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TOTM The Federal Circuit handed down a victory for free expression today — in the commercial context no less. At issue was the Lanham Act’s § 2(a) . . .
The Federal Circuit handed down a victory for free expression today — in the commercial context no less. At issue was the Lanham Act’s § 2(a) prohibition of trademark registrations that…
Read the full piece here.
Popular Media Last July, the Eastern District of Virginia upheld the cancellation of various trademarks of the Washington Redskins on the grounds that the marks were disparaging to . . .
Last July, the Eastern District of Virginia upheld the cancellation of various trademarks of the Washington Redskins on the grounds that the marks were disparaging to Native Americans. I am neither a fan of football, nor of offensive names for sports teams–what I am is a fan of free speech. Although the Redskins may be well advised to change their team name, interfering with both the team’s right to free speech as well as its property right in the registered mark is the wrong way–both legally and in principle–to achieve socially desirable ends.
Various theories have been advanced, but the really interesting part of the dispute–a topic upon which I published a paper this year–is the likelihood that the Lanham Act’s prohibition of immoral, scandalous, or disparaging marks runs afoul of the First Amendment. I was cheered to see this week that the First Amendment Lawyers Association filed an amicus brief largely along the lines of my paper. However, there were a couple of points that I still feel deserve more attention when thinking about the § 2(a) (the Lanham Act’s so-called “morality clauses”).
The district court tried to sidestep the First Amendment issue by declaring that the trademarks themselves are not at issue, but merely the right to register the trademarks. To reach its result, the court relied on the recent Walker case wherein the Supreme Court declared that Texas was at liberty to prevent Confederate flags from appearing on its license plates, since license plates could be considered the speech of the government.
However, there is an important distinction between license plates and trademarks. License plates are a good totally of government manufacture. One cannot drive a car on a public road without applying to the government for permission and affixing a government registration tag on the vehicle. The plate is not a blank slate upon which one may express one’s self, but is a state-issued information placard used for law enforcement purposes.
Trademarks, arising as they do from actual use, preexist federal recognition. The Lanham Act merely provides a mechanism for registering trademarks that happen to be used in interstate commerce. The federal government then chooses to recognize that trademark when contested or offered for registration.
This is a major distinction: the social field of trademarks already exists – the federal government has chosen to regulate and provide an enforcement mechanism for these property rights and speech acts when used in interstate commerce. Thus it is the market for trademarks that constitutes the forum, and not the physically recorded government register. Given that the government has interfered in a preexisting market in a way in which it protects some state-created trademark property rights, but not others, is it proper to regulate speech by virtue of its content? I think not.
Further, license plates are obviously government property to anyone who looks at them. Plates bear the very name of the state directly on their face. The system of trademark registration is a largely invisible process that only becomes relevant during legal proceedings. When the public looks at a given trademark I would argue that the state’s imprimatur is certainly one of the last things of which they would think.
Thus, a restriction on “immoral” or “disparaging” trademarks constitutes viewpoint discrimination. Eugene Volokh echoed this sentiment when he wrote on the refusal to register “Stop the Islamisation of America”:
Trademark registration … is a government benefit program open to a wide array of speakers with little quality judgment. Like other such programs … it should be seen as a form of “limited public forum,” in which the government may impose content-based limits but not viewpoint-based ones. An exclusion of marks that disparage groups while allowing marks that praise those groups strikes me as viewpoint discrimination.
The Lanham Act endows registrants with government-guaranteed legal rights in connection with the words and symbols by which they are recognized in society. Particularly in a globalized, interconnected society, the brand of an entity is a significant component of how it speaks to society. Discriminating against marks as “immoral” or “disparaging” can be nothing short of viewpoint discrimination.
As everyone is well aware, the First Amendment provides broad protection for a wide spectrum of speech. The definition of speech itself is likewise broad, including not only words, but also non-verbal gestures and symbols. Any governmental curtailing of such speech will be “presumptively invalid,” with the burden of rebutting that presumption on the government.
