I’m seeing some real panicked shouting online about CISPA, a new bill that some are calling “the new SOPA.” It’s absurd. The bill may not be perfect. It could have flaws. But the argument being hammered against CISPA again and again is that it may be used against copyright infringers who abuse networks. So? The only reason to oppose that is if you wish to destroy copyright property rights entirely, as the radicals do.

I warned about this way back during the SOPA debate. I predicted that the left side of the anti-SOPA coalition would try to hijack the movement into a general one against copyright, as the anarchists over there tend to do, and the shrieking over CISPA is proving me right. CISPA is not a bundle of mandates. It is an avenue to information sharing. Note that everything in CISPA is “totally voluntary,” per The Hill.

If someone and disprove that, and point to one or more mandates in CISPA, I’d like to know. Until then, the burden of proof is on the radicals to prove they’re not really out to protect Anontards and copyright infringers.

For now, it’s looking like CISPA is a solid response to The plans by the President and Democrats to expand government online, by regulating the Internet. Double regulating in fact, as every ‘critical’ industry is already regulated. So this whole “critical infrastructure” thing is more pretext than anything

Speaking of copyright, Adam Theirer suggests a parallel between copyright over-regulation and privacy over-regulation. I can see what he’s getting at, but there is one key difference between the two: copyright is a Constitutionally-enshrined principle. The nebulous concept of privacy, which in practice often amounts to buyer’s remorse of people who give away their information in exchange for free services, but then regret it, is not.

That said, when Obama talks about a huge new Privacy regulatory scheme, I worry. FCC is already grabbing power online through Net Neutrality. The administration and Lieberman-Collins are trying to bring DHS online. Now Obama wants FTC online, too?

Remember that “retransmission consent” scuffle between Jim DeMint and the ACU? DeMint is supporting a bill that would deregulate the process by which cable companies negotiate to retransmit over the air broadcasts. Here’s a defense of ACU’s position. I would suggest that we remember the fundamental reason for retransmission consent rules: a desire to have government protect over the air broadcasters from being stepped around by cable companies. All local broadcasters have to do in order to keep their feeds from being swiped entirely, is to include copyrighted content that would be illegal to be rebroadcast.

So that’s not the fear. The fear is that cable companies will negotiate directly copyright holders to rebroadcast the specific works, without keeping the Local News at 11, shutting out the local broadcaster entirely. The fear is an open market and free wheeling competition. So I support the DeMint plan. Defang the FCC.

So let’s have some more FCC: Bloomberg apparently wants Cable Neturality against Comcast, demanding government regulation of channel lineups. Give me a break. I don’t want Nanny FCC dictating channel numbers.

FCC seems to be doing the job of GSA by trying to facilitate potential government contractors. Now why would they do that? Oh right, the Obama GSA is corrupt.

Attention Brian Bilbray, Joe Pitts, and Lindsey Graham: You are allying with John Kerry. Pull up now before it’s too late. Defense came out against the LightSquared plan. FCC ruled against it. The combination of the two seems pretty conclusive, particularly when FCC is obstructing Chuck Grassley on the matter of favoritism in favor of LightSquared.

Trademark Wars: Rosetta Stone goes after Google. I don’t know, if your name is Rosetta Stone, that’s a pretty generic name for translations. There may or not be a legitimate case for calling AdWords shenanigans trademark dilution, but a generic name like Rosetta Stone, based on an actual historical object, seems like a bad case for me.

Jim DeMint sounds skeptical on the matter of a sales tax interstate compact. DeMint suggests that the compact is a way for high tax states to avoid having to compete for jobs, and that the net effect is a tax hike. I think that’s a reasonable position, but I disagree. I think if we reform sales tax in this way, and add careful safeguards to avoid a true national sales tax, this could broaden tax bases and allow states to have simpler tax regimes. Tax simplification has benefits as well, as Ronald Reagan saw in 1986.

