Content and Its Discontents

[Commentary] Public Knowledge recently celebrated its 8th birthday of defending citizens' rights in the digital culture. Unlike any other public interest group in Washington or elsewhere, we are dedicated to ensuring openness at every layer of our communication system, and that includes the content layer. That's why our work to ensure balanced copyright is so important -- we cannot have an open Internet if large corporate copyright holders can exploit overly burdensome copyright laws to sacrifice legitimate speech at the altar of trying to stop piracy. Some in Hollywood, like Disney, were in favor of Network Neutrality in the late 90's because they knew well the powers that the network owner has. More recently, they changed course, believing that net neutrality would somehow prevent them from enforcing their copyrights. Copyright enforcement and net neutrality can co-exist, unless one seeks to enforce their copyrights through network level filtering.