Meeting Howard Berman at the Tech Policy Summit

I’m attending the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose, a first-time conference about technology issues that is drawing a crowd of heavy hitters — most of the 150 or so people in the audience could well be on stage.  Some of the speakers include Deborah Platt Majoras, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz, Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn, top execs at AT&T, Sybase, SAP and Cisco. Some interesting fare so far, though after attending so many unconferences (like Bloggercon and Vloggercon) and inclusive conferences (like WeMedia), the setup here is a bit stuffy for my tastes. There’s no "former audience" here. We’re allowed to ask questions, but it’s still very much us and them.

Rep. Howard Berman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, was on stage for a half hour, discussing patent issues and immigration reform. But I wanted to talk about the looming copyright crisis in this country.

From the floor, I told Rep. Berman that I have this old-fashioned notion that congressmen are servants of the people, that they’ve been elected to do the people’s work. Just today BitTorrent announced a distribution deal with several of the big Hollywood studios. Viacom has announced a plan to distribute its content on Joost and continues to demand that YouTube take down its copyrighted videos, which is all well and good. But the landscape is changing rapidly, and I believe we’ll see a backlash against Capitol Hill’s formulation of copyright in a few weeks if and when Google banishes millions of videoclips that contain short snippets of copyrighted video or music from YouTube’s servers. (Media coverage has focused on YouTube’s spat with Viacom, while ignoring the potentially larger and more knotty issue of individuals using copyrighted music in their soundtrack or taking news show clips to create a commentary.) Copyright law never envisioned a culture where millions of us are content creators who want to borrow, annotate and comment upon the culture.

I asked Berman whether it was time to reform copyright laws to take into account the millions of us who want nothing more than to express our creativity in a noncommercial way in this new digital era, and whether he was open to listening to both sides of this issue in hearings before the House.

Other than a short riposte in which he equated taking others’ copyrighted works with piracy ("That’s not people expressing their creativity.  It’s people expressing someone else’s creativity."), Berman had some reassuring things to say. He said he wouldn’t be a rubber stamp or advocate for any one side, and that Congress shouldn’t be in the position of propping up outdated business models. He said he wants to solicit all viewpoints when these issues come before his subcommittee.

I followed him into the hallway (along with Steve Levy of Newsweek), introduced myself and gave him a copy of "Darknet" to read on his flight back to D.C. (He said he’d read it.) He repeated his position that he won’t be a "shill" for anyone and that his committee will be an honest broker with respect to IP issues. I also suggested that he take up the "orphaned works" cause championed by Lawrence Lessig and Brewster Kahle, among others.

Next, James Cicconi, Sr. Executive VP of external and legislative affairs for AT&T had an interesting exchange with Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg. Walt pointed to a number of countries where true high-speed broadband is deployed much more widely than in the U.S. — Japan, South Korea, Scandinavia, "even France, for God’s sake!" In some of these countries, you can download video at 50 megabits a second and upload your own video at 10 megabits per second. "Why can’t we do that?" Mossberg asked point blank. In the U.S., he pointed out, the best you can generally do is 15mbps down and 2 up — if you’re lucky.

Cicconi danced around the question, blaming government regulation, the dispersed population in the U.S. ("what about Manhattan!?" Mossberg said), and the telecom companies’ ongoing fight with the cable companies over access to local franchise systems.

Pointing out that AT&T carries 18% of the broadband traffic in the U.S., Cicconi noted, "The Internet wasn’t really built for video. The move to high defnition will exponentially increase the amount of traffic." The company is "very concerned" about the ability of the network to deliver all those bits. "It’s a very fragile structure and we need to upgrade it."

Next, Mossberg and Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz chatted about Schwartz’s blog, one of the best-read business blogs around.

Mossberg: "Did your lawyers have a heart attack when you started your blog?"

Schwartz: "No. I had a heart attack when our general counsel started a blog."

Schwartz says he doesn’t blog at regular times. "It fills a lot of the white space during my day." No one edits his blog posts in advance. The only time it’s reviewed is immediately after an earnings call, when Schwartz runs his entry past the lawyers.

Schwartz also invited the government to step in and set some standards for Internet broadband deployment (or something like that; see Schwartz’s blog for details). In general, Silicon Valley wants the government to stay out of technological affairs. "I’m not interested in having the government regulate technology," he said. But in this case, "It’s a mean to an ends: enhancing this country’s competitiveness" with countries ahead of us in the broadband game.

Some familiar faces in the crowd: Dan Farber, Shel Israel, Lisa Padilla, Lauren Gelman, Drew Clark and others.

Since Dan Farber is here, you can follow the conference’s goings on at ZDNet. (I won’t be able to attend tomorrow’s sessions.)

I’ll post photos tonight. Here are nine photos from the summit.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.