interactions (main blog page and latest post in the saga) with Youtube after it deleted a snippet of the Super Bowl broadcast she'd posted, and sent her a so-called Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) "takedown" notice:

That didn't take long. On Feb. 8, I posted to YouTube a clip taken from the Super Bowl: not the football, but the copyright warning the NFL stuck into the middle of it, wherein they tell you it's forbidden even to share "accounts of the game" without the NFL's consent. Their copyright bot didn't seem to see the fair use in my educational excerpt, so YouTube just sent me their boilerplate takedown. Time to break out that DMCA counter-notification.

Personally, as a big fan (previous blog on the documentary Shut Up and Sing), I was excited to see the Dixie Chicks sweep five Grammy categories this year, including the trifecta: album, record and song of the year. And, as opponents of media consolidation and its negative impact on the diversity of both music and speech -- we at the state PIRGs were pleased as well. As the New York Times editorialized today in The Courage of Others' Convictions:

The awards -- including for the trio's fittingly titled album "Taking the Long Way" and the song "Not Ready to Make Nice" -- ended a desolate period in which their music was boycotted and banned by country music stations, their CDs were burned and smashed, and group members' lives were threatened.

Was it mere coincidence that at the very same time these big media conglomerates were vilifying the Chicks and/or giving the administration a pass on its Iraq policy, they were also intensely lobbying the administration to free them from the media ownership limits they loathe? One reason these limits are in place is to make sure that a wide diversity of viewpoints and voices have access to our nation's publicly-owned broadcast airwaves. Having diverse viewpoints and voices could provide a necessary counterweight to the Big Media mischief that victimized the Chicks -- and the American public -- and turned a MSM {Main Stream Media] that is supposed to be a watch dog on our government into its lap dog.

Over at Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren's blog Warren Reports On The Middle Class, she notes in the entry Trumpets Please the debut of the Harvard Law and Policy Review, affiliated with the American Constitution Society. Warren:

For me, the most exciting part of the journal is that it features middle class economic issues front-and-center. Grouped together as part of a discussion on reducing the price of opportunity, the journal has pulled in Jacob Hacker for a piece on the new economic insecurity, Michael Lind on the smallholder society, Michael Barr focusing on savings, and a piece from my co-blogger Ganesh Sitaramen, College Board economist Sandy Baum and me on paying for college.

The successful MakeTextbooksAffordable.com Campaign run by the student PIRGs has issued its latest report on changing the textbook marketplace to both improve access to knowledge and make college more affordable. The report is called Exposing the Textbook Industry: How Publishers' Pricing Tactics Drive Up the Cost of College Textbooks.

The new MASSPIRG report is a survey of several hundred Massachusetts professors. Among its findings: publishers are not adequately disclosing price information to the faculty, who do care about the cost to students and want better information. In particular, 77% of the professors surveyed found that publisher sales representatives rarely or never volunteer the price, and even when professors directly asked for the price during a sales meeting, only 38% reported that the sales representative would always disclose the price.

A number of consumer advocates are over in Geneva, Switzerland at the latest meeting of the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization. WIPO continues deliberations on a PIRG-opposed treaty that would grant massive and unprecedented intellectual property rights to broadcasters, and could still extend those rights to Internet webcasters. More from CPTech's Jamie Love at his Huffington Post blog.

Check out the column Gadgets as Tyrants in today's New York Times. It's by BoingBoing's Xing Jardin and describes how the electronic toys and systems you buy increasingly impose severe digital rights management (DRM) restrictions that limit your use and enjoyment. These restrictions are allegedly to prevent digital piracy but, when a CD or music download or game or movie will only play on one brand of machine-- anyone can see the real goal is locking up market share, diminishing competition and limiting consumer choice. From Jardin:

One electronics show attendee told me his 12-year-old recently asked him, "Why do I have to buy my favorite game five times?" Because the company that made the game wants to profit from each device the user plays it on: Wii, Xbox, PlayStation, Game Boy or phone.

