February 2011

The Broadband for First Responders Act of 2011 (HR 607), a public safety bill introduced by Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-NY), is catching some flak from broadcast engineers. The bill allocates a chunk of spectrum to public safety agencies and funds the creation of a broadband network. But the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE) is wary of one provision of the bill which says that, within ten years, the paired spectrum between 420-440MHz and 450-470MHz will be auctioned by the Federal Communications Commission for commercial use. Apparently this includes radio broadcasters between 450-451MHz and 455-456MHz. The problem is that the bill does not offer the displaced broadcasters any replacement spectrum, according to the SBE.

Humanity’s musical treasures — Beethoven piano sonatas, Schubert songs, Mozart symphonies and the like — come to life in performance. But they truly survive as black marks on a page, otherwise known as scores. Now a Web site founded five years ago by a conservatory student, then 19 years old, has made a vast expanse of this repertory available, free.

The site, the Internet Music Score Library Project, has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere. It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month. That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship. More than a business threat, the site has raised messy copyright issues and drawn the ire of established publishers. The site (imslp.org) is an open-source repository that uses the Wikipedia template and philosophy, “a visual analogue of a normal library,” in the words of its founder, Edward W. Guo, the former conservatory student. Volunteers scan in scores or import them from other sources, like Beethoven House, the museum and research institute in Bonn, Germany. Other users oversee copyright issues and perform maintenance. Quality control — like catching missed pages — is also left to the public. “It’s completely crowd sourced,” Mr. Guo said. The site has recently begun adding recordings. And through a partnership with a freelance musician in Indiana who runs a publishing business, it offers low-cost, on-demand printing of the music, often at a tiny fraction of the cost of standard editions. The prices of major publishing houses range widely depending on the number of instruments in the work or its length. A set of parts for a mainstream string quartet, for example, can run from $30 to $50.

[Commentary] Increasingly, news and other websites are striving to elevate the content of comments online. Among the strategies:

• One option is to ban comments entirely. This certainly eliminates ugly postings, but it also wipes out any constructive conversation and removes a check on flawed journalism.
• Many sites have posted clear standards and rely on self-policing by members who flag particularly offensive comments. Some sites are experimenting with ways to have the most constructive comments and commenters be more visible.
• The most effective — and expensive — way to ensure a constructive community of commenters is through strict moderation. Nothing gets posted unless it's first reviewed by an editor.
• Finally, more websites are considering forcing commenters to register and post comments by name. There's a downside for site managers, though. As the New Haven Register told its readers, "The problem is research showing that forcing people to register to comment dramatically decreases the size of the online audience, and that's an area we're trying to grow, not shrink."

The common denominator in all of these solutions, of course, is that they're being implemented by website managers and not the government. That's exactly how it should be. The First Amendment gives sites the right to determine their own content, including deciding which comments pass muster. In turn, abusive commenters have the right to free speech, but that doesn't mean that websites have to give them a soapbox. There's a strong possibility that the marketplace itself will help enhance the online marketplace of ideas. If sites provide guidelines, enforce them and create an environment conducive to the sharing of opinions, they should see greater engagement and have a better setting for readers and advertisers. The sites where comments are simply an endless string of epithets, attacks and counterattacks run the risk of losing their audiences. In the end, we'll get the kind of online discourse we demand — or deserve.

[Paulson is president of the First Amendment Center]

China's domestic security chief, Zhou Yongkang, added his voice to calls for tighter Internet controls as censors ratcheted up temporary online restrictions, a day after a failed attempt to use social-networking sites to start a "Jasmine Revolution" in China.

Zhou, one of the nine members of the Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee, the country's top decision-making body, was quoted in official media Monday as saying Chinese officials needed to find new ways to defuse social unrest. He made the remarks at a meeting of Chinese officials on Feb 20, when police and Internet censors easily thwarted an anonymous online appeal for people to stage simultaneous antigovernment protests in Beijing, Shanghai and 11 other Chinese cities.