It’s on: The Holder DoJ is suing Apple for working with book publishers to try to rig the online book market against Amazon and book purchasers, as buyer and seller tried to rig the market for the agency pricing model to prop prices up higher.

There may be facts that haven’t come out, and the law against this may or may not be good, but as it stands, they sound pretty guilty to me. It doesn’t help that the key information about this seems to have come out in a post-mortem Steve Jobs biography.

Monday night, as promised, we still have some catch up work to do. So let’s start with those Amazon Taxes, those Internet sales taxes of dubious Constitutionality. Colorado’s got tossed in federal court and Illinois’s didn’t raise any money. Obeying the Constitution counts, folks. Pass a true interstate compact through the Congress first.

Also as promised, there’s the matter of the Next Generation Television Marketplace Act. This is the one where ACU has come out against Jim DeMint, and that caught my attention. I have to side with the bill DeMint is sponsoring. I think ACU simply misunderstood what’s at stake here and had good intentions, but the excessive complexity of the regulations defeated them here.

The bill does not let cable providers become free riders, retransmitting others’ streams for free. It just stops the law from trying to dictate the parameters of the negotiations on retransmissions. I see no harm in that, and potentially much good.

Here we go again. Apparently we’re supposed to be unhappy with the CISPA information sharing bill by Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger because it potentially could be used against copyright infringement. And SOPA is invoked against that. SOPA wasn’t defeated because everyone hates copyright. It was a power grab. Take your anti-copyright anarchy battles home, Reddit kiddies. You and your Anontard buddies.

More cybersecurity still: We cannot and must not have DHS start regulating the Internet. Government can’t even secure itself yet and so has no standing to dictate to others. Information sharing in the private sector, without government gatekeepers, is far more useful for protecting our country’s Internet resources. Further, with the irrationality and secrecy of TSA and its regulations, how can we trust them at all?

Going back to SOPA, Comcast was apparently for it, which doesn’t surprise me. Comcast is an ISP particular vulnerable to Bittorrent users flooding the network with high volume copyright infringement dragging down service for everyone.

Is a problem with tech patents, including software patents, that the system isn’t scaling well? Size, not just speed?

Apparently all the fuss over FCC reform, using white spaces as an excuse to oppose all FCC reform out of the Congress, was resolved with white space use marching on. This could be interesting. We’ll have to watch and see how it works, or whether we just get a tragedy of the commons.

An interesting development in the Do Not Track saga: Radicals and businesses are interpreting them differently, but frankly, the interpretation of the radicals is stupid. There already is a way to not be tracked at all, and not just exclude third parties: Disable cookies, dummies. The radical agenda apparently to be promoted by the FTC is out of touch with the actual technologies involved.

Apparently the FTC folks don’t understand that if you don’t want tracked by, say, Amazon’s recommendations, then you simply shouldn’t log into Amazon all the time.

LightSquared may be on the verge of bankruptcy, but Chuck Grassley is still fighting tenaciously for FCC transparency with respect to LightSquared, and is going to maintain his holds on the new FCC appointees. Go Chuck Go!

Here’s a potentially huge deal in the tech/copyright nexus that I hadn’t heard about at all Google is under concerted attack by a number of copyright holders in a move that potentially risks undermining the whole DMCA safe harbor system. Google has taken many steps to curb copyright infringement on YouTube, but they’re being dogpiled upon anyway by firms going after those deep pockets. If being a rich and popular website that gets taken advantage of by copyright infringers is enough to knock down the Safe Harbor, then it seems to me that the entire Safe Harbor system of the DMCA is at risk. That’s not good, as that was a careful balancing of interests in that bill. We cannot let the scales get tilted one way.

If the Youtube case goes too far, new legislation may be needed, and that’s going to be a big old mess. Especially when the MPAA and RIAA interests will inevitably be comingled with legitimate international concerns of Chinese and other foreign firms ignoring US copyrights

The company has formed a committee named FLIXPAC, according to Politico. Put simply, a PAC is an organization that lobbies for a certain candidate or piece of legislation. Via FLIXPAC, Netflix can make contributions to candidates in the 2012 presidential and congressional races — up to $5,000 each.

