boucher Recent days have brought both bad news and good news out of Capitol Hill on the intellectual property front. In the bad news, Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA), chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, whom we’ve mentioned many times here on TeleRead for his enlightened stance on consumers’ digital rights, lost his bid for re-election. Hopefully there will be other congressmen who share Boucher’s points of view.

But there is also some unexpectedly good news. The FTC has appointed its first ever Chief Technologist, and they could not possibly have chosen a better man for the job than Princeton’s Professor Ed Felten, a DRM researcher who has an excellent reputation for standing up to the DRM excesses of the content industry.

Felten knows well the potential for abuse of the DMCA, having been a target of legal threats himself on more than one occasion. And the FTC has itself taken a recent interest in DRM, as shown by last year’s DRM Town Hall Meeting. Could the appointment also be the FTC’s way of sending a message to the content industry?

Now we just need to get Larry Lessig made the next copyright czar…

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