When speech is undertaken as part of commerce it does not magically lose any political, social or religious dimension it had when in a noncommercial context. Cartoons issued bearing the image of the Prophet as part of a commercial magazine are surely a political statement deserving of protection. The situation is the same if an organization adopts a logo that is derisive to a particular political or religious ideology – that publication is making a protected, expressive statement through its branding.
At first glance, one might think that defenders of § 2(a) would attempt to qualify scandalous and immoral trademarks as “obscene” and thereby render them subject to censorship. But, in McGinley the Federal Circuit explicitly refused to apply the obscenity standards from the Supreme Court to §2(a) on the grounds that the Lanham Act does not itself use the word “obscenity.” Instead, the Federal Circuit, following the TTAB, was of the opinion that “[w]hat is denied are the benefits provided by the Lanham Act which enhance the value of a mark” and that the appellant still had legal recourse under state common law. Therefore, so the court in McGinley reasoned, since the right to use the mark is not actually abridged, no expression is abridged. And this is the primary basis upon which the district court in Pro-Football built its argument that no First Amendment concerns were implicated in canceling the Redskins trademark.
This of course willfully ignores once again the notion that in intervening in the field of trademarks, and in favoring certain speakers over others, courts effectively allows the Lanham Act to amplify preferred speech and burden disfavored speech. This is true whether or not we classify the trademark right as a bundle of procedural rights (which in turn make speech competitively possible) or as pure speech directly.
That said, it’s much more in keeping with the tradition of the First Amendment to understand trademarks as a protected category of commercial speech. The Supreme Court has noted that otherwise commercial information may at times be more urgent than even political dialog, and that information relating to a financial incentive was not necessarily commercial for First Amendment purposes. “[S]ignificant societal interests are served by such speech.” This is so because even entirely commercial speech “may often carry information of import to significant issues of the day.”
Even were commercial speech not fully protected–as I believe it to be–the Supreme Court has also recognized that commercial speech may be so intertwined with noncommercial speech so as to make them inseparable for First Amendment purposes. In particular, commercial messages do more than merely provide information about the characteristics of goods and services:
[S]olicitation is characteristically intertwined with informative and perhaps persuasive speech seeking support for particular causes or for particular views on economic, political, or social issues, and for the reality that without solicitation the flow of such information and advocacy would likely cease.
The analogy to trademarks is rather clear in this context. Although trademarks may refer to a particular product or service, that product or service is not of necessity a purely commercial object. Further, even if the product or service is a commercial object, the trademark itself can be, or can become, a symbolic referent and not a mere sales pitch. Consider, for instance, Mickey Mouse. The iconic mouse ears certainly represent a vast commercial empire generally, and specifically operate as a functional trademark for Mickey Mouse cartoons and merchandise. However, is there not much more of cultural significance to the mark than mere commercial value? The mouse ears represent something culturally – about childhood, about America, and about art – that is much more than merely a piece of pricing or quality information.
The district court (and Federal Circuit, for that matter) have missed a very important dimension in summarily dismissing First Amendment concerns of trademark holders. These courts dismiss owners of “immoral” or “disparaging” trademarks on the belief that no actual harm is done – the mark holders still own the mark, and, as far as the court is concerned, no speech has been suppressed. However, trademark registration, in addition to providing a forum in which to speak, also provides real procedural benefits for the mark holder. For instance, businesses and individuals enjoy a nationwide recognition of their presence and can vindicate their interests in federal courts. Without the federal registration that is presumptively supplied to marks that are not “immoral” or “scandalous,” an individual can find himself attempting to protect his interests in a mark in the courts of every state in which he does business.
However, under the unconstitutional conditions doctrine even though the benefits of trademark registration are not constitutionally guaranteed rights, those benefits cannot be offered in exchange for a trademark owner’s loss of actually guaranteed rights. Thus, the tight link between trademark registration and First Amendment protections that the courts just keep ignoring.
Its also worth noting that this doctrine did not emerge in constitutional jurisprudence until after the period in which the Lanham Act was drafted. Instead, the Lanham Act era was characterized by the rights-privileges distinction–made famous by then Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Oliver Wendell Holmes. In McAuliffe, a police officer sued for reinstatement after he was dismissed for his participation in a political organization. In dismissing the case, Chief Justice Holmes held that “[t]he petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” This quote from Holmes captures precisely the sense in which the Federal Circuit dismisses the First Amendment concerns of mark holders.
