The other big news after SOPA crashed and burned last week following online protests, was the shutdown of the website Megaupload for online infringement. The U.S. Department of Justice announced in a statement that a grand jury had indicted seven individuals and two corporations with running an “international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyright works.” Notably, law enforcement officials arrested top executives of...

Compartmentalization is one of the things people do best. Life is complicated, so it’s a lot easier to deal with its troubles and travails in little pieces. As Scarlett O’Hara said when she lost Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind: “I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.” Compartmentalization plays a large role in both engineering and Internet policy. Engineers and policy makers can influence the nature of the Internet in countless ways by developing...

Paul Vixie and some of his fellow DNS experts have published a blog post in The Hill's "Congress Blog" denouncing the DNS blacklisting feature of the rogue site bills currently working their way through Congress, PROTECT-IP and SOPA. In their view, DNS blacklisting is un-American: [T]he debate over what we as a society ought to do about online piracy and infringement has gone into the weeds – so much so that bills now pending before both houses of the US Congress (S. 936, PIPA; and H.R...

We live in a global economy and society built on our investments in computer and network technology. Our connectedness—our ability to work and communicate easily with those outside of our borders–is the foundation of our digital economy. Policymakers are increasingly recognizing that the free flow of information online is important both for promoting democratic values (see Secretary Clinton’s remarks last year on Internet Freedom) and for promoting commerce (see the Department of Commerce’s Internet...

Continuing comments on the questions posed by the Commerce Department's Competitiveness study RFI (see here, here, here and here), we turn to a cluster of topics and questions concerning knowledge creation and dissemination. The questions posed in topic #1 (government R&D) and #5 (incentives to innovate) can be taken together.  Topic #1 - Government research and development - asks the following questions: How can the economic impacts of basic research funding (e.g., NSF, NIH) be better measured...

No, this is not another blog post about the Oscars.  In case you missed it, this week the USTR released its “Out-Of Cycle Review of Notorious Markets.” This used to be published as part of the Special 301 Report which looks at IP violations by U.S. trading partners, but is now published separately. Basically, this is a sampling of some of the “Worst of the Worst” places for copyright infringement and counterfeiting. USTR describes the list as follows: “The Notorious Markets List identifies selected...

The Internet generates a lot of traffic. Cisco reports that this year global IP traffic on the Internet is expected to exceed 21,000 petabytes per month (a petabyte is about 1 million gigabytes) and the total volume is expected to increase by almost one-third every year. At the per-connection level, Cisco found that the average broadband connection generates almost 15 GB of Internet traffic per month. So what is all this traffic? And how much of this traffic is being used for legitimate content...

Many of the facts relating to the globalization of intellectual property (IP) theft over the last decade are not debatable.  For example, IP theft has decreased the market share of U.S. firms and destroyed or prevented the creation of millions of U.S. jobs.  While currently 18 million Americas are employed in IP-intensive industries, the U.S. economy loses over $20 billion annually to IP theft and in 2007 IP theft reduced global trade by 5 to 7 percent. However once one gets beyond a simple fact...

Last fall I wrote an article about Sen. Leahy’s proposed legislation—the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA)—that summarized the criticism of the bill and provided a rebuttal to those arguments. Since last year the issue of online piracy has not abated and the opposition to the legislation remains as heated as ever. Since COICA draws heavily on ideas proposed by ITIF in the report “Steal These Policies: Strategies for Reducing Digital Piracy,” I think it is appropriate to...

As the ninth round of negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) comes to a conclusion and the White House has made clear its support for ACTA as part of its Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement, opponents of the initiative have become increasingly vocal. The critics range from those who fundamentally reject the idea of intellectual property rights, to those who worry about empowering private sector actors to enforce digital IP rights, to those who feel...