Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Well how about that! On Thursday I mocked James DeLong’s assertion that “the market” will give TiVo users the opportunity to transfer video content to the iPod. And now TiVo seems to have proved me wrong by announcing plans to sell a new software that will enable compatibility between its video recorder and the iPods. [...]
Seriously, is there a week that goes by these days that we don’t hear about another stunning innovation on the media front? In his recent essay on “Migrating Video Content,” Daniel English points out that “Media is shifting to a digital architecture where media is a continuous, ubiquitous experience and content is decoupled from any [...]
Last Friday, PFF hosted a forum on the Google Print battle featuring 4 excellent panelists. I’m not going to go into all the issues at stake in this debate, but I did find it interesting that the panel of legal experts speaking at the event spent so much time focusing on transaction costs, something we [...]
Alan Wexelblat has a good point. Policy debates–especially esoteric ones like the DRM controversy–depend crucially on the way they’re framed. For years, the copyright industry has sought to frame the debate as a debate between “property” and “piracy”–with them on the side of property rights. This was disingenuous, because most of their critics were in [...]
This week, newspaper giant Knight Ridder announced that it was putting itself up for sale. In a sign of just how much the media universe has changed in just the past few years: (1) the announcement received almost zero front-page attention in other papers; word of the sale was buried in the obscure back pages [...]
Speaking of departures, today another departure from the telecommunications scene was finalized–that of AT&T. The final paperwork was concluded earlier today with the filing of a merger certificate with the New York state secretary of state. Making things more than a little confusing, the name “AT&T” will not actually be retired–instead the SBC moniker will [...]
Yesterday, Kathleen Abernathy– one of two current GOP members of the FCC–announced she would be leaving the Commission effective December 9. The announcement was no surprise–her term has already expired, and she had long made it clear that she would not seek re-appointment. Still, she will be missed. Abernathy is one of a rare breed [...]
Here’s yet another example of how DRM is leading to pointless balkanization of the media marketplace: Apple has been loath to license its FairPlay DRM, used to protect songs sold from the iTunes Music Store. That has been a sticking point for record companies, which yearn to provide iPod compatibility for their copy-protected discs. EMI–in [...]
The UN’s World Summit on the Information Society ended today with the U.S.–or more precisely Internet users around the world–coming up winners. Efforts to impose international controls over Internet governance were firmly beaten back. Instead, the summit only called for creation of an advisory “International Internet Governance Forum,” with no binding authority. The new forum [...]
May 16, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