According to congressional records, Netflix spent a meager $20,000 on lobbying the Federal government in 2009 — but that figure exploded to $130,000 and $500,000 in 2010 and 2011 respectively as the SOPA fight took off. Throughout 2011, Netflix reported using the services of approximately 20 lobbyists.

Officially, Netflix defined itself as neutral in the SOPA debates. It never appeared on the list of companies backing the legislation. However, the US Chamber of Commerce reported receiving a letter from CEO Reed Hastings which was “supportive” of SOPA’s goals.

There are a host of cybersecurity and intellectual property bills currently making their way through congress, including the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

Netflix could be in favor of an intellectual property bill which protects the content they license and prevents the company from being held liable for infringement.

The company could not immediately be reached for comment. How do you think Netflix will use its PAC powers? Let us know in the comments.

Update: A Netflix spokesperson denied the PAC would be used to support SOPA, and said the following in an email:

“PACs are commonplace for companies that lead a big, growing market and Netflix is no exception. Our PAC is a way for our employees to support candidates that understand our business and technology. It was not set up for the purpose of supporting SOPA or PIPA. Instead, Netflix has engaged on other issues including network neutrality, bandwidth caps, usage based billing and reforming the Video Privacy Protection Act.”

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The House is doing anything but shirking its responsibility to apply oversight to the Obama administration. The FCC in particular is getting the attention it needs. “Regulatory hubris” in picking winners and losers is part of the problem, says Commissioner Robert McDowell. He should know, as he’s on the inside.

Darrell Issa and Chuck Grassley disagree on the FCC’s transparency though. Issa gives them a good grade, oddly enough, even as they continue to stonewall Grassley.

And so it’s good that Jo Ann Emerson questions the FCC’s hypocritical and questionable demand for senseless record keeping in others.

Though it’d be nice if somebody asked “Senator” Wendy’s questions about Free Press, in relation to the FCC.

Lamar Smith, House Judiciary Chairman and sponsor of SOPA, has a primary challenger: Richard Morgan. Morgan’s issues page is still in progress, but so far he sounds like a good candidate to consider supporting.

The rhetoric is getting insane in the cybersecurity bill debate. No, really. Hint: passing a bill that increases information sharing and (in the case of Lieberman/Collins) creates an effective Internet Kill Switch by giving the President dictatorial powers over the Internet, neither of those things will actually protect us from attack in the short run. To pretend there’s a crisis is dangerously dishonest.

Wireless data competition marches on, despite the fringe’s claims, with the begin of NetZero’s service. They claim it’s 4G, but I don’t know if it’s LTE, WiMax, or a pseudo-4G like HSPA+.

PATENT WARS: Motorola fends off Apple at the ITC, while Samsung and RIM are now being sued over emoticons, of all things.

The House is doing anything but shirking its responsibility to apply oversight to the Obama administration. The FCC in particular is getting the attention it needs. “Regulatory hubris” in picking winners and losers is part of the problem, says Commissioner Robert McDowell. He should know, as he’s on the inside.

Darrell Issa and Chuck Grassley disagree on the FCC’s transparency though. Issa gives them a good grade, oddly enough, even as they continue to stonewall Grassley.

And so it’s good that Jo Ann Emerson questions the FCC’s hypocritical and questionable demand for senseless record keeping in others.

Though it’d be nice if somebody asked “Senator” Wendy’s questions about Free Press, in relation to the FCC.

Lamar Smith, House Judiciary Chairman and sponsor of SOPA, has a primary challenger: Richard Morgan. Morgan’s issues page is still in progress, but so far he sounds like a good candidate to consider supporting.