In contrast to this rather antiquated view, the Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed the proposition that “the government may not deny a benefit to a person because he exercises a constitutional right.” Although this principle contains exceptions, it has been applied to a wide variety of situations including refusal to renew teaching contracts over First Amendment-protected speech acts, and infringement of the right to travel by refusing to adequately extend healthcare benefits to sick persons who had not been residents of a county for at least a year.
Basically, the best defense one can offer for § 2(a) is rooted in an outmoded view of the First Amendment that is, to put it mildly, unconstitutional. We don’t shut down speakers who offend us (at least for the time being), and we should stop attacking trademarks that we find to be immoral.
Filed under: First amendment, intellectual property, Trademark Tagged: First Amendment, Intellectual property, trademark
Scholarship Is net neutrality necessary to protect First Amendment values in the 21st Century? Or does the First Amendment actually prevent net neutrality regulation? How can both of these questions be considered simultaneously?
Is net neutrality necessary to protect First Amendment values in the 21st Century? Or does the First Amendment actually prevent net neutrality regulation? How can both of these questions be considered simultaneously?
At issue is a conflict of visions about the nature of the liberty protected by the First Amendment. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously described two clashing concepts of liberty — negative and positive. Simply, negative liberty is freedom from external interference. Positive liberty, on the other hand, is freedom to do something, including having the power and resources necessary to do it.
For example, negative liberty means that no one may rightfully take my property away from me without my consent. Positive liberty means that I have a right to health care that must be provided for me if I cannot afford it on my own.
Positive rights necessarily involve at least some subjugation of the rights of others. A right to health care, for instance, would violate the rights of those who must provide or subsidize health care services without their consent. Further, it would infringe upon others’ positive rights insofar as there are scarce resources available to pay for all such rights.
Conversely, negative rights are compossible with one another, which means all people could hold them simultaneously. These rights apply only against aggressors—e.g., rapists, murderers, and thieves—and not against those who are respecting the rights of others.
In this article, we examine the debate over the First Amendment merits of the Federal Communications Commission’s (“FCC”) “Open Internet” Order issued in March 2015.
Popular Media Last week the International Center for Law & Economics, joined by TechFreedom, filed comments with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in its Operation and Certification . . .
Last week the International Center for Law & Economics, joined by TechFreedom, filed comments with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in its Operation and Certification of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (“UAS” — i.e, drones) proceeding to establish rules for the operation of small drones in the National Airspace System.
We believe that the FAA has failed to appropriately weigh the costs and benefits, as well as the First Amendment implications, of its proposed rules.
FAA regulations are subject to Executive Order 12866, which, among other things, requires that agencies:
The FAA’s proposed drone rules fail to meet these requirements.
An important, and fundamental, problem is that the proposed rules often seem to import “scientific, technical, economic, and other information” regarding traditional manned aircraft, rather than such knowledge specifically applicable to drones and their uses — what FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen has dubbed “The Procrustean Problem with Prescriptive Regulation.”
As such, not only do the rules often not make sense as a practical matter, they also seek to simply adapt existing standards, rules and understandings promulgated for manned aircraft to regulate drones — insufficiently tailoring the rules to “impose the least burden on society.”
In some cases the rules would effectively ban obviously valuable uses outright, disregarding the rules’ effect on innovation (to say nothing of their effect on current uses of drones) without adequately defending such prohibitions as necessary to protect public safety.
Importantly, the proposed rules would effectively prohibit the use of commercial drones for long-distance services (like package delivery and scouting large agricultural plots) and for uses in populated areas — undermining what may well be drones’ most economically valuable uses.
