In December 2010, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally adopted an order-the Open Internet Order-to transform the Internet Policy Statement into an enforceable set of rules for broadband providers. Since this new rule limits room for the providers' discretion, the FCC had to face a lawsuit brought by Verizon, an American broadband and telecommunications company. On January 14, 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a decision that struck down two out of the three obligations stipulated in the order. At first glance, this is a huge loss for the FCC; however, the author sees this as a big win for the FCC and its network neutrality principle. This decision has enabled the FCC to secure its legal foundation in regulating broadband services and to get what the original Open Internet Order tried to achieve in the first place.

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Online publication of university lectures has been shifting from using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). This trend highlights some of the problems surrounding the publication of online courses. First of all, the lectures provided through OCW are published under Creative Commons (CC) license, while MOOC has no clear standard. This gives rise to a first problem which is that the CC license only complies with the copyright law system of the United States, which is not necessarily in conformity with Japan's legal and/or ethical standard. The second issue is the nature of OCW, which is also a registered trademark and has a publication structure with a potential for the involvement of patent rights. This highlights the need for an appropriate management of patent rights, as well as overall control of property rights. In solving these issues, these rights should be explained in terms of their relationship with our nation's social system. Such discussion should include the protection and restriction on “copyright and related rights”, as well as trademark rights and patent rights, and should be further extended to the issues concerning their ethical handling. This paper clarifies the relationship between the copyright and “copyright and related rights” concerning the publication of online courses.. It also sheds light on the overall management of intellectual property rights concerning industrial property rights and ethics.

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In cases where the general public utilizes “communications” as stipulated in Paragraph 2, Article 21 of the Constitution of Japan, it can be understood that not only the public authorities but also communications service providers are prohibited from “discriminating” against or in favor of specific users of communications services, as per Paragraph 1, Article 14 of the Constitution, given that both are theoretically required to ensure “secrecy of communications.” It is instructive that there have been many cases in the United States of network operators handling certain platform operators’ transmissions of content or applications in a discriminatory manner. This has led to the establishment of the Open Internet Order by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which will provide some insights in considering constitutional equality in the utilization of communications. While it is difficult to explicitly identify the legal conceptual purview within which network operators are required to handle platform operators equally, it is useful to consider specific discriminatory acts of network operators. In this connection, it should be noted that the Open Internet Order regards the act of favoring some traffic over other traffic in the provision of Internet access services (i.e., “pay for priority”) as “discrimination”, whereas the acts of charging subscribers based on bandwidth consumed (i.e., “tiered or usage-based pricing”) and properly controlling bandwidth during periods of congestions (i.e., “bandwidth control”) are regarded as reasonable.

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