The rhetoric is getting insane in the cybersecurity bill debate. No, really. Hint: passing a bill that increases information sharing and (in the case of Lieberman/Collins) creates an effective Internet Kill Switch by giving the President dictatorial powers over the Internet, neither of those things will actually protect us from attack in the short run. To pretend there’s a crisis is dangerously dishonest.

Wireless data competition marches on, despite the fringe’s claims, with the begin of NetZero’s service. They claim it’s 4G, but I don’t know if it’s LTE, WiMax, or a pseudo-4G like HSPA+.

PATENT WARS: Motorola fends off Apple at the ITC, while Samsung and RIM are now being sued over emoticons, of all things.

Great news! Tech at Night’s favorite Representative Marsha Blackburn, along with TaN’s own home representative Mary Bono Mack are bringing a version of Secure IT to the House. The bill has been introduced in the Senate as an alternative to the power grab known as Lieberman-Collins. The great thing about the bill? It toughens criminal penalties for online lawbreaking even as it makes it easier for the private sector to share information about attacks.

The bad guys share information, and they think they won’t go to jail. If we let the good guys share information without getting sued for it, and if we throw the bad guys in jail, we win. And you can tell that the bad guys really hate it when we send them to jail; just witness how Anonymous has been hitting law enforcement more and more in the last year or so, most recently targeting Interpol’s website, and previously publishing names and addresses of police officers in the US. These online terrorists don’t like that they can be held accountable for their actions. It’s their weakness, the fact that they are named individuals who are finite in numbers, and we need to exploit it.

I know we had to push hard against some good members of Congress in order to send a message on SOPA, but it had to be done. The RIAA is not giving up on SOPA, so it was important that we let good members of Congress know what the problem was. And we did, so now it’s time to move on to passing good bills like SECURE IT.

Yes, the FCC does need reform. Republicans want a transparent and accountable FCC, so naturally Obama Democrats are opposed. The Obama FCC and allies is out of control: shifting opinions of market forces as is convenient to justify power grabs, taking power in new issues needlessly, buddying up with George Soros-funded radicals at Free Press, and of course blocking spectrum transactions needed to service the growing market for wireless Internet. The FCC is out of control. Obama regulators know no bounds.

Someone came up with a clever idea recently: lease television antennas to people so they can watch free broadcast television over those channels. The clever part? Aereo would let you watch over the Internet what your antenna picks up. Naturally, this threatens some cable television revenues, if people actually have free stuff, so the broadcasters are suing. I hope they lose. These are purely free, over the air broadcasts.

PATENT WARS: Apple and Samsung lose some claims against each other in Germany, essentially drawing without injury. Google/Motorola Mobility however is at risk of some pretty bad worst-case scenarios over its loss to Apple in Germany.

Phone app development is creating jobs and wealth! Quick, to the Schumer-mobile! That job creation must be stopped, post haste!

Great news! Tech at Night’s favorite Representative Marsha Blackburn, along with TaN’s own home representative Mary Bono Mack are bringing a version of Secure IT to the House. The bill has been introduced in the Senate as an alternative to the power grab known as Lieberman-Collins. The great thing about the bill? It toughens criminal penalties for online lawbreaking even as it makes it easier for the private sector to share information about attacks.

The bad guys share information, and they think they won’t go to jail. If we let the good guys share information without getting sued for it, and if we throw the bad guys in jail, we win. And you can tell that the bad guys really hate it when we send them to jail; just witness how Anonymous has been hitting law enforcement more and more in the last year or so, most recently targeting Interpol’s website, and previously publishing names and addresses of police officers in the US. These online terrorists don’t like that they can be held accountable for their actions. It’s their weakness, the fact that they are named individuals who are finite in numbers, and we need to exploit it.

I know we had to push hard against some good members of Congress in order to send a message on SOPA, but it had to be done. The RIAA is not giving up on SOPA, so it was important that we let good members of Congress know what the problem was. And we did, so now it’s time to move on to passing good bills like SECURE IT.

