John Palfrey

My parents, Judy and Sean Palfrey, among 36 pediatricians, issued this open letter about the effects of the current administration’s health policies on America’s children. 

One reporter covering the news conference in Washington, DC, today described my mom this way:

“Dr. Judith Palfrey, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical
School and past president of the Ambulatory Pediatric Association,
spoke about a child with a degenerative disease who was denied leg
braces by a private health insurance company because, the company
reasoned, he would lose the ability to walk within a couple of years
anyway.

‘I have seen children, saved in our intensive care units, discharged to
homeless shelters because the enormous medical bills have left families
without money for rent or food,’ she said. ‘The uncaring policies of
the current administration are systematically shattering our promise to
children.’”

(Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson doesn’t seem to have thought it was such a good idea.)

I am very proud of them for taking this stand for children.

Tonight’s win against the Devil Rays at Tropicana Field did the trick for the Red Sox, clinching at least a wild card berth in the playoffs.  The AL East division race isn’t over yet, either, as the Yankees are just a few games ahead going into the last 5 games or so.

Two new/old entrants in the digital music mix this week – Virgin (subcriptions starting at $7.99/month for unlimited access to 1 million+ tunes) and eMusic (a bit more costly) – both of which are betting that Apple and Microsoft and the rest of the a la carte crowd have the pricing thing wrong.  From a transaction cost perspective, it makes all kinds of sense.  But perhaps people really do want to “own” their music?

The Internet Engineering Task Force yesterday shuttered the MARID project that was seeking a standard for e-mail authentication.  It sounds as though the working group shut down over dispute around MSFT’s Sender ID proposal.  John Levine has much more.

Today also happens to be spam day in my Cyberlaw and the Global Economy class.

It’s just so extraordinary that a court would say: “Get
a license
or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in
any significant way.”  The first sentence has the benefit of clarity; there’s something
wonderful about clarity in the law, about bright-line rules.  But set that aside, and set
also aside whether the court is right on the copyright law related to
sound recordings.  Given what we’re learning about creativity in the digital music zone, how can a federal appellate court say this second sentence with such conviction?

The most-likely-to-succeed approach of curtailing spam is to mix a cocktail: some combination of technical standard-setting, changes in cultural norms surrounding to whom one connects, market decisions, a back-drop of legal provisions to prevent and punish the worst wrong-doing, and a heavy dose of cross-border cooperation on all fronts. 

AOL dealt a blow, apparently, to Microsoft’s effort to spread its technical solution, Sender ID, which would crack down on domain spoofing and, the story goes, fight phishing in the process.  AOL’s rejection is not the first for this would-be standard.  While the IETF are said to have found the Sender ID license acceptable, others in the open source movement found it less so. 

In other spam news, the FTC today released its long-awaited take (as mandated by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2002) on the bounty hunter proposals championed at various times by Prof. Lessig and Cong. Lofgren.  The report is here.

Timothy Egan has written a good piece in the New York Times today on the youth vote in 2004 as compared to previous elections.  (Though I wonder, on page 2: is there any kind of blogging other than “computer-blogging”?)  The piece links up to one of the key themes of our conference coming up in December, “Internet & Society 2004: Votes, Bits, and Bytes,” which is meant to be a skeptical take on whether or not the political process is actually being transformed by internet technologies.

A provocative interview with a leading European law scholar, Thomas Hoeren, who is presently a visiting faculty member at the Oxford Internet Institute, who takes issue with the gospel of Lessig, talks about spam in Germany (opt-out; regulated as an unfair trade practice), and points out some other people whose work we should be reading.

I wrote in an op-ed earlier this week in the Boston Globe about the digital copyright crisis about the importance of listening to customers and giving people more ways to go legit as one in a series of strategies to stop widespread illegal copying.  One idea that ended up mostly on the cutting room floor has to do with making greater use of Creative Commons licenses in the peer-to-peer environment.  It’s an idea the Lawrence Lessig has talked about in the past.  For those of us who believe that there are substantial (and important) non-infringing uses to new technologies like P2P networks, we’ve got to be prepared to demonstrate those uses.  One way to do so is to give people easier ways to be accountable to one another on the networks.  If we really care about unsung artists being able to make their music freely available online, then cc licenses can help make clear that the work is being licensed for free use — and can help would-be consumers to find legit music online for sampling purposes.  P2P providers can help to make these transactions easier and clearer.  It’s one of the things the net is great at: enabling new connections to be made between geographically distant people who may not know one another.  And all of us can step up to the challenge of making ourselves more accountable online, whether in a P2P environment or others, to the long-term benefit of the net, and society, as a whole.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will be ruling on a landmark education case, Hancock v. Driscoll, at some point this year.  The case takes up the question of whether the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has been providing our children with a constitutionally adequate education or not.  I’ve been informally working with a team of policy advocates, educators, lawyers, and child development experts on an amicus brief in that case, which is posted here.  The brief was ably drafted by a Boston lawyer, and HLS grad, Andrea Kramer.

Mass2020’s Chris Gabrieli and Jennifer Davis wrote in an e-mail today: “In the coming year, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will rule on a case that promises to be one of the most important matters impacting public education and children in Massachusetts in the state’s history.  The ruling will come in the Hancock v. Driscoll school financing case, where students from underperforming districts have brought suit against the state, claiming that it has not satisfied its constitutional duty to educate all children.  The plaintiffs argue that their schools, which serve a high proportion of at-risk students, are significantly under-resourced and, thus, cannot possibly adequately educate students to the high standards which the state has set.  These standards are fixed through the seven curriculum frameworks, which cover English/Language Arts, mathematics, science, social science, language, health and the arts.  Setting the educational bar so high, and in such a wide variety of subjects, without furnishing enough resources to reach the bar, say the plaintiffs, means that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is in default of its own constitutional mandate.

Led by Massachusetts 2020 and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, a group of organizations and individuals committed to increasing the time children at-risk spend in productive learning environments recently filed an amicus curiae brief to extend the plaintiffs’ argument further.  The brief contends that the lack of resources for at-risk children comes not only in the form of money, but also in the form of time.  Our schools still operate on the same schedule they did since the 19th century, even as our expectations for what children should know and be able to do are so much higher. If the state is to live up to its constitutional duty, it must implement policies that extend the real learning time of students or else too many will simply not meet the state’s high standards for learning.”

For the lower court opinion, look here.  It’s an interesting and important case (even though it has nothing to do with Internet law!).