Category: Uncategorized

By Farieha Aziz (Co-Founder, Bolo Bhi) & Vivek Krishnamurthy (Director, TLPC)

Since the beginning of 2024, network disruptions and slow internet speeds have become the norm in Pakistan. Various reasons have been cited, including faults in undersea cables, upgrades to a web-management system, and the installation of a national firewall—sometimes referred to interchangeably.

Government officials and regulators have provided contradictory accounts, neither fully acknowledging the deployments nor clarifying their exact nature. Nevertheless, their narrative consistently emphasizes that firewalls exist in many countries and that content regulation, including restrictions on speech about state institutions and public officials, is a global norm. The justification for these measures is typically framed in terms of national security, counterterrorism, and the fight against “fake news.”

Earlier in 2024, Bolo Bhi and the Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law and Policy Clinic (TLPC) at the University of Colorado Law School worked together to examine Pakistan’s approach to regulating disinformation. This included analyzing changes to Pakistan’s laws in comparison with international approaches and standards.

This term, TLPC students Jordan Chen, Santana Andazola, Neven Grigic, and Natalie Phillips explored content regulation and speech restrictions in the context of claims that such practices are common worldwide—even in the US and EU. The project explored whether Pakistan’s restrictions— implemented through both technological measures and legislative changes—align with those in other jurisdictions. The resulting memoranda, which are compiled in this document, provide insights into what actually happens in other regions and highlight how these practices differ from Pakistan’s approach.

TLPC is honored to share the important work our clinic has been doing to help improve access to communications for Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing.

In May 2024, a TLPC team led by student attorneys Sebastian Blitt, Madeline Finlayson, Sarah Misché, Kevin Nguyen, and Sophie Pickering filed a petition calling on the FCC to re-evaluate its approach to the use of automated speech recognition (ASR) to generate captions for phone calls. ASR allows services like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa to recognize a user’s voice and transcribe it to text, but as users of these technologies know, they often make mistakes.

In 2018, the FCC authorized providers of Internet Protocol Caption Telephone Services (IP CTS) to rely exclusively on ASR to caption telephone calls for persons who are deaf and hard of hearing. Our petition, on behalf of three advocacy groups—TDIforAccess, the National Association of the Deaf, and the Hearing Loss Association of America—urges the FCC to change course and provide IP CTS users with the ability to seek human assistance when ASR malfunctions.

Although ASR technology is improving, the petition prepared by TLPC highlights how ASR performs poorly in recognizing the speech of persons with non-standard accents and speech patterns. Such individuals tend to be on the margins of American society and are more likely than most to live and work in noisy environments—which further degrades the performance of ASR. To meet the legal requirement of functional equivalence, the TLPC petition urges the FCC to require IP CTS providers to make a human communication assistant available whenever one is needed to communicate effectively.

Following a public comment period launched by the FCC in August, last month TLPC student attorneys Sarah Baldwin, Zoe Leonore Glepa, and Victor Laudano spearheaded the submission of a reply comment to the FCC. The reply comment highlighted how the proposed rule would drive innovation in the IP CTS marketplace and help the FCC develop performance metrics for these services—which it has failed to do for nearly a decade.

The full text of the petition and the reply comments prepared by TLPC on behalf of its clients are available below. We look forward to the FCC’s decision on our petition in the coming months.

TLPC student attorneys Rebecca Gruber, Richard Koch, and Stacey Weber, with the aid of Professor Margot Kaminski, developed comments responding to the Attorney General’s Pre-Rulemaking Considerations for the Colorado Privacy Act. Their response to the considerations, filed in anticipation of formal rulemaking in the fall, discusses several areas for potential rulemaking that closely impact the strength and effect of consumer privacy rights and company obligations in handling consumer data. The submission can be downloaded below.

The following is a guest post by Luke Ewing, student attorney at the Colorado Law Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic. We’d like to thank Luke and his classmates Sean Doran and Andi Wilt, and their supervisor Blake Reid, at Colorado Law; and law students Eric Malmgren, Erica Row, and Julia Wu, and their supervisor Jack Lerner, at UC Irvine Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic for their assistance with the development of the Termination of Transfer tool and templates.

Yesterday, Authors Alliance and Creative Commons released the Termination of Transfer tool at rightsback.org. You may be wondering what the tool does and how termination helps authors. Along with many other beta testers, student attorneys at the Colorado Law Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic and the UC-Irvine Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinichelped verify that the tool accurately reflects the state of termination law. We scoured statutes, regulations, and case history to determine what is required to make the termination process go smoothly under a wide range of circumstances. We also tested the tool to ensure that its results accurately reflect the current state of the law. Finally, we drafted a standardized form and written guidance that make the paperwork simple once an author decides to exercise their termination right.

Authors who assigned their copyrights many years ago may feel that their works are being underutilized or misrepresented, or they may want to renegotiate their earlier agreements. Fortunately, Congress devised a mechanism by which authors can take back those rights. This is a critical opportunity for authors who made less-than-advantageous deals early in their careers, saw their works become unavailable when a publisher went bankrupt, or want to release their works into the public domain or under an open access license. But because the window for termination opens decades after that original transfer of rights and requires navigating a particularly difficult and complex area of copyright law, exercising termination rights can be daunting.

Termination windows are determined by three separate subsections of the Copyright Act (§ 203, 304(c), and 304(d)), the format and instructions for notifying the Copyright Office are spelled out in a list of very particular regulations, and each subsection of the Copyright Act yields a different list of regulations. Determining whether the window is open for a copyrighted work, or which subsection applies, depends on a number of variables, including:

• Was it published?
• If so, when was it published?
• When were rights transferred?
• Did those rights include the right of publication?
• Has the agreement already been renegotiated?
• Were there multiple authors involved, and do they all agree to terminating the transfer?
• Are all the authors still alive?
• And more.

Every one of these questions is relevant, and every answer leads down different branches of a decision tree that indicates whether, when, and how an author may exercise termination rights rights. Without help, trying to understand these rights can be tedious and discouraging.

The tool makes understanding the process easy.  It knows which questions to ask and what to do with the answers to those questions. Within minutes, the tool helps authors better understand how termination of transfer works. Congress intended for authors to exercise these rights, and Authors Alliance wants to simplify the process by removing as much confusion and uncertainty as possible. If you want to learn more about taking back the rights to your work, or are just curious about the process, you can try out the tool right now. It’s free, simple, and only takes a few minutes.

And if you decide to exercise your termination rights, check out our termination of transfer resource page for notice of termination templates, a cover letter, and instructions on how to notify the Copyright Office as well as any relevant parties.