Yes, the FCC does need reform. Republicans want a transparent and accountable FCC, so naturally Obama Democrats are opposed. The Obama FCC and allies is out of control: shifting opinions of market forces as is convenient to justify power grabs, taking power in new issues needlessly, buddying up with George Soros-funded radicals at Free Press, and of course blocking spectrum transactions needed to service the growing market for wireless Internet. The FCC is out of control. Obama regulators know no bounds.

Someone came up with a clever idea recently: lease television antennas to people so they can watch free broadcast television over those channels. The clever part? Aereo would let you watch over the Internet what your antenna picks up. Naturally, this threatens some cable television revenues, if people actually have free stuff, so the broadcasters are suing. I hope they lose. These are purely free, over the air broadcasts.

PATENT WARS: Apple and Samsung lose some claims against each other in Germany, essentially drawing without injury. Google/Motorola Mobility however is at risk of some pretty bad worst-case scenarios over its loss to Apple in Germany.

Phone app development is creating jobs and wealth! Quick, to the Schumer-mobile! That job creation must be stopped, post haste!

Yes, we beat SOPA, but the problem of foreign infringers is still around. And we’re not just talking about online copyright infringement, either. Copies of clothing, purses, gadgets, you name it: foreign free riders are a problem. It’s an important tradeoff to find, so an open process for the Darrell Issa OPEN Act is a good one. A slow, consensus-based approach is also smart, so I’m glad consensus is what Eric Cantor and John Boehner are demanding from a bill on this topic.

The alternative is picking winners and losers. That’s not good for government to do, even if it’s been a problem for a long time, to the annoyance of Frédéric Bastiat.

Speaking of picking winners and losers, FCC Spectrum management is falling apart. The more the FCC controls who’s bidding, and how the winners of the auctions will use that spectrum, the less efficiently we allocate and use that critical, limited resource.

So naturally what are we looking at? Hassling Verizon for doing what it has to instead of fixing the FCC. Seriously: People who say that any Republican would be anywhere near the problem Obama is, simply need to look more closely at just how awful the Obama regulators are. They are completely out of control. We need to defeat Barack Obama and restore some sanity at FCC, FTC, EPA, and the rest.

Google and Facebook will obey Indian censorship laws. Singling out Twitter for abuse over foreign censorship laws never made much sense, folks.

Programming note: due to CPAC and my traveling cross country to it, this will be the only Tech at Night post this week.

Yes, we beat SOPA, but the problem of foreign infringers is still around. And we’re not just talking about online copyright infringement, either. Copies of clothing, purses, gadgets, you name it: foreign free riders are a problem. It’s an important tradeoff to find, so an open process for the Darrell Issa OPEN Act is a good one. A slow, consensus-based approach is also smart, so I’m glad consensus is what Eric Cantor and John Boehner are demanding from a bill on this topic.

The alternative is picking winners and losers. That’s not good for government to do, even if it’s been a problem for a long time, to the annoyance of Frédéric Bastiat.

Speaking of picking winners and losers, FCC Spectrum management is falling apart. The more the FCC controls who’s bidding, and how the winners of the auctions will use that spectrum, the less efficiently we allocate and use that critical, limited resource.

So naturally what are we looking at? Hassling Verizon for doing what it has to instead of fixing the FCC. Seriously: People who say that any Republican would be anywhere near the problem Obama is, simply need to look more closely at just how awful the Obama regulators are. They are completely out of control. We need to defeat Barack Obama and restore some sanity at FCC, FTC, EPA, and the rest.

Google and Facebook will obey Indian censorship laws. Singling out Twitter for abuse over foreign censorship laws never made much sense, folks.

Programming note: due to CPAC and my traveling cross country to it, this will be the only Tech at Night post this week.

Sometimes, the anarchists lose. Even in leftist Sweden, The Pirate Bay’s founders lost their last appeal. It’s guys like these, who deliberately put up a system for infringing on US copyrights while playing word games to justify it, that motivated SOPA and that drive the desire for a treaty like ACTA.

