Jack Shafer of Slate, not exactly a bastion of conservative thought, just published a strong piece advocating a property-rights approach to spectrum. Lead-off:

Suppose Congress had established in the early 19th century a Federal Publications Commission to regulate the newspaper, magazine, and newsletter businesses. The supporters of the FPC would have argued that such regulation was necessary because paper-pulp-grade timber is a scarce resource, and this scarcity made it incumbent upon the government to determine not only who could enter the publications business but where. Hence, the FPC would issue publication licenses to the "best" applicants and deny the rest.

And conclusion:

Technology alone can't bring the spectrum feast to entrepreneurs and consumers. More capitalism—not less—charts the path to abundance.

And ditto for content, I would add -- what is needed is more capitalism, not less, wihch means better definitions of property rights, better DRM, and free markets.

For those who want the government to expand fair use or otherwise micromanage intellectual property rights, bear in mind Shafer's summing up of FCC history:

what the FCC really excelled at was postponing the creation of new technologies. It stalled the emergence of such feasible technologies as FM radio, pay TV, cell phones, satellite radio, and satellite TV, just to name a few. As Declan McCullagh wrote in 2004, if the FCC had been in charge of the Web, we'd still be waiting for its standards engineers to approve of the first Web browser.

The last thing we need is a comparable freezing of investment and energy in the content space while academicians and governments engage in endless omphaloskepsis about the exact meaning of "fair."