Meanwhile, in my own continuing saga as an unwitting lab rat (more, including info on whether you are a victim) in Sony's treacherous DRM debacle, I've received one, but not both, of the spyware/virus hole-free album downloads I was promised (as part of a massive settlement of consumer claims) after I spent hours figuring out to get my computer to expunge the dangerous DRM system Sony loaded without my permission when I merely wanted to listen to a purchased CD. More news as we get it. For more on DRM, including the Microsoft Vista issues, see Defective by Design.

In today's New York Times, Marian Burros reports that a new study finds that "Research studies financed by the food industry are much more likely to produce favorable results than independently financed research." These important findings are in a study, Relationship between Funding Source and Conclusion among Nutrition-Related Scientific Articles, published in the important and relatively new online journal PLoS Medicine of the Public Library of Science. PLoS Medicine, like other PLoS projects, is a fully peer-reviewed scientific journal, but unlike most scientific journals, is open-access: it's not copyrighted and it's free to other researchers and to the general public on the Internet. For more on the international open access -- or what's often called the Access To Knowledge movement -- see CPTech's A2K page. Also see the 2005 CALPIRG Report Limited Knowledge: How The High Cost Of Academic Journals Limits Public Access To Research.

PIRG Higher Education Project Advocate Luke Swarthout has a new report out today: Cutting Interest Rates in Half Would Save Working and Middle Class Students Thousands of Dollars in Debt. The report documents the benefits that the First 100 Hours proposal from Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and others will provide:

Cutting student loan interest rates in half will save the average working- and middle class borrower $4,420 over the life of their loans...The Congressional proposal would lower interest rates on undergraduate subsidized Stafford loans over the next five years until they are cut in half to 3.4% starting in 2011. In 2004-2005 more than five and a half million students took out subsidized Stafford loans to pay for college. "Over the past decade we have asked America's college students to shoulder a heavy burden of debt to pay for college," said Swarthout. "Cutting interest rates on student loans will help millions of working and middle-class students and their families by saving them thousands of dollars in student loan payments."

The New York Times understands that our real-world democracy depends on Internet freedom, known technically as net neutrality. From its lead editorial Wednesday Protecting Internet Democracy:

Internet users now get access to any Web site on an equal basis. Foreign and domestic sites, big corporate home pages and little-guy blogs all show up on a user's screen in the same way when their addresses are typed into a browser. Anyone who puts up a Web page can broadcast it to the world...[MORE]

Cable and telephone companies are talking, however, about creating a two-tiered Internet with a fast lane and a slow lane...Creating these sorts of tiers would destroy the democratic quality of the Internet. Big, wealthy voices would start to overpower the smaller, poorer ones...A net neutrality law would require cable and telephone companies to continue to provide Web sites to Internet users on an equal basis....The cable and telephone companies have fought net neutrality with a lavishly financed and misleading lobbying campaign, because they stand to gain an enormous windfall. But there is growing support from individuals and groups across the political spectrum, from MoveOn.org to the Gun Owners of America, who worry about what will happen to their free speech if Internet service providers are allowed to pick and choose the traffic they carry.

Here are links to a few interesting recent entries in the various consumer and public interest blogs I read:

In defiance of requests from incoming Congressional committee chairs, Bush administration factotums at the EPA have begun shuttering regional libraries that have been important to citizens, first responders, plant workers and EPA's own scientists seeking information about hazardous chemicals and other environmental problems in their communities and workplaces. Today's New York Times op-ed column Keep the E.P.A. Libraries Open by Leslie Burger, president of the American Library Association, explains the important right-to-know and access to knowledge issues:

Anyone who needs to understand the environmental impact of, say, living downwind or downstream from a new nuclear power plant, or the long-term public health impact of Hurricane Katrina, cannot afford to find the doors barred to potentially lifesaving information. But neither can the rest of us, whose daily lives and choices will be affected by global warming. We all have a right to be able to get access to information about our air, water and soil.