As our comments note:
By prohibiting UAS operation over people who are not directly involved in the drone’s operation, the rules dramatically limit the geographic scope in which UAS may operate, essentially limiting commercial drone operations to unpopulated or extremely sparsely populated areas. While that may be sufficient for important agricultural and forestry uses, for example, it effectively precludes all possible uses in more urban areas, including journalism, broadcasting, surveying, package delivery and the like. Even in nonurban areas, such a restriction imposes potentially insurmountable costs. Mandating that operators not fly over other individuals not involved in the UAS operation is, in fact, the nail in the coffin of drone deliveries, an industry that is likely to offer a significant fraction of this technology’s potential economic benefit. Imposing such a blanket ban thus improperly ignores the important “incentives for innovation” suggested by Executive Order 12866 without apparent corresponding benefit.
By prohibiting UAS operation over people who are not directly involved in the drone’s operation, the rules dramatically limit the geographic scope in which UAS may operate, essentially limiting commercial drone operations to unpopulated or extremely sparsely populated areas. While that may be sufficient for important agricultural and forestry uses, for example, it effectively precludes all possible uses in more urban areas, including journalism, broadcasting, surveying, package delivery and the like. Even in nonurban areas, such a restriction imposes potentially insurmountable costs.
Mandating that operators not fly over other individuals not involved in the UAS operation is, in fact, the nail in the coffin of drone deliveries, an industry that is likely to offer a significant fraction of this technology’s potential economic benefit. Imposing such a blanket ban thus improperly ignores the important “incentives for innovation” suggested by Executive Order 12866 without apparent corresponding benefit.
The FAA’s failure to tailor the rules according to an appropriate analysis of their costs and benefits also causes them to violate the First Amendment. Without proper tailoring based on the unique technological characteristics of drones and a careful assessment of their likely uses, the rules are considerably more broad than the Supreme Court’s “time, place and manner” standard would allow.
Several of the rules constitute a de facto ban on most — indeed, nearly all — of the potential uses of drones that most clearly involve the collection of information and/or the expression of speech protected by the First Amendment. As we note in our comments:
While the FAA’s proposed rules appear to be content-neutral, and will thus avoid the most-exacting Constitutional scrutiny, the FAA will nevertheless have a difficult time demonstrating that some of them are narrowly drawn and adequately tailored time, place, and manner restrictions.
Indeed, many of the rules likely amount to a prior restraint on protected commercial and non-commercial activity, both for obvious existing applications like news gathering and for currently unanticipated future uses.
Our friends Eli Dourado, Adam Thierer and Ryan Hagemann at Mercatus also filed comments in the proceeding, raising similar and analogous concerns:
As far as possible, we advocate an environment of “permissionless innovation” to reap the greatest benefit from our airspace. The FAA’s rules do not foster this environment. In addition, we believe the FAA has fallen short of its obligations under Executive Order 12866 to provide thorough benefit-cost analysis.
The full Mercatus comments, available here, are also recommended reading.
Read the full ICLE/TechFreedom comments here.
Filed under: international center for law & economics, markets, regulation, technology Tagged: Drones, FAA, Federal Aviation Administration, First Amendment, UAS
Regulatory Comments "We believe the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has failed to appropriately weigh the costs and benefits, as well as the First Amendment implications, of its proposed rules for the Operation and Certification of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)..."
“We believe the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has failed to appropriately weigh the costs and benefits, as well as the First Amendment implications, of its proposed rules for the Operation and Certification of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The proposed rules would unduly burden both current and future economically and societally valuable uses of drones, in some cases effectively banning obviously valuable uses outright. Among other things, the proposed rules would effectively prohibit the use of commercial drones in populated areas, undermining what may well be drones’ most economically valuable uses.”
The proposed rules would unduly burden both current and future economically and societally valuable uses of drones, in some cases effectively banning obviously valuable uses outright. Among other things, the proposed rules would effectively prohibit the use of commercial drones in populated areas, undermining what may well be drones’ most economically valuable uses. Absent justification that such overbroad and costly rules are required to ensure the public safety, they are more restrictive than necessary to satisfy the FAA’s core statutory responsibility: to protect the safety of the general public.
Moreover, these rules constitute a de facto ban on most — indeed, nearly all — of the potential uses of drones that most clearly involve the collection of information and/or the expression of speech protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, many of the rules likely amount to a prior restraint on protected commercial and non-commercial activity, both for obvious existing applications like newsgathering and for currently unanticipated future uses. The same failure to tailor the rules according to an appropriate analysis of their costs and benefits also likely causes them to violate the First Amendment. Without proper tailoring based on the unique technological characteristics of drones and a careful assessment of their likely uses, the rules are considerably more broad than the Supreme Court’s “time, place and manner” standard would allow.
