Conyers has been sparring against Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford professor with a lot of digital clout, on the Huffington Post about the measure. He argues the bill, as the title of it implies, protects copyrights and peer reviews while repealing a provision slipped into another bill in the middle of the night that wouldn’t receive proper debate.

That provision, backed by Lessig, 33 Nobel prize winners, and the National Institutes of Health, would ensure the public has open access to all taxpayer funded research. While Conyers is crying foul on procedural grounds and arguing that late-night addition can’t be supported just because one happens to like the intent, Lessig and company are noting that the cosponsors of the bill all have received twice as much money in campaign contributions from the paper publishing industry than others.

At the same time, Lessig is promoting his donor strike, a movement to get donors to withhold contributions until Congress reforms the campaign finance system.

Conyers’ opponents on this issue argue that disallowing public posting results in taxpayers paying for research twice, and that opening up that research will exponentially increase the rate of scientific growth while helping the medical industry access the latest research on treating illnesses.

Conyers has argued that publishers rely on subscriptions to fund the peer review process that creates better, more credible collections of research. Scientific journals typically reward good science with publishing (e.g., the researchers typically are paid with a publishing credit, not money).

Conyers has come out swinging on this from a defensive viewpoint, but his argument isn’t holding water. Besides that the public shouldn’t have to pay for something twice, nothing bars scientists from waiting a year to publish research publicly. Further, the argument that publishers would no longer have incentive to peer review and publish research collections is specious at best. The peer review is what creates the value of the research, not the copyright, and presumably nothing would prevent publishers from selling their own peer-reviewed packages, which would create value for the science consumer in that he wouldn’t have to sift through the masses of poor research out there.

Neither side wants to budge for fear of losing, or for fear of the embarrassment of choosing the wrong team.

Net Neutrality champ Lawrence Lessig spoke at the FCC hearing at Stanford last week and clarified an issue many may have not known was an issue. Lessig testified that ISPs having different pricing plans for various levels of access, e.g., charging differently for 5 Mbps and 10 Mbps, wasn’t a Net Neutrality concern.

That’s an important clarification, and one that many may not have thought to make. ISPs have always charged for various levels of service, and have a right to do so. We might (and should) criticize them for wasting a $200 billion Congressional gift on long distance instead of broadband upgrades, for putting the country on the gradual-upgrade-maximized-profit road, or for waltzing in the same market manipulation dance big oil, pharma, and insurance companies like to engage in. But regulating at the access point does seem overly restrictive. You wouldn’t make a retailer charge the same for rayon as they would for cashmere, right?

What spooked people in the beginning was not pricing plans for various speed levels at the access point, but BellSouth and AT&T’s stated intention of double-dipping inside the pipes. Though companies and organizations already pay for the bandwidth they use, these now re-merged giants want the right to, as they put it, accept payment from Yahoo to have its homepage load faster than Google’s on subscriber computers.

Thus, the alarms went off everywhere. If you’re a startup or a nonprofit and can’t pony up, good luck getting your foot in the Internet’s door. As reported here in the past, you have four seconds to get your page loaded before visitors start to bail. ISPs want to use the free market argument, but there is no free market when consumers have a choice of one, maybe two providers. Consumers who don’t like AT&T’s interference with non-preferred companies, websites, or message-creators could sometimes, if available in their area, switch to Comcast, where last-century networks are clogged to the point they have to block peer-to-peer and degrade high definition channels just to make room, or else follow Time Warner’s lead by going 90′s retro and charging per minute again.

Verizon assistant vice president Link Hoewing weighed in again on the debate yesterday, giving some background on historical network troubles and how the market has corrected them on its own:

"I know some believe that things are different today but I think a lot of this is due to the demonizing that has crept in on both sides of the debate.  I believe that most of the players still have strong incentives to work together while they also in some arenas compete.  Government, industry and academics – as well as individuals – all worked together over the last two decades to make things work and to help the Internet evolve. Government was involved too but not in a formal, highly regulatory way. 
 