New York Law School has a new virtual law school, the State of Play Academy. You can log on the Academy site and check out the course materials and class materials; if you'd like to participate, however, you'll need to download the free program There.com (more info available at the Academy page) and create an avatar (same concept as a virtual game character such as a wizard or a warrior, but in this case more like you and less like Gandalf or Aragorn). The Dean of the Academy is Lauren Gelman, associate director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society:

The State of Play Academy is the first law and technology academy built in a virtual world. Its purpose is to challenge the traditional means of imparting a legal education-in time, place and manner-- by experimenting with opportunities offered by the virtual space. It is funded by a grant awarded to New York Law School by There.com. We usually have classes on a law and technology issue every Tuesday and Thursday evening from 5:30-6:30 PM PST.

Over at his Huffington Post blog, my colleague Jamie Love of CPTech has posted a good analysis of some of the issues raised at the important international meeting at Harvard Law School on Open Document Formats (ODF) I attended yesterday, along with Amina Fazlullah, our new media reform attorney (my previous blog). The meeting was sponsored by the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue. Excerpt from Jamie's post:

A handful of thoughtful government officials are trying to require software vendors, including Microsoft, to use this new open standard, in order to achieve a number of important public policy objectives, including:

* More competition among suppliers of software,
* Improved ability to manage archives of data,
* Enhanced ability to use and re-purpose data contained in documents.

The State of Massachusetts and the government of Belgium and Denmark have already put in place requirements that ODF be supported by software companies, and now other governments are beginning to consider similar initiatives. If they succeed, it could result in a revolution in the structure of the entire software market, and bring much needed competition and innovation to these important areas.

I am participating Friday in an important international meeting sponsored by the TransAtlantic Consumers Dialogue at Harvard Law School. The meeting, A Round Table on Open Document Format (ODF), attempts to answer the following and other questions about the inter-operability of text, spreadsheet and other files.

One reason that the meeting is in Massachusetts is that Governor Mitt Romney (R) and his administration are pioneers in ODF procurement. More resources here at CPTech.

I've previously discussed efforts by webcasters to push unprecedented language in a proposed broadcast/webcast treaty that would grant them a new type of intellectual property right over any content that passed through through their portals, even to content they'd never owned, didn't create or was already in the public domain. MORE:

Thanks to efforts by a PIRG-backed coalition of consumer and civil liberties groups allied with some major corporations, the US recently withdrew its puzzling and longstanding support for the sweepingly dangerous proposal. Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest reports "the US and developing countries such as Chile and India worked together to broker a deal to limit the scope of the proposed broadcast treaty to combating signal theft, instead of the more expansive rights that broadcasters had originally been seeking" (and webcasters had been hoping to get in on). The events occurred at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) General Assembly meeting in Geneva.

If you care about consumer rights, check out the work of the activists at Defective by Design, who are trying to discourage the use of software that limits our cultural freedom and prevents us from full enjoyment of our legally-purchased digital products. They seek to educate the world -- sometimes through street theater and direct action -- about the threat of so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes, including the one used by Apple's iTunes and the apparently even more intrusive one said to be coming on the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Zune mp3 service, according to an article Hot Rod Your iPod, in the Phoenix, which also says you can come to a party at MIT Friday to learn how to switch out your iPod's proprietary software for an open-source alternative: MORE:

While Apple’s products may be more user-friendly than most, they’re hardly DRM-free. This Friday, Free Culture Boston and the Computing Culture group at the MIT Media Lab aim to change that by hosting an iPod Liberation Party. There, attendees can switch their compatible iPods (or other mp3 players) to run on Rockbox or iPod Linux, open-source firmware that lets your iPod work like a hard drive: it frees you from having to depend on iTunes software, lets you access your song files, supports Ogg Vorbis and FLAC codecs, and offers a bunch of other cool customizations...The iPod Liberation Party takes place at 7 pm this Friday, October 6, at the MIT Media Lab, 20 Ames Street, in Cambridge. For more information e-mail freeculture-boston@hcs.harvard.edu or visit Freeculture.

