Policy Advocacy

On Thursday, May 15, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched a 4 month rulemaking asking for "public comment on how best to protect and promote an open Internet." For months, regulators, consumer advocates, and service providers have wrestled over what the next steps should be after a court decision that threw out the FCC's previous open internet rules, adopted in 2010.

Now its your turn to share your ideas with the FCC. How we can promote and protect the Internet as a vital resource for years to come?

In November of 2013, New Media Rights responded to the Department of Commerce’s inquiry regarding the formation of a multistakeholder process to create a set of best practices for the DMCA notice and takedown process. That multistakeholder process has begun and New Media Rights wants to ensure that the voices of independent creators, small user generated content sites, internet users and remixers are represented.

As a first step, New Media Rights joined with a coalition of public interest groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Center for Democracy and Technology, Public Knowledge and The American Library Association, to submit a set of principles for improving the efficiency of the notice and takedown system. These principals will not only make the process more efficient for all stakeholders but also make sure that creativity and free speech are not unnecessarily chilled. 

In January 2013, we brought you the story of Fortress of Attitude who had their song “PS Gay Car” removed after it was misflagged for violating “TOU #4 Section H”, that is using Bots or other automated means to inflate a YouTube video’s view count. The good news is that video and its view have been fully restored only four months after the last appeal to YouTube! Granted we’re not sure which of our many appeals resulted in the video being restored since Fortress of Attitude never received any notice from YouTube that the video had been restored.

The bad news is that this is the only successful appeal we’ve seen in over a year of covering this issue. And even worse, despite the February 14th blog post from YouTube that seemed to indicate YouTube would start adjusting view counts of videos accused of bots inflation instead of removing videos; we’ve seen a recent influx of unsuccessfully appealed wrongful bots takedowns.

As much as we want to celebrate Fortress of Attitude’s victory, the reality is the bots problem on YouTube is still very real.

On Friday, March 28, the FCC’s Consumer Advisory Committee approved an important recommendation to modernize and improve the way we bring high-speed broadband to classrooms and libraries around the county.  New Media Rights Executive Director Art Neill, and Legal Interns Marko Radisavljevic and Kyle Welch were directly involved in the research, drafting, and proposal of this recommendation.

New Media Rights’ Executive Director Art Neill is a member of the CAC, and co-chair of the Broadband Working Group. 

New Media Rights conducted an extensive review of the FCC’s E-rate program, including analyzing a vast amount of input on the program from a variety of stakeholders. Based on this research, New Media Rights’ staff and interns helped lead the efforts to draft a recommendation encouraging the FCC to modernize and improve the 18 year old E-rate program for the 21st century.  The recommendations include both general priorities as well as specific process priorities that will improve the E-rate program. 

Photo Some rights reserved by alexdecarvalho

Thanks to your votes, New Media Rights is heading to SXSW interactive in Austin, Texas. On Tuesday March 11^th at 12:30PM in the Driskill Hotel Ballroom we’ll be presenting our panel “Stand Up To Content Bullies, Know Your Copy Rights”.

At New Media Rights we know copyright laws are complicated, and they're often the reason why your videos, mobile apps, and other content may get taken down. "Fair use" is complicated, but it's often the reason you can get your content back up. Our panel will teach real-world best practices to use the law, YouTube's rules, and practical steps to fight back against content bullies.

Not only will we provide SXSW audiences with great best practices developed from our many years helping video creators but pop culture hacker Jonathan McIntosh will join us as our special guest creator.  Johnathan is a pop-culture hacker and remix artist that we helped get his video Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed put back up on YouTube after it was taken down by content bullies. McIntosh’s pro-feminist video is a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21st century. Over the past three years, this video has been used in law school programs, media studies courses and gender studies curricula across the world.  Who better to talk about standing up to content bullies than a highly skilled content creator who has stood up to content bullies and actually won!

If you’re at SXSW please come by to hear what should be an amazing panel (if you’re not at SXSW you can follow our session on twitter using #nmr).