Communications and Copyright Policies - Tim Wu

Tim Wu has some simple conventional things to say about communications and copyright policy making. Firstly copyright law should act as an incentive scheme for authors and creators not as an innovation barrier to new technology.

Secondly, communications infrastructure regulators like the Federal Communications Commission, should forget about trying to regulate content and get back to their real job of making sure the government facilitates (or at least stays out of the way) innovations and development of communications infrastructure!

"Copyright law should limit itself to promoting authorship, and communications law should forget about content regulation. That may, again, not sound very radical, but the fact is that today the two areas of law moonlight for each other in fairly shameful ways. Copyright is used to do things that would be embarrassing to propose in communications policy circles. Meanwhile, the FCC is effectively implementing copyright laws that couldn’t get through Congress.

Government accountability is more than Congressional testimony. When laws hide their dirty laundry in other legal regimes, it becomes hard, even for legal experts, to keep track of what the government is doing. The crossover of Copyright and Communications policy is a sterling example."

He also has some sensible advice on the ever widening problem of vested interests and their supporters taking simplistic, polarised and diametrically stances in important public debates:

"I think things are even worse than Cass Sunstein predicted. What Cass wrote about in the 1990s was the basic problem of debate polarization. But I don’t think he expected that even facts themselves would come up for grabs, leaving each side living in fully constructed parallel universes of disinformation.

I don’t blame the blogs. Here is the problem: we are living with the unexpected consequences of low-cost information dissemination, or “cheap speech.” Cheapness is generally good, but it also creates strange consequences. Cheap corn, for example, makes us fat. Cheap drugs, like crack cocaine, can destroy neighborhoods. And cheap information is making us stupid.

As a society, the only answer is likely to be painful: an information diet. Consider the food analogy: in another age, food was scarce, and so everyone ate anything they could get their hands on. Today that approach will make you look like Andre the Giant. We have learned, albeit imperfectly, to eat more carefully. We similarly need to learn to regulate our information intake, or we’ll end up with brains that look like CNN Crossfire."

A balanced diet in information. We could all do with that.