STATE PIRGs' HIGHER EDUCATION PROJECT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 29, 2006
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Luke Swarthout (202)546-9707
Department of Education: Private Lender Bilking Taxpayers for Billions

Statement of Luke Swarthout, State PIRGs' Higher Education Advocate

"According to a new OIG report released late Friday by the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Education, private lender Nelnet Inc. abused a student loan loophole to generate $1.2 billion in illegitimate government payments. Through the "9.5% loophole" the company has already been paid $278 million in excess subsidies and stands to receive $882 million more unless the Department steps in. The IG report calls on the Department to stop the payments and repay the outstanding $278 million.

The Department of Education must stop this abuse of taxpayers at the hands of private student lenders. Citizens pay taxes to help students go to college, not to pad the profits of private lenders."
###

Over at the new Consumer Law and Policy Blog, Deepak Gupta summarizes some of the important consumer cases that the Supreme Court may decide to take up. We have co-signed an amicus brief in one of the cases, Cellco v. Hatch. I discuss its issues, dealing with the right of states to regulate unfair cell phone practices, here.

Over in Geneva, negotiations continue on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO is a UN agency) proposal to extend a new form of property rights to broadcasters and even to webcasters. A number of public interest advocates are over there lobbying against the treaty and summarize daily discussions at a WIPO Casting Treaty blog. Yesterday, a diverse coalition including public interest and civil society groups along with companies we often otherwise oppose -- such as Verizon -- gave a workshop to treaty negotiators and the media. Last week, we co-signed a statement (html ) against the treaty, along with numerous public interest organizations and businesses and associations including Verizon, Dell, Cingular, HP and several industry trade groups. My previous blog on this important Access to Knowledge (a2k) issue. From today's Los Angeles Times story Proposed Treaty on TV Signals Spurs Criticism:

"Many believe that the broadcasters see this exclusive right as a way to protect an industry that is rapidly being eclipsed by technological development," said Matthew Schruers, senior counsel for litigation and legislative affairs at the Computer & Communications Industry Assn., an industry trade group. "There is a fear that right could prevent the use of cool new devices because people can't license them or because the broadcasters don't want to license them."

In today's Washington Post, Griff Witte reports in On Youtube, Charges of Security Flaws, how Michael de Kort may be the first whistleblower to post his allegations via a Youtube video. In the video, De Kort anonymously describes his unheeded complaints to his then-employer Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor refurbishing Coast Guard patrol vessels, and the risks posed to homeland security. MORE:

De Kort says at the end of his 10-minute video words to the effect, "If you can help me, you can certainly find me."
The Post's Witte quotes Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight:

The formal systems that whistle-blowers are expected to use have failed. That's why you're seeing people be creative like this. This is a tremendous way for someone brave enough to do it to say something directly and not have to go through a filter.

The Student PIRGs have released Textbooks for the 21st Century: A Guide To Free and Low-Cost Textbooks. The report is part of our Campaign To Make Textbooks Affordable. MORE:

Excerpt:

The rising price of college textbooks has created a growing market for lower-cost and free textbooks. Several alternative and online publishers are now offering low-frills textbooks or online versions of textbooks. These books offer the same educational value as traditional textbooks; faculty members we surveyed who have used these alternative textbooks in a classroom setting said they are satisfied with the books' educational content.

This week, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, well-known for its no-strings-attached individual "genius" grants to activists, academics, musicians, authors and others, announced that Knowledge Ecology International (formerly CPTech) was among the first winners of its new round of organizational genius grants. (Well, they're actually called MacArthur Awards for Creative and Effective Institutions.) It's a well-deserved award. MORE:

We've been fortunate over the years to work with the organization Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech) in campaigns designed to balance intellectual rights claims with the broader public interest. Among other goals, KEI/CPTech and the PIRGs and others seek to preserve access to knowledge and access to medicine. The group, which is in the process of changing its name to Knowledge Ecology International, is led by the indomitable Jamie Love.