"I feel that this flexible, cooperative, competitive, adaptive model will get lost if government plays more and more of a regulatory role."

You’d be right to note that Hoewing as a stake in the debate by being a Verizon executive, but so does everybody else, wherever they’re coming from. The truth is, though, that Hoewing’s argument made sense ten years ago, when conservative free market arguments made more sense in general, before the greed of multinational corporations became more apparent, before it seemed they had better access to the government’s ear than the people had, before it became obvious there is no free market anymore, before the information age really began to sink in at a public-level, before the people had stopped trusting the lot of them.

Trust, then, not demonizing, is more at the heart of this issue. It is different these days. The people would be glad to ascribe to a free market dogma, if only the market were free, if only the companies still pounding the free market drum could be trusted with the free market. But these same companies have done little to earn that trust, and have in fact done just the opposite. As big oil gouges us and the government rewards them, as insurance companies look for every way to keep from holding up their end of the bargain, as mortgage companies are bailed out while the people’s troubles are ignored, as AT&T states its intention to squeeze Internet companies while earning its get-out-jail-free card from Capitol Hill via domestic spying (prevention from packet manipulation could prevent them also from snooping on behalf of the government and the MPAA), as Verizon blocks text messages and hands our paid-for-by-the-minute mobile numbers over to telemarketers, as Comcast interferes with peer-to-peer, as they take tax breaks and never give back to the people, as the world blazes past us in broadband speeds, what is it exactly that they have done to convince the people they should be trusted with one of the most important and equalizing developments in the history of mankind?

What our mothers taught us when we were teenagers is that trust is a very fragile thing. You earn trust the first time easily, but if you break that trust, it is much harder (nearly impossible) to earn it back. When they do something to earn our trust, we might give it back to them, but they’ll have to do a better job of convincing us.

_{*Yes, all you annoying realists, money often proves more powerful.} 
 

Last week, Stanford Law’s Lawrence Lessig petitioned both the DNC and RNC to arrange with the TV networks for open licensing of debate footage. The purpose of public domain licensing, or at least, Creative Commons licensing was so online participants could post, share, or even remix footage.

It’s all about furthering the democratic process, you see.

It didn’t take Obama long to join Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Arianna Huffington, and even Michelle Malkin in that cause. The Illinois Senator pounded out a letter to Dean, asking for his support of not only open licensing, but also of "citizen generated content."

"We, as a Party, should do everything that we can to encourage this participation," he writes. "Not only will it keep us focused on the issues that matter most to America, it will also encourage participation by a wide range of our youth who have traditionally simply tuned out from politics."

Though a believer in strong copyright protection in the digital age, Obama denied that political debate footage needed the same considerations, and noted also that televisions would still have incentive enough to broadcast.

All that’s well and good, but an already somewhat controversial candidate, especially one that espouses the cause of the little guy while pounding the podium on the power of "citizen generated media," should watch how his campaign managers handle the little guy’s contributions.

Joe Anthony, WaPo reports, is a 29-year-old paralegal who has dug Obama ever since his landmark speech at the DNC in 2004 (landmark because, as a freshman Senator, nobody’d ever heard of him before that, but everybody liked what they heard) that he created a MySpace fan page.

Obama and his crew dug Anthony’s page so much they made it their official MySpace home. 160,000 friends later, a campaign spokesperson says Anthony’s page is "bigger than him" (campaign spokespersons should really watch their grammar, don’t you think?) and took the page over.

And when I say, took it over, I mean they got MySpace to block Anthony from accessing it. They could do that, says MySpace, because the address had Obama’s name in it.

Though the details of the dispute are murky, WaPo’s Jose Antonio Vargas reports Anthony sent the campaign a $39,000 bill for over two years of service, and removed his name from the Obama friends list.

Oh well, love the sinner not the sin they say – at least until the sinnin’ gets out of hand.