TechCrunch today added John McCain to its list of blogger “gets” in the Republican presidential field, interviewing the Arizona senator about the activities of technology firms in China and visas for high-skilled foreigners, among other topics.
The interview with McCain followed one several days ago with Mitt Romney, one of McCain’s rivals for the GOP nomination.
Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine sees TechCrunch’s series of interviews with presidential candidates as a noteworthy milestone for new media.
“It’s just a blog. It’s just a tech blog,” Jarvis said. “But it’s powerful and has an important audience in a critical industry. So candidates are paying attention. That and 10Questions and the YouTube debates are evidence of a political process that’s just beginning to open up.
Next on TechCrunch’s list is Democrat John Edwards, but he apparently agreed to only a written question-and-answer session with the tech Web site. How very 20th century of him.
The Bush administration this week filed two trade complaints against China at the World Trade Organization, one on intellectual property rights and the other on the ability of foreign companies to access China’s market for copyright-oriented industries.
The decision to pursue the formal complaints has some people wondering whether a trade war might be the end result, but Cato Institute trade expert Daniel Ikenson thinks that is unlikely. “I don’t think it’s in China’s interest to allow this case to actually go through dispute settlement” because the WTO could authorize retaliation against China if the nation loses.
As part of it’s ETech conference last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation hosted a debate about copyright law as it relates video-sharing sites like YouTube and specifically Viacom’s billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement. The participants in the debate: Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban and EFF’s Fred von Lohmann.
“We know if we keep on going and going and going, there’s no end to it,” Cuban said of actions that he perceives as copyright infringements made possible by Internet services like YouTube. “So unless you set the ground rules to respect copyright at some level, people just aren’t ever going to respect it. … It, in fact, induces people to disrespect copyright … particularly with YouTube because it’s the legitimacy of Google applied to infringement.”
Von Lohmann’s response: “For me, [Viacom’s lawsuit is] not quite about YouTube. It’s a fight for a larger precedent” and for the “safe harbors” in digital copyright law that protect Internet hosts from legal liability for people who use their services.
Viacom recently sued Google and its YouTube video-sharing service for $1 billion over alleged copyright violations. When a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., asked Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards his thoughts on the lawsuit, Edwards used it as an opportunity to voice his support for equal pricing treatment of all high-speed Internet content and strong antitrust laws to prevent media consolidation.
“If democracy’s going to work in this country,” Edwards said, “then we want people to be well-informed and we want a wide variety of diverse voices to be heard. And that’s what’s at issue with these media conglomerates … What we see flourishing at the grassroots could be stomped on if we’re not careful.”
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