CPTech has led many important and visionary fights, including its successful WTO battle against the powerful prescription drug lobby PhRMA and its sycophants in the U.S. State Department and European Commission, which made it easier to bring critical low-cost AIDS drugs and malarial and other necessary medicines to African and other less-developed nations. More recently, CPTech/KEI is leading the fight against a proposed broadcast treaty which invents then preposterously grants for 50 years a whole new set of property rights -- including rights to materials already in the public domain -- to webcasters (our previous blog on the proposed WIPO treaty).

From the announcement by MacArthur.

For more than a decade, KEI led the successful campaign to lower prices of medicines essential for treating AIDS and other diseases through "compulsory licenses." It brought about numerous changes in international trade policy, working with nongovernmental organizations and academic partners to design a new trade framework and new financing mechanisms for medical research and development.

More recently, KEI has called on the World Intellectual Property Organization to take a more balanced approach between promoting intellectual property rights and serving the public interest. It seeks to slow or stop work on treaties that could restrict severely access to knowledge.

As the Washington Post story on the award notes, CPTEch/KEI is also working with U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders on innovative proposed legislation, HR 417, that would change the way we reward inventors of new medicines to "drive down the price of drugs by changing how research and development are financed. The goal would be for development to be based on drugs' potential health benefits, not on their potential market value."

One of the most important consumer protection fights occurring both in Washington and internationally is the battle to ensure access to knowledge and culture. Powerful special interests are using a variety of tactics and strategies to try to privatize and control access to knowledge and culture. There are many efforts, but among the most brazen is the ongoing effort by some "webcasters" to invent, then grab, property rights that never before existed. Jamie Love of CPTech has a new blog entry explaining the Bush Administration's latest submission to a Geneva-based UN agency known as WIPO, which is considering a proposed broadcast treaty that powerful webcasters -- Fox, Yahoo and AT&T and others -- have been using as a wedge to demand an unprecedented grant of new rights and control over information streamed through their servers, even if it exists in the public domain, and even if they don't own it, never owned it, and didn't create it. MORE:

Along with its other perhaps more significant claims, the Bush negotiators have also proposed that what had been called webcasting would henceforth be known as netcasting. The CPTech WIPO treaty page is here. As background, here's a joint statement a number of activists sent US negotiators in March.

For more on the philosophy and importance of preserving knowledge and culture in a shared commons, and the growing corporate threats to privatize and commodify that shared knowledge and culture instead, I recommend a book on threats to all kinds of publicly-held assets, Silent Theft (2002), by David Bollier and, more specifically, an article by Professor James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement. Both Bollier and Boyle explain the threat to public knowledge as having an historical parallel in the English Enclosure movement and subsequent Parliamentary Enclosure Acts -- where the rights of the public to graze and hunt on common lands and forests were taken away and those lands then granted to powerful special interests, as this review of Silent Theft explains:

In a massive project of social engineering, Parliament passed the Enclosure Acts, which stripped the commoners of their property rights and delivered the lands to individual, usually wealthy landowners. (By 1895, about half of one percent of the population of England and Wales owned almost 99 percent of the land.) Thus was born the market on a national scale. Land became a commodity---real estate---and commoners became commodities too, in the form of workers in a "labor market." Something people once thought was theirs suddenly was someone else's.

And as Professor Boyle explains:

We are in the middle of a second enclosure movement. It sounds grandiloquent to call it "the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind," but in a very real sense that is just what it is. True, the new state-created property rights may be "intellectual" rather than "real," but once again things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights.

