A couple of days ago, the Post had an article detailing the strategy shift that politicians are using to “reach out” to voters. Rather than the old, and very expensive, method of sending voters junk mail, politicians are now buying very detailed e-mail lists in order to spam registered voters in targeted ways. This trend should be of no surprise to anyone. When CAN SPAM passed last year, it only “banned” commercial e-mail. Apparently, political messages are so vital that spamming voters with them is ok.
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Many in industry are already making a big stink about the potential copying of digital music played on either over-the-air or satellite radio stations. They fear the unrestricted play will result in unrestricted copying, and then massive redistribution of that music via P2P systems. As this AP story notes, there are already devices on the market to faciliate this.
The story also notes that the RIAA has told the FCC that “Digital audio broadcasting without content protection is the perfect storm facing the music industry,” and asked for new regulatory mandates to help them address this concern. Specifically, the RIAA would like the FCC to build on the “broadcast flag” regulatory model they imposed recently at the request of the television and movie industries. Thus, the RIAA wants “an audio protection flag” mandate that would require all consumer electronic devices to read a special string of code embedded in every digital audio transmission that signalled to the device that the music was copyrighted and could not be copied.
As I wrote in a newsletter last fall, I’m concenred about all this mandatory “flag” nonsense:
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Why again do we need the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (Induce Act)? Apple’s iTunes service sells about 2.5 million songs a week, while Wal-mart sells around 200,000 and Sony 100,000 songs per week. And soon, enter Yahoo – it’s the second most visited site on the net. And enter Microsoft. Its MSN music service and soon to be released Windows Media Player 10 will add serious competition to this developing market. Microsoft will differentiate itself from the more proprietary downloading services of Apple and Sony by touting its interoperability, using the slogan “Plays for Sure.” And college kids are going back to school and finding that they get access to music downloads (compliments of their tuition of course). Music is for sale! Buy it!
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but your “brilliant” idea to eliminate spam will not work. And before you waste my time with details, please take a moment to run a sanity check by filling out this checklist.
Rudy Giuliani gave a pretty good speech last night, IMHO. But, alas for the GOP, the speech got cold-shouldered from the broadcast networks. Flipping around the bacast dial during the speech, I found Monday night football, a local weather report, and one local broadcast report from the convention floor–but even that didn’t show the speech. Time to take up arms against networks disregard of the body politic? No.
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Earlier this year I read an interesting new book by Harvard Business School professor Debora Spar entitled “Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet.” Spar’s book is important because it can tell us a lot about where cyberspace and the Internet economy might be heading next.
The central thesis of Spar’s book is that there are predictable patterns associated with technological revolutions that can help us understand how rules for future industries might unfold. Importantly, when Spar speaks of rules, she doesn’t necessarily mean government regulation. She includes property rights, contracts, intellectual property, and industry standards as “rules” that are every bit as important in shaping how industries and technologies develop. Spar then examines the history of several important technologies or industries–shipping, the telegraph, radio broadcasting, satellite television, encryption, and online music–to help explain the four phases every industry or technology goes through:
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The Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General announced today that it would be seeking Supreme Court review of an case with important ramifications for the future of broadband Internet regulation in America. The decision in question, Brand X Internet Services vs. the Federal Communications Commission, was handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals late last year.
In the
Brand X case, the Ninth Circuit foolishly decided that high-speed Internet services provided by cable companies could be considered a “telecommunications service” and regulated accordingly. In other words, all the silly damn laws that apply to telcos–including misguided infrastructure sharing rules–could be rolled over onto cable operators. Thus, regulators–including state and local regulators–would be allowed to regulate rates and terms of service for nationwide Internet services under the logic of Brand X.
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While running television ads in Washington, D.C. to show what a swell bunch of people they are, the National Association of Broadcasters have been running an aggressive campaign to squeeze out the latest threat to local broadcasters, satellite radio providers XM and Sirius. The problem, it seems, is that XM has been offering its subscribers useful information about local traffic and weather conditions. The local broadcasters view this as a major transgression, and have cried foul to the FCC. Because of previous regulatory barriers inspired by local broadcasters, XM Radio is restricted to national programming. XM’s solution is to provide local forecasts on a national basis. While it may be inefficient to provide listeners in L.A. up-to-date information on traffic jams in Manhattan, it’s the only way around the existing rules. Local broadcasters have petitioned the FCC and have also played the homeland security card in an effort to keep satellite providers out of local markets. Scott Woolley provides a full account at Forbes.com.
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There’s a very interesting article over at ZDNet about the unintended benefits of the continuing spam wars. The author makes the point that the war between spammers and filter designers has sparked new interest and innovation in the field of AI (artificial intelligence). In order to distinguish between spam and legitimate e-mail, filters must become increasingly “intelligent” as spammers continually find new ways to slip by them. The ongoing adaptation of these machines may one day make them sophisticated enough to pass a Turing test, where a human interviewer blindly interviews two subjects (one human, one computer) and is unable to tell the difference between the two. As the author concludes, “If the evil of spam leads to a renaissance of well-funded research into fundamental knowledge systems–nothing else will do–it could be the final kick we need to create truly intelligent machines.”
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Like my TFL colleague Tim Lee, I’ve been spending some time lately thinking about digital rights management (DRM), trusted computing (TC) and copyright skirmishes. Just so you know right up front, I consider myself to be right smack in the mushy middle of most copyright battles going on out there these days. I’m hopelessly undecided on many of the more controversial issues out there, but I’d like to think I still might have a little something to contribute to the debate.
In particular, I’d like to comment on this very interesting battle over the role DRM should play in the future of copyright. The current debate pits those who generally claim that “DRM is the devil” against those who claim “DRM is our savior.” Just by way of background, DRM is generally defined as a system of content protection that employs various technological tools and capabilities to shield against undesirable use or distribution of digitized works or products. Trusted computing is essentially an extension of DRM, or a new, more robust flavor of it, which focuses on how to make computing platforms and technologies even more tamper-resistant.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.