On August 31, the Justice Department planted a very large nail in the coffin of the AT&T takeover of T-Mobile when it filed a lawsuit in the District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit to block the merger. Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole couldn't have been...

Tuesday night I stayed up late, working on a grad school recommendation for one of my Public Knowledge colleagues. As usual, my Twitter feed was open, and right around midnight, I heard an unusual amount of chirping for that hour. Why? Tech reporters were writing that the FCC...

Whatever the final results of this election night, nothing will be more shocking or sad for Public Knowledge and me personally then the defeat of Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va), the current Chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology & the Internet. Rep. Boucher, widely recognized as one...

U2 frontman and humanitarian Bono had a page-long op-ed in this past Sunday's New York Times, where he describes what he calls "10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil. Some are trivial, some fundamental. They have little in common with one...

Either Jenner and Block lawyers are looking for something to do in this economic downturn, or the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has a direct pipeline to the Justice Department. Because the Legal Times blog is reporting that a fourth Jenner partner (and fifth Jenner attorney overall) who...

After proposing to dump over $1 trillion into Wall Street coffers in less than a month (all the while looking at the wrong side of a $483 billion budget deficit ), you might think that Congress would be careful about taking on new financial obligations. Of course if you...

Later this month I will celebrate 20 years as a public interest communications lawyer. After two unhappy years in a private law firm, I walked into the small and cluttered offices of Media Access Project in August 1988 and never looked back. We spent most of our time...

The expected FCC decision on the Free Press/Public Knowledge complaint against Comcast for throttling Bit Torrent will be groundbreaking precedent. This is because among other things, a Bush Administration FCC will find that the agency has the authority under the Communications Act to protect Internet users from discriminatory network...

There is nobody involved in the effort to reform copyright laws who I admire more than Stanford Law professor Larry Lessig. If it were not for his tireless work as the first populist copyright reformer, my organization, Public Knowledge, would likely not exist.

But I must take issue...

Today, the Federal Communications Commission faced perhaps its most important decision of the past two decades. It voted on the rules and procedures for next year's auction of the most valuable part of the electromagnetic spectrum, that is, the public airwaves over which people receive broadcast television, satellite TV...

Hollywood and the recording industry have a long history of forcefully requiring third parties to bear the cost of enforcing their copyrights. The entertainment industries' lawsuits against consumer electronics and technology companies are legion; the predecessors to the VCR, iPod and TiVo were all sued either by Hollywood or...

To the extent that ordinary people follow major lawsuits alleging copyright infringement, those cases probably involve Google in some way. There is the Google Book search case, where the publishers and authors guild are suing Google because they provide a service that allows you to search for small snippets...

Every Federal Communications Commission Chairman has one or two legacy-defining moments in his tenure. For Clinton FCC Chair Reed Hundt, it was pushing through the Children's television programming rules and starting the transition to digital TV. For the first George W. Bush Chair, Michael Powell, it was the media ownership...