In June, we joined other groups in the "Access to Knowledge" (or a2k) movement in a letter in support of legislation sponsored by Senators Jon Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT), S 2695, The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006. If you, as a taxpayer, acting through the federal National Institutes of Health or the Department of Energy or National Academies of Science or some other agency that funds research, make grants of taxpayer funds to research, shouldn't you as a taxpayer be able to access the research results? Well, most of the time, that isn't the case. MORE:

Why? The research is published in extremely expensive journals, often controlled by a few powerful private publishers. The bill would require agencies with annual research budgets of more than $100 million to implement a public access policy. Advocacy for the bill is being coordinated by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, which has a lot of background on the issue on its site. Excerpt:

From NIH funding alone, it is estimated that about 65,000 papers are published each year. Because U.S. taxpayers underwrite this research, they have a right to expect that its dissemination and use will be maximized, and that they themselves will have access to it. If this information is shared with all potential users, it will advance science and improve the lives and welfare of people of the United States and the world. This is an achievable goal – today. The Internet has revolutionized information sharing and has made it possible to make the latest advances promptly available to every scientist, physician, educator, and citizen at their homes, schools, or libraries.

I am participating this week in an important conference in Paris - New Relations Between Creative Communities and Consumers. It is one of a series of conferences on access to knowledge (a2k) and culture being hosted by the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumers Dialogue. Intrusive new copyright and intellectual property regimes being considered by governments and international treaty organizations such as the WIPO (previous blog) concentrate control over intellectual property in the hands of fewer and fewer powerful corporations, treat consumers as pirates while restricting their activities and fail to compensate the musicians, artists and authors -- who are the ones that are supposed to reap the benefits of copyright, trademark and patent protectio -- adequately. This conference brings together those actual creators with consumers.

This weekend in the Bangor (ME) Daily News, two University of Maine officials explain in a column Net Neutrality and Higher Education the threat that the phone and cable companies pose to higher education if they become Internet gatekeepers.

The network operators are now proposing to create a two-tiered network infrastructure that allows only certain applications onto a "premium" Internet lane leaving universities, entrepreneurs, consumers, small businesses and any other individuals without deep pockets to the slower lane. Taxpayers of our state already pay hard-earned money to support state-funded organizations like our universities, libraries, K-12 schools and museums.

On Thursday the House Judiciary Committee passed PIRG-backed legislation to preserve net neutrality and keep the Internet free. This critical vote shows that like a dead fish, the phone company propaganda against keeping the Internet free is starting to lose its freshness. The bipartisan (Sensenbrenner-R-WI; Conyers-D-MI) "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006" (H.R. 5417) is now ready for floor action, but so is the PIRG-opposed but phone company-backed COPE Act, which fails to preserve net neutrality.

UPDATE: corrected bad urls 15 Jan 07] (I'll get to credit bureaus and the phone company in a minute, and even access to knowledge and culture and your fair use rights, as a sidebar.) But first you need to know about Johnny Fever and the Phone Police. I've seen a few comments on the big blogs this week referring to the classic "Run, it's the phone police!" episode of the hilarious late 70's-early 80's show WKRP in Cincinnati. The 2006 blog comments are of course in reference to the recent news (see e.g., Does Anyone Have Privacy Left? in the Baltimore Sun) about the phone companies assisting NSA in spying on us. On WKRP, I recall that the phone police were chasing manic deejay Dr. Johnny Fever (played by Howard Hesseman) because he hadn't paid his phone bill. MORE:

The phone police from the show are probably phone company in-house debt collectors. The phone companies always chase down the bills. Of course, the firms have always had a powerful cudgel hanging over their customers' heads, whether or not they ever employ phone police: "Can't pay us? No problem, we'll shut off your phone. Have a nice day."

Now, the phone companies may actually be turning their efficient payment apparatus into a force for the public good. Verizon is beginning to report your regular payment history -- late is bad or on-time is good -- to the credit bureaus, as Gary Haber recently reported in a comprehensive story about Verizon and credit bureaus in the Delaware News Journal. Previously, they only reported extremely negative payment behaviors -- phone shut-offs, sent to collection, etc.

However, it is a complex issue. I hope that the phone company reporting to bureaus will help consumers with thin credit histories. As the Delaware Ne