Finally, the FAA’s stated interest in protecting safety may be viewed by a court as being, at least in part, a pretext for attempting to regulate the use of UAS to collect information in order to address “privacy” concerns about uses many would find unsettling. We do not dismiss such concerns, but we believe there are better – and more legally supportable – ways to handle them than the effective ban in populated areas imposed by the proposed rules. If every new technology required the consent of everyone who might hypothetically be harmed by it, however small the risk, technological progress would come to a standstill, especially the progress of technologies that allow us to better observe, understand and communicate about the world…”
Popular Media The free market position on telecom reform has become rather confused of late. Erstwhile conservative Senator Thune is now cosponsoring a version of Senator Rockefeller’s previously . . .
The free market position on telecom reform has become rather confused of late. Erstwhile conservative Senator Thune is now cosponsoring a version of Senator Rockefeller’s previously proposed video reform bill, bundled into satellite legislation (the Satellite Television Access and Viewer Rights Act or “STAVRA”) that would also include a provision dubbed “Local Choice.” Some free marketeers have defended the bill as a step in the right direction.
Although it looks as if the proposal may be losing steam this Congress, the legislation has been described as a “big and bold idea,” and it’s by no means off the menu. But it should be.
It has been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows. Indeed, people who disagree on just about everything can sometimes unite around a common perceived enemy. Take carriage disputes, for instance. Perhaps because, for some people, a day without The Bachelor is simply a day lost, an unlikely alliance of pro-regulation activists like Public Knowledge and industry stalwarts like Dish has emerged to oppose the ability of copyright holders to withhold content as part of carriage negotiations.
Senator Rockefeller’s Online Video Bill was the catalyst for the Local Choice amendments to STAVRA. Rockefeller’s bill did, well, a lot of terrible things, from imposing certain net neutrality requirements, to overturning the Supreme Court’s Aereo decision, to adding even more complications to the already Byzantine morass of video programming regulations.
But putting Senator Thune’s lipstick on Rockefeller’s pig can’t save the bill, and some of the worst problems from Senator Rockefeller’s original proposal remain.
Among other things, the new bill is designed to weaken the ability of copyright owners to negotiate with distributors, most notably by taking away their ability to withhold content during carriage disputes and by forcing TV stations to sell content on an a la carte basis.
Video distribution issues are complicated — at least under current law. But at root these are just commercial contracts and, like any contracts, they rely on a couple of fundamental principles.
First is the basic property right. The Supreme Court (at least somewhat) settled this for now (in Aereo), by protecting the right of copyright holders to be compensated for carriage of their content. With this baseline, distributors must engage in negotiations to obtain content, rather than employing technological workarounds and exploiting legal loopholes.
Second is the related ability of contracts to govern the terms of trade. A property right isn’t worth much if its owner can’t control how it is used, governed or exchanged.
Finally, and derived from these, is the issue of bargaining power. Good-faith negotiations require both sides not to act strategically by intentionally causing negotiations to break down. But if negotiations do break down, parties need to be able to protect their rights. When content owners are not able to withhold content in carriage disputes, they are put in an untenable bargaining position. This invites bad faith negotiations by distributors.
The STAVRA/Local Choice proposal would undermine the property rights and freedom of contract that bring The Bachelor to your TV, and the proposed bill does real damage by curtailing the scope of the property right in TV programming and restricting the range of contracts available for networks to license their content.
The bill would require that essentially all broadcast stations that elect retrans make their content available a la carte — thus unbundling some of the proverbial sticks that make up the traditional property right. It would also establish MVPD pass-through of each local affiliate. Subscribers would pay a fee determined by the affiliate, and the station must be offered on an unbundled basis, without any minimum tier required – meaning an MVPD has to offer local stations to its customers with no markup, on an a la carte basis, if the station doesn’t elect must-carry. It would also direct the FCC to open a rulemaking to determine whether broadcasters should be prohibited from withholding their content online during a dispute with an MPVD.
“Free market” supporters of the bill assert something like “if we don’t do this to stop blackouts, we won’t be able to stem the tide of regulation of broadcasters.” Presumably this would end blackouts of broadcast programming: If you’re an MVPD subscriber, and you pay the $1.40 (or whatever) for CBS, you get it, period. The broadcaster sets an annual per-subscriber rate; MVPDs pass it on and retransmit only to subscribers who opt in.
But none of this is good for consumers.
When transaction costs are positive, negotiations sometimes break down. If the original right is placed in the wrong hands, then contracting may not assure the most efficient outcome. I think it was Coase who said that.
But taking away the ability of content owners to restrict access to their content during a bargaining dispute effectively places the right to content in the hands of distributors. Obviously, this change in bargaining position will depress the value of content. Placing the rights in the hands of distributors reduces the incentive to create content in the first place; this is why the law protects copyright to begin with. But it also reduces the ability of content owners and distributors to reach innovative agreements and contractual arrangements (like certain promotional deals) that benefit consumers, distributors and content owners alike.
The mandating of a la carte licensing doesn’t benefit consumers, either. Bundling is generally pro-competitive and actually gives consumers more content than they would otherwise have. The bill’s proposal to force programmers to sell content to consumers a la carte may actually lead to higher overall prices for less content. Not much of a bargain.
There are plenty of other ways this is bad for consumers, even if it narrowly “protects” them from blackouts. For example, the bill would prohibit a network from making a deal with an MVPD that provides a discount on a bundle including carriage of both its owned broadcast stations as well as the network’s affiliated cable programming. This is not a worthwhile — or free market — trade-off; it is an ill-advised and economically indefensible attack on vertical distribution arrangements — exactly the same thing that animates many net neutrality defenders.
Just as net neutrality’s meddling in commercial arrangements between ISPs and edge providers will ensure a host of unintended consequences, so will the Rockefeller/Thune bill foreclose a host of welfare-increasing deals. In the end, in exchange for never having to go three days without CBS content, the bill will make that content more expensive, limit the range of programming offered, and lock video distribution into a prescribed business model.
Former FCC Commissioner Rob McDowell sees the same hypocritical connection between net neutrality and broadcast regulation like the Local Choice bill:
According to comments filed with the FCC by Time Warner Cable and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, broadcasters should not be allowed to take down or withhold the content they produce and own from online distribution even if subscribers have not paid for it—as a matter of federal law. In other words, edge providers should be forced to stream their online content no matter what. Such an overreach, of course, would lay waste to the economics of the Internet. It would also violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against state-mandated, or forced, speech—the flip side of censorship. It is possible that the cable companies figure that subjecting powerful broadcasters to anti-free speech rules will shift the political momentum in the FCC and among the public away from net neutrality. But cable’s anti-free speech arguments play right into the hands of the net-neutrality crowd. They want to place the entire Internet ecosystem, physical networks, content and apps, in the hands of federal bureaucrats.
According to comments filed with the FCC by Time Warner Cable and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, broadcasters should not be allowed to take down or withhold the content they produce and own from online distribution even if subscribers have not paid for it—as a matter of federal law. In other words, edge providers should be forced to stream their online content no matter what. Such an overreach, of course, would lay waste to the economics of the Internet. It would also violate the First Amendment’s prohibition against state-mandated, or forced, speech—the flip side of censorship.
It is possible that the cable companies figure that subjecting powerful broadcasters to anti-free speech rules will shift the political momentum in the FCC and among the public away from net neutrality. But cable’s anti-free speech arguments play right into the hands of the net-neutrality crowd. They want to place the entire Internet ecosystem, physical networks, content and apps, in the hands of federal bureaucrats.
While cable providers have generally opposed net neutrality regulation, there is, apparently, some support among them for regulations that would apply to the edge. The Rockefeller/Thune proposal is just a replay of this constraint — this time by forcing programmers to allow retransmission of broadcast content under terms set by Congress. While “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” sounds appealing in theory, here it is simply doubling down on a terrible idea.
What it reveals most of all is that true neutrality advocates don’t want government control to be limited to ISPs — rather, progressives like Rockefeller (and apparently some conservatives, like Thune) want to subject the whole apparatus — distribution and content alike — to intrusive government oversight in order to “protect” consumers (a point Fred Campbell deftly expands upon here and here).
You can be sure that, if the GOP supports broadcast a la carte, it will pave the way for Democrats (and moderates like McCain who back a la carte) to expand anti-consumer unbundling requirements to cable next. Nearly every economic analysis has concluded that mandated a la carte pricing of cable programming would be harmful to consumers. There is no reason to think that applying it to broadcast channels would be any different.
What’s more, the logical extension of the bill is to apply unbundling to all MVPD channels and to saddle them with contract restraints, as well — and while we’re at it, why not unbundle House of Cards from Orange is the New Black? The Rockefeller bill may have started in part as an effort to “protect” OVDs, but there’ll be no limiting this camel once its nose is under the tent. Like it or not, channel unbundling is arbitrary — why not unbundle by program, episode, studio, production company, etc.?
There is simply no principled basis for the restraints in this bill, and thus there will be no limit to its reach. Indeed, “free market” defenders of the Rockefeller/Thune approach may well be supporting a bill that ultimately leads to something like compulsory, a la carte licensing of all video programming. As I noted in my testimony last year before the House Commerce Committee on the satellite video bill:
Unless we are prepared to bear the consumer harm from reduced variety, weakened competition and possibly even higher prices (and absolutely higher prices for some content), there is no economic justification for interfering in these business decisions.
So much for property rights — and so much for vibrant video programming.
That there is something wrong with the current system is evident to anyone who looks at it. As Gus Hurwitz noted in recent testimony on Rockefeller’s original bill,
The problems with the existing regulatory regime cannot be understated. It involves multiple statutes implemented by multiple agencies to govern technologies developed in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, according to policy goals from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. We are no longer living in a world where the Rube Goldberg of compulsory licenses, must carry and retransmission consent, financial interest and syndication exclusivity rules, and the panoply of Federal, state, and local regulations makes sense – yet these are the rules that govern the video industry.
While video regulation is in need of reform, this bill is not an improvement. In the short run it may ameliorate some carriage disputes, but it will do so at the expense of continued programming vibrancy and distribution innovations. The better way to effect change would be to abolish the Byzantine regulations that simultaneously attempt to place thumbs of both sides of the scale, and to rely on free market negotiations with a copyright baseline and antitrust review for actual abuses.
But STAVRA/Local Choice is about as far from that as you can get.
Cross-posted from Truth on the Market
TOTM We’ll be delving into today’s oral arguments at our live-streamed TechFreedom/ICLE event at 12:30 EDT — and tweeting on the #NetNeutrality hashtag. But here are . . .
We’ll be delving into today’s oral arguments at our live-streamed TechFreedom/ICLE event at 12:30 EDT — and tweeting on the #NetNeutrality hashtag.
But here are a few thoughts to help guide the frantic tea-leaf reading everyone will doubtless be engaged in after (and probably even during) the arguments
Popular Media Disputes over intellectual property rights permeate our culture. The music and movie industries have brought thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits against users of peer-to-peer systems . . .
Disputes over intellectual property rights permeate our culture. The music and movie industries have brought thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits against users of peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent. YouTube videos and Facebook postings are regularly taken down because they contain infringing content. Earlier this year, proposed copyright legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was effectively killed by a grassroots uprising on the Internet. After the Internet Blackout Day on Jan. 18, SOPA became the new four-letter word.
TOTM In Part I of this post, I identified a jurisprudential thread of cases that suggest corporations have a First Amendment right to own and invest . . .
In Part I of this post, I identified a jurisprudential thread of cases that suggest corporations have a First Amendment right to own and invest in law practices for the delivery legal services. These decisions include NAACP v. Button, the union trilogy, and Bates v. State Bar of Arizona. Two recent cases shed light on how the Supreme Court might view my collective reading of NAACP v. Button and its progeny: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commissionand Sorrell v. IMS Health.
