Pictured below: Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) plays the guitar; Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) plays on the drums; Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) is behind the keyboard.

They teamed up on Wednesday with Monkee Micky Dolenz to campaign for performance royalties legislation, which would require A.M. and F.M. radio stations to pay fees to musicians each time their song is aired.

Satellite and Internet radio stations pay such fees but traditional stations do not. The broadcasters respond that they provide musicians with free publicity by airing their songs and that the economic burden of a new fee could drive stations into the ground.

Recording industry lobby musicFIRST held the event, where the troupe played "(I'm not your) Steppin' Stone" and "I'm A Believer." 

(Photo supplied by musicFIRST spokesman Marty Machowsky)

On the one hand, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski argues that his sweeping strategy for expanding Internet access, the National Broadband Plan, may be on shaky ground after an appeals court decision that he says complicated the agency's legal authority.

On the other hand, big provider AT&T argues that the FCC's authority to implement the most crucial aspects of the plan is on solid ground despite the decision; in other words, the commission need not seek new power through a regulatory maneuver.

Pictured above at an Atlantic magazine forum on the future of the city, Genachowski speaks about broadband access at the podium as Blair Levin (left) and Bob Quinn (right) look on. Levin was the architect of the National Broadband Plan; Quinn is AT&T's senior federal regulatory vice president.

Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins has joined the advisory board for the Secular Coalition of America, which includes authors Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens.

In addition to founding Palm Computing and Handspring, Hawkins started the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, now part of the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently the founder of Numenta, a company that builds computing platforms modeled after the human brain.

Hawkins said he supports the Secular Coalition because it lobbies for the separation of church and state, an idea that is very important to him personally.

The folks at Sunlight Foundation have come up with an innovative tool that lets users search through Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's e-mails from her tenure as White House associate counsel under President Bill Clinton as if it were their own inbox.

Elena's Inbox was created from more than 80,000 e-mails recently released by the Clinton Presidential Library from Kagan's tenure as a White House aide between 1995 and 1999. The threaded format looks similar to Google's Gmail conversations and should allow users to more easily track conversations between Kagan and her White House colleagues.

Tom Lee of Sunlight Labs created the tool after gaining inspiration from this tweet.

Lawmakers and industry representatives hailed the release of the administration's intellectual property enforcement plan at a hearing Wednesday, claiming online piracy costs the U.S. billions of dollars and thousands of jobs every year.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams on Wednesday morning, according to a Twitter spokesperson.

He launched two accounts: @kremlinrussia in Russian, and @kremlinrussia_e in English.

His inaugural tweet: "Hello everyone! I'm on Twitter, and this is my first tweet."

He added that he is headed to visit Apple, Yandex and Cisco today.

Check out the pictures of the visit supplied by Twitter: http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice.

Josh Gottheimer has been tapped as senior counselor to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski, the agency announced this week.

He arrives from Burson-Marsteller, where he was an executive vice president. Before that, he was the director of strategic communications at Ford Motor Company, overseeing corporate advertising.

Gottheimer joins the agency as it faces pressure both on the Hill and from within its own walls. The chairmen of the related House and Senate committees are pushing for new telecommunications legislation at the same time the FCC is moving ahead with a plan to boost its regulatory authority.

In his new role, Gottheimer will keep an eye on the National Broadband Plan, an effort to expand Internet access in the United States. But he has not said farewell to the speechwriting beat: He’s working on a book called "Power in Words: Barack Obama’s Speeches from the State House to the White House," a history and analysis of President Barack Obama’s most important pre-presidential speeches.

Gottheimer succeeds Colin Crowell, a telecommunications veteran and former aide to Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.). Crowell announced last month that he planned to leave the agency.

The Obama administration is focused on fostering innovation in the health information technology and clean energy sectors in hopes they will drive the economy for years to come, according to federal chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra.

At a hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on Tuesday Chopra said the administration is investing in the building blocks of innovation through research and development grants and contests aimed at encouraging entrepreneurship. He also suggested previous administrations placed less emphasis on innovation, which is why the U.S. is now lagging other developed nations in some areas.

"My humble opinion is this has to be a priority of the administration. I don’t want to render judgments on past priorities, but structurally our president has made this a key priority," Chopra said.

Rep. Joe Barton will keep his spot on the House Energy and Commerce Committee after apologizing to BP.