Google considers its privacy changes a public policy issue as the firm is getting plenty of criticism. This suggests to me they believe the critics won’t actually stop using Google services like Gmail, but will rather try for government regulation.

Considering Google is implementing a censorship plan much like that Twitter recently announced, and yet you don’t really see the same angry protestors saying they’ll quit using Google services in protest, that did a “Twitter blackout,” I think Google’s right that nobody will quit them over any of this. Hey, people: If you don’t like Google, use somebody else. It’s not that hard.

A former Clinton and Obama administration official is angry that the House Republicans have the nerve to demand the FCC obey the Congress. AT&T seems to think the FCC needs put in its place, though. I still support efforts to put limits on the FCC’s ability to dictate arbitrary spectrum rules.

The FCC is feeling the heat. As Chuck Grassley demands transparency on LightSquared, the brand new Chief of Staff lashed out at the Senator, and had to apologize. Watch the name Zachary Katz. He may embarrass himself and his bosses again in the future, and let slip their controlling agenda in his rage.

Grassley’s now gotten pushback from the FCC and from LightSquared. What do they have to hide? Why not just go transparent on this, instead of criticizing the man simply asking for openness in government? It couldn’t be because LightSquared is now under pressure from Sprint to deliver the goods, eh?

After all, it was when FCC critics exposed abuse of the “Lifeline” program that the need for reform of the wireless phone subsidy became apparent.

Don’t you just love it when firms ask for favors from the FCC, openly asking for legal action that benefits them against others? When it’s out in the open, we see the corruption inherent the regulatory system. Help, help, America is being oppressed.

Oh boy, Herb Kohl wants to block more spectrum deals. This is out of control. It’s like DC Democrats want to keep high-speed wireless Internet prices sky high or something.

When Congress wants to grab power for government, one of the easiest ways to disarm opposition is to say it’s being done to fight child pornography. People’s brains shut down and they rush to join in that fight. So I’m not sure we’re fully thinking through the risks of this data retention bill. Once we create this database, we’re not only creating a huge new legal mandate on a fast-growing, innovative industry, but we’re creating risks that the data could get out, or be used for other purposes. Do you really want Eric Holder to have access to all you do online? Really? I think I oppose this bill, despite the misleading name it has: the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act. A more accurate name would be: Keeping Records Of All You Do Online act, because the real goal is data retention for government to check up on you.

Databases always find new uses. When they created the ‘deadbeat dad’ database, they couldn’t help from using it to track other things. Mark my words: If these database are protected, they will be used to track more than child pornographers. This I promise you. The warrants will be issued. The laws will be passed. This data will get out.

It’s not really a “snooping” bill. It’s a data retention bill. But just as we don’t like it when Google creates a massive database of all we do, so should we fear government demanding that such databases be made. It simply creates the risk of future snooping, and that’s bad enough.

Also, we’ve really got to primary Lamar Smith. He’s producing one stinker of a bill after another. He clearly has no concept of limited government in his mind.

Meanwhile, as we keep trying to regulate Americans, Wikileaks operates abroad, and none of the bills Lamar Smith is putting up would do one thing about it. Nor would the latest power grab of a “cybersecurity” bill by Jay Rockefeller and Susan Collins.

You don’t create security by regulating the victims; that just hinders innovation and distracts from retaliation and prosecution. You don’t stop criminals by creating massive schemes to track everyone online; that just hurts the innocent.

Fascinating issue to consider: How do we apply the concept of the search warrant to encrypted data? How do you compel the accused to admit to the knowledge of a cryptographic key, which if the encrypted data is illegal, amounts to a self-incriminating statement? As the world goes digital, the lines between information and ‘stuff’ get more and more blurry.

Again, what good is ACTA if China doesn’t join it and trashes Apple trademarks?