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1. Congressional Recess Begins
2. Update on the Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act
3. Cuts Expected in Grants for Expanding the Information Superhighway
4. Fair Use and Copyright in the Electronic Environment
1. Congressional Recess Begins - On April 8 the House and Senate begin
their Spring recess. The House will reconvene on May 1 and the Senate
on April 24. At the Organization of American Historians' Annual meeting
in Washington last week, the OAH Board made plans for ensuring that all
members of key appropriations committees receive visits in their home
offices during the recess. Next week I will provide more information on
this initiative.
2. Update on the Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act of
1995 - On March 23 the Senate Commerce Committee approved with some
modification S.314 [the "Communications Decency Act" by Senator James
Exon (D-NE) and Slade Gorton (R-WA)] and attached it as an amendment to
the Telecommunications Competition and Deregulation Act of 1995, S.652.
The modification includes some defenses from criminal liability for
online service provides. However, the American Civil Liberties Union
reports that the "amendment subjects online users to surveillance and
imposes criminal penalties for messages deemed by some government
official to be 'indecent, lewd, lascivious or filthy.'"
The Senate Commerce Committee also approved in late March Senator John
Kerry's (D-MA) amendment to S. 652 which would ensure low-cost public,
educational, and government access to "video dialtone" channel capacity.
"The choices we make now will set the nation's telecommunications policy
for years to come," said Kerry. "It's crucial that communiti have public
access services, regardless of whether they're provided by
the traditional cable companies or the new video services soon to be
offered by local phone companies." This vote expresses the commitment of
the committee for including some provisions in the Telecommunications
Competition and Deregulation Act for low-cost educational, social,
charitable, and civic access to the information superhighway.
3. Cuts Expected In Grants Program for Expanding Use Of the "Information
Superhighway" - In 1993 Congress created the Telecommunications and
Information Infrastructure Assistance Program to support the development
of educational, economic, and cultural telecommunication services to
the public. The FY'95 budget for this program is $64 million which will
go primarily for grants to nonprofit organizations and state and local
governments. However two separate bills under consideration now in
Congress would make major cuts in the amount available in FY'95 for
these grants that enhance use of the information superhighway. The
Defense Supplemental bill which is proposing cuts in various domestic
programs to offset the expenditures of the Haiti and other military
operations would cut $15 million from the Telecommunication and
Information Infrastructure Assistance Program. The House has passed an
FY'95 rescission bill that includes an additional cut of $30 million
from this grants program. The Senate FY'95 rescission bill which is
still under consideration does not cut this program. The Conference
Committee that will work out differences between these bills will
probably not begin work until after the spring recess.
4. "Fair Use" and Copyright in the Electronic Environment - On April 5,
I attended the Fair Use and Copyright Working Group meeting convened by
Christopher Meyer of the Department of Commerce. For the past seven
months representatives of educational, library, and scholarly
organizations have been meeting with a wide range of publishers to
discuss the appropriate balance in the new electronic environment
between copyright owners' rights and various "fair use" exemptions.
Last fall the group identified twenty-two aspects of this thorny issue.
At the recent meeting there was a lengthy discussion of the types of
activities that teachers and librarians could use in placing material
for courses on electronic reserves. There was little consensus. In the
digital environment many educators fear that instead of being able to
capitalize on the new technology to make materials more accessible that
there will be burdensome costs that will stifle the applications for
digital access. Last summer the Administration's Working Group on
Intellectual Property Rights issued a report, called the Green Paper,
which failed to make a case for how "fair use" would operate in the
digital environment. Concern expressed over that aspect of the report
led to this series of meetings. The final report of the Working Group
on Intellectual Property Rights is expected in late May; however, many
in the higher education and library communities worry that it too will
fail to address adequately "fair use" issues.