Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Ever wonder why the ‘bloggers on Tech Liberation Front feel the way they do? This might give you some idea.
Things are getting better all the time and technology is integral to making that true. So, while we often rant here about the dumb people doing dumb things to hinder progress, let’s take a moment to savor how technology is making life better in every respect.
There. That was nice.
[HT: Instapundit]
OK, this has nothing to do with technology policy, but knowing the love some of my fellow TLF bloggers have for the game of soccer, every once and awhile I like to go off on a little rant about this dreadful sport that is currently infecting America.
To explain why I hate soccer so much, let’s take a look at last night’s opening PLAYOFF game between the D.C. United and the Chicago Fire.
Both teams charged up and down the field numerous times, playing footsie with each other the whole way, until they got close to the goal and then – – assuming some stupid offsides penalty was not called for someone actually beating their man downfield – – they kicked the ball and the crowd would go wild because it was only 5 feet away from the net instead of the usual 10-15 feet off the mark.
Back and forth they went all night until this monotony produced the stellar result of – – are you ready for this – – a 0-0 TIE GAME.
Woo-hoo! Pop the champagne and let’s celebrate this big ZERO-ZERO playoff tie!!
I just cannot think of anything more exciting than that. After all, wining is for losers. In our “let’s not hurt Johnny’s feelings” political correct world, soccer is the perfect sport. When the commies who invented this stupid sport were sitting down to devise the rules, apparently they had a special “from each according to their need” moment and decided that TIE games during PLAYOFFS would be the ultimate equalizer of the masses.
I’m sorry, but I refuse to call anything a “sport” if it can end in a tie especially during “a playoff.” Doesn’t “playoff” mean you play till one team is off the board? I guess not in the pinko little sport of soccer.
[Jim Harper, Tim Lee and other soccer dorks… I invite any defense you guys want to provide for this pathetic “sport.” But I won’t be reading it until after I get done watching Game 1 of the World Series. You’ve heard of baseball, I assume? That’s a sport where playoff games end with one team defeating the other.]
James DeLong muses about Google’s motivation for cutting a deal with Sun, speculating that Google may be contemplating a switch to Solaris to avoid the obligations of the forthcoming GPL 3.0.
This is (to be euphemistic) a silly theory:
Three Cheers for Sen. Norm Coleman! He recently introduced a Sense of the Senate resolution “to protect the U.S.’s historic role in overseeing the operations of the Internet from an effort to transfer control over the unprecedented communications and informational medium to the U.N.”
In his statement, Sen. Coleman argued that:
“There is no rational justification for politicizing Internet governance within a U.N. framework. Nor is there a rational basis for the anti-U.S. resentment driving the proposal. Privatization, not politicization, is the Internet governance regime that must be fostered and protected. At the World Summit next month, the Internet is likely to face a grave threat. If we fail to respond appropriately, we risk the freedom and enterprise fostered by this informational marvel, and end up sacrificing access to information, privacy, and protection of intellectual property we have all depended on. This is not a risk I am prepared to take, which is why I initiated action to respond on a Senate level to this danger.”
YOU GO NORM! I love it.
Faithful readers of this blog will know that this issue really gets me worked up. Here’s my recent Wall Street Journal editorial on the issue that I penned with my old friend Wayne Crews of CEI. And two years ago, Wayne and I also co-edited a massive collection of essays on Internet governance / jurisdication issues entitled “Who Rules the Net.” Our point in the book and that recent editorial was simple: We stand at a crucial moment in the history of the Internet and unless we stand firm in opposition to those who seek to impose an international regulatory regime on this vibrant, borderless technology of freedom, the Internet as we know it today will die.
Let’s hope that other members of Congress and the Administration will join Sen. Coleman in this important effort to protect the Internet from the global regulatory / bureaucratic nightmare that looms overhead today.
The complaint in the case of McGraw-Hill v. Google is available on FindLaw. The most interesting paragraph, in my opinion, is this one:
Google purports to justify its systematic copying of entire books on the ground that it is a necessary step to making them available for searching through www.google.com, where excerpts from the books retrieved through the search will be presented to the user. Google analogizes the Google Library Project’s scanning of entire books to its reproduction of the content of websