Civil Defense - a weblog by Joshua Breitbart

Hannah Sassaman was on Democracy Now! a couple of days ago and it’s a must read/watch/listen for anyone hoping to make changes to the nation’s media system. It’s far too rare to hear anyone articulate such a clear and comprehensive explanation of what we should be fighting for in DC: community-defined media.

In Immokalee, Florida, they have Radio Consciencia. It’s a farm worker-led radio station, where communities can get on the air, talk about indentured servitude in the fields of Southwest Florida and fight to get their labor rights enforced. That is the appropriate communications technology for Immokalee. MNN is appropriate for Manhattan. And we have all of these options that we have determined are important.

By putting all of these different provisions by the telecom companies and the broadcast industry fighting for all of these provisions to be on one bill, they’re trying to divide us. But we have proven that we can clearly articulate to our senators that we want to fight for low-power FM on Senate Bill 2686 and we want to fight for meaningful net neutrality provisions on the bill, as well as locally determined, municipally controlled public access television. We’re a sophisticated group of folks across the United States, who understand why media consolidation affects us.

She was speaking specifically about the LPFM ammendment to the Stevens bill in the Senate, which wound up passing 14-7. But she did it in a way that unified the various messages, rather than diffuse them. The problem with the bill is that it does not protect the open internet and it guts public access.

I’m speaking on a panel with Hannah at the Alliance for Community conference next weekend and I hope she says exactly the same thing because, along with Mike Weisman, we’re talking about community radio and municipal wireless in relation to PEG.

Hannah was great on the “We can do better: moving from policy to action in the media movement [mp3]” panel at the AMC this past weekend. She was also excellent at the bowling alley. Check the post on her blog about the AMC.

On top of everything, Hannah’s band, Kiss Kiss Kill is playing with my friends from Michigan, the Pussy Pirates, tomorrow night at Lava Space! (I’ll be checking out the Pussy Pirates at Club Midway tonight in NYC.)

Yesterday I wrote about the racial and economic implications of digitizing the public sphere (and spoke about this at the MuniWireless conference). I mentioned a distinction between “digital inclusion” and “digital expansion.”

Digital inclusion has gained a lot of traction as a phrase, especially in Philadelphia where Wireless Philadelphia has all but branded it to describe the social programs they are planning to close the digital divide.

But to me (and to other people I’ve spoken with) it carries an implication that people who are offline are being brought into a perfect world. That’s clearly not the case.

What we see in the online world is the result of a land rush where English speaking white men had first crack at the virtual real estate. Digital inclusion is like saying poor people, people of color, and non-English speakers are allowed to shop in white neighborhoods.

(I’ve heard that the phrase “digital divide” was first promulgated by the US Department of Commerce, which makes a lot of sense in that regard.)

People talk about the entrepreneurial opportunities that will come from “closing the digital divide.” They’re there, but anyone who is arriving now to the online world is working at a disadvantage to those who came before. It’s one more example of government policies perpetuating economic divisions based on race.

We want to do more than just include people in the online world as it currently exists. We want that new involvement to transorm that world. This is what I hope to imply with the phrase digital expansion. It’s also what I want to imply when I talk about “open internet.”

I had a conversation along these same lines yesterday with Brownfemipower, who writes the Woman of Color Blog and will be at the AMC this weekend.

She comes at it from her experience with INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and a desire to use online tools to bolster grassroots base building offline. But she’s now developing a women of color blog ring and working to build a base in the online world, not focusing on pure quantity of hits or email addresses but on finding the allies and people in need of support that she or INCITE! would not find offline.

It goes without saying that this is needed. As BFP described with telling examples, the online world is no less racist or violent towards women than the offline world. In many instances it is more virulent. It might provide some physical security at times, but can expose private information in other instances. Women of color are online and they need support, especially from other online women of color.

This stands on its head a common assumption in online activism, one that was particularly prevalent within Indymedia when I was active in that network: that to reach poor people and people of color you need to go offline.

The divide is real so of course this is partly true. But it is also self-fulfilling as it removes the motivation to provide meaningful content and safe, useful spaces for those folks who are online.

So rather than working to include people in this world as it currently exists, we need to expand the digital world and our imaginations of it.

We've been on the radio across the country talking about the Allied Media Conference. Here are links to the mp3s:

• Me and Jeff Chang on Wakeup Call, with Deepa Fernandes: listen
• Me on Paul Riismandell's Mediageek show: listen
• Jen Angel on Cleveland Indymedia's Blackout News on WRUW: (still waiting for the link)
• and, if you missed it, hear me on Free Press's Media Minutes: listen (starts about two-thirds through)

Thanks for the shine, folks! Please let me know of any blogs or other outlets covering the AMC so I can add it to the AMC wiki.

I am speaking today at the Muniwireless Conference in Santa Clara, CA, on a panel on “How successful community projects can help to develop, implement, & expand municipal wireless networks.”

The other people on the panel are awesome and I’m honored to be sharing the stage with them: Becca Vargo Daggett from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Richard MacKinnon from Austin Wireless, and Matt Rantanen of the Tribal Digital Village Network; Jeff Perlstein from Media Alliance is the moderator.

The panel is part of a track on community issues and open source tools organized by Sascha Meinrath. As I wrote yesterday, we form a narrow sliver of community advocates at a conference with many hardware vendors, venture capitalists, industry consultants, and municipal officials.

I expect Richard and Matt to discuss their specific community projects and Becca to focus on the economic implications of municipal ownership. I want to talk about how we’ve gone from community to municipal to corporate control of the networks and what we are losing as a result.

In an age where companies like AT&T are attempting to use their ownership of a portion of the network essentially to close the entire internet, it seems to me that we need to look at wireless networks as a critical opportunity to regain some leverage. If we hand this opportunity over to corporations like Earthlink, we will be outsiders looking in, forever hoping to be included.

This comes at a moment when more and more of our public life is taking place online. This is a standard argument for closing the digital divide, but the implications are much broader than that when we consider the way poor people, people of color, and non-English speakers are excluded from the Internet in the United States.

To the extent we digitize the public sphere, we exacerbate the racial and economic divides already prevalent in our society. It’s the new Jim Crow.

My friend Antwuan Wallace recently observed this at the YearlyKos conference in Las Vegas, where Democratic Party heavyweights addressed the “netroots.” The netroots is whiter and more male than the offline “grassroots” it is supplanting or, at best, augmenting. The experience motivated Antwuan to start blogging. In his first post, he writes that “telecommunication policy is the new civil rights legislation.”

I would not argue that we should halt the process, even if we could. The internet still offers the promise of a broader, more participatory democracy. That’s what I mean by “digital expansion.” It’s the two steps forward we need to take now, as the prioritization of online civic engagement over offline takes us one step back.

This is why it is so important that we secure wireless networks as public spaces and it shows the importance of community wireless.

Community wireless – and not just civic projects, but networks with true community involvement and ownership – is the vehicle for bringing people online and into the digitized public sphere. In my view, this is how they can “develop, implement, & expand municipal wireless networks.”

I'm at the Muniwireless Conference in Santa Clara, CA, today. The conference is mostly for corporate vendors and consultants hoping to sell to municipalities. That means it's a good opportunity to peek behind the curtain at the processes that go into making these large scale networks that are reshaping our cities' communications landscapes. And in that sense, the conference accurately represents where community organizations are in the process (i.e., not behind the curtain).
We're going to change that. Sascha Meinrath and I, along with Dharma Dailey and the support of Becca Vargo Daggett, Richard MacKinnon, Ben Scott, Harold Feld, Esme Vos and many others, are launching a new organization, The Ethos Group.

Ethos is a wireless consulting firm emphasizing the social justice implications of wireless technology. We plan to work directly with community organizations to develop strategies to advocate for the local network that best serves their needs. Where possible, we will consult directly for municipalities to ensure that the community perspective is prioritized in the process rather than tacked on at the end.

Sascha, Dharma, and I have all been working on wireless issues within different organizations: I with Media Tank for the past year, Dharma and Sascha for much longer than that with Prometheus Radio Project and Free Press respectively. It's been hard to constantly argue for the importance of these issues, especially where it may seem outside of the core mission of the organization.

Our movement needs an organization that is solely focused on the world of wireless broadband. Our view is that any organization that cares about media and communication rights needs to factor in the impacts of the wireless future. Now they have a one-stop shop to guide them through that.

Jeff Gelles reported today that the provision in the Stevens telecom bill that would have closed the Comcast Loophole has been removed since the last hearing, when David L. Cohen complained about it.

If Comcast can get what it wants against the wishes of the people of Philadelphia at the city level and at the federal level, it raises serious questions about whether we should be supporting a state franchising bill.

That's something that Verizon is pushing and that community organizations and public access stations around the country have generally opposed. But Philadelphia, whose public access channels remain inactive and unfunded and whose City Council laughs at potential competitors like RCN cable or local-sports-carrying satellite, is in a special situation.

Of course, a state franchise for Verizon video service is no guarantee that they would roll out video in every neighborhood in Philadelphia, especially if they don't have access to local sports programming. That's why an effective non-discrimination or buildout clause is critical to any state franchise bill.
Read more of my articles on Comcast.

On July 5, I'll be taking part in a planning meeting for the Communication Rights and Media Justice Organizing Institute being organized by the Center for International Media Action. (CIMA is a great team of people that I've worked with a number of times over the past few years as a consultant and writer/researcher.) The Organizing Institute will be a regular intensive gathering to examine and build the media movement.

In preparation for the planning meeting, CIMA has issued a survey to gather information from the broad range of people working to transform our media landscape. If you work on or care about the issues you've been reading about on this blog, please take the time to share your views and experiences.

Here is the announcement CIMA has been circulating…

Read the rest of this entry »

The Recording Industry Association of America – the same people that brought you the harrassment suits for filesharing – is now training police officers to spot "bogus CDs."

A police officer in Virginia recently justified a search of a car because he saw in plain sight during a traffic stop what he believed to be "bogus" CDs in the vehicle. He called for backup from the Copyright Squad:

Officer Goins suspected the CDs were "pirated," because they were in a "poor quality made CD case with the labeling." He requested assistance from two other officers that had received training concerning CDs. Minutes later, Officers Barker and Perkins arrived. Officer Barker testified that he saw CDs on the front passenger seat and on the floorboard of the car. He testified that "based on [his] training with the recording industry the thin cases and the homemade labels in the cases led [him] to believe they were bogus CDs." He explained:

"They were thin case CD's and the labels on them were real blurry. You couldn't really make out the reading on them that well. You could just look at them and tell that they were bogus."

Concluding that the CDs were illegitimate, the officers seized the CDs they saw and searched the car for others.

The search turned up a brick of marijuana, but the appeals court judge threw out the search because the officers had no reason to suspect that the burned CDs were illegal copies. According to Virgina state law, they would have been illegal had they been intended for sale, for example. Read the appeals court judge's decision and narrative of the case.

Granted, the cops might have been looking for any justification to search the car. Nevertheless, it's pretty remarkable that not only is there a special RIAA-trained copyright squad on this Virginia town's police force, but that the squad is overzealously misinterpreting the law to bust anyone who might have made a mix or a personal copy of their own CDs.

Why am I surprised? The person leading the charge of RIAA's anti-piracy operation, including its relationship with law enforcement, is a former director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms: Bradley Buckles.

Last June in New York City, the NYPD raided Kim's Video, a long-time source for hard-to-find movies and music. RIAA representatives were at Kim's directing the police towards hip hop mix CDs that they claimed violated copyright laws. MPAA, the motion picture trade association, also had reps there. The police arrested five people.

The RIAA also has their hands in Congress. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property recently marked up the little-known Section 115 Reform Act (aka SIRA). The act helps pave the way for partnerships between music publishers and the online music services, in part by shutting out everyone else.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the potential act would require licenses for "incidental reproductions…including cached, network, and RAM buffer reproductions."

For anyone who understands how the internet works – the way files go from server to server to server before reaching their final destination – that restriction is just bananas. Also with your own home computer, you store files in a cache or buffer when making backup copies or listening to a stream.

You can assisting the EFF in fighting this bad law, called SIRA, by contacting Congress.

The RIAA was emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling last year that got less attention than the Brand X decision, but was just as bad for end users in the way it limited technological innovation. In MGM vs. Grokster, the Court determined that companies that offer filesharing software can be held liable in some cases when their members use the software to violate copyright laws. The RIAA followed up the decision with a burst of 700 new complaints against people they say are illegally sharing music and films.

While this case was specifically about peer-to-peer filesharing, the implications could go much further. The ruling could conceivably apply to any technology that is used for illegal purposes. It modified the standard that was applied to VCRs in the 1980s, that they were legal because they had "substantial non-infringing uses." Under the new standard, providers of technology can be held liable if they "induce" people to infringe on copyright. With such a vague measure of intent, all programmers and software developers will have to worry about the potential for large-scale civil suits.

I'm not sure what, if any, direct fallout there has been from the decision in the year since it came down. The point is simply that we are facing a situation where all three branches of government, from the cops to the courts, are working hand in hand with an industry trade group to impose corporate law.

Industry watchers, Philly sports fans, and those in attendance at last week's City Council hearing on the Area II franchise transfer have all by now spotted the meager argument the cable industry is offering in defense of the Comcast loophole.

Here it is paraphrased from National Cable & Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow in an article on the Stevens bill in the Senate that would create a national franchise:

He labeled a step backward the addition of sports program-access language that he says applies restrictions on cable that do not apply to satellite, singling out DirecTV's exclusive NFL Sunday Ticket access to football games.

Ruby Legs over at Phillyville already took Jeff Alexander to task for saying much the same thing to the Philadelphia Business Journal last week:

Alexander said satellite provider DirecTV has exclusive rights to programming that it does not share with cable companies, including the popular NFL Sunday Ticket package, which allows viewers to choose among several NFL games in one afternoon.

Seriously, folks, you're talking about apples and oranges – and we paid for your orchard.

Yes, both Philly SportsNet and NFL Sunday Ticket are "competitive advantages" – to use the phrase of the Comcast spokesperson at the City Council hearing – but our tax dollars paid for your competitive advantage.

Plus NFL Sunday Ticket does not preclude anyone in Philadelphia from seeing Eagles games, while free TV and satellite TV watchers in Philadelphia are shut out of many Phillies, Flyers, and Sixers games.

So Free The Flyers! Release the Sixers! Let our Phillies Go!

Like I said, Ruby Legs already summed this up in great detail. And nearly 200 people from the Philadelphia area have said as much to the FCC through the "Free the Flyers" comment engine. Our shared hope is that the FCC will close the Comcast Loophole as a condition on the takeover of bankrupt Adelphia Communications.

One possible scenario, at this point, would be for the FCC to deliberate long enough for the Adelphia creditors to get antsy so maybe the whole deal falls through. For details on this angle, you've got to read Harold Feld's blog, Tales of the Sausage Factory, especially "Is the Comcast/Time Warner/Adelphia Deal In Trouble?" (For background, see "Adelphia Transaction Advances" and his white paper, “Cable Market Power for Dummies.&rdquo

That would be good in the sense that it would keep the already-mammoth Comcast and Time Warner from growing more mammoth. But it wouldn't solve the Comcast Loophole problem.

That's why it's so interesting that the Stevens bill addresses the issue. It's a sign that pressure is coming from many sides (including from the phone companies who are looking to eliminate all of the cable companies' "competitive advantages"). And it suggests that there might be more than one way to skin this cat. The bad news, of course, is all of the bad things in the Stevens bill, like a national video franchise and a closed Internet.

So we keep fighting…

UPDATE: I just learned from Jeff Gelles's blog that David L. Cohen offered a further defense of the Comcast Loophole before the Senate: It's not a national problem because they're only screwing over one town: ours. Gelles calls it "Comcast's special gift to Philadelphia."

Yesterday’s City Council hearing showed itself to be merely an opportunity for our elected supplicants to heap praise on local corporations. (”It’s nice to be Comcast,” Michael Currie Schaffer writes in the Inquirer.) But our side got in a few good shots. Here’s my testimony.

Councilman Nutter asked some pointed questions, including about Comcast’s fulfillment of its minority- and women-owned business requirements. Considering how intently Council focused on that issue with Earthlink, it was revealing to see how little they pressured Comcast on it.

A highlight of the hearing came when Councilman Nutter was asking the Comcast spokespeople about the Comcast loophole. The Comcast guy referred to it as an “investment” and a “competitive advantage” to which Nutter responded, “It’s all about the money, isn’t it?” And after a pause added, “Say yes.”

The Daily News saw Monday’s vote as an indication that we are living in the “Comcast Era,” but hopefully suggested, “Maybe now we’ll finally get Public-Access TV.” “Reasonably stable rates, and alternative access to televised Sixers and Flyers games, would probably help customers more appreciate the Comcast Era,” the opinion piece concluded.

In any event, I don’t think anyone really expected the ordinance to be held up. What Comcast wants from City Council, Comcast gets. And no one on that committee or in the Mayor’s office is going to let Nutter take credit for anything as wonderful as public access or closing the Comcast loophole.

At least Comcast has to answer some questions, even if they’re from friendly sources. If you want to know why the Comcast comparison of Comcast SportsNet to DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket is a bunch of bullshit, check out Phillyville (though Ruby Legs and I have a different take on the state franchising bill).

Following all of our yapping, the committee passed ordinance 060440 transferring the Area II franchise from Time Warner to Comcast by a unanimous voice vote. It will be read into the record at the City Council meeting on Thursday and then, one assumes, passed at the following meeting next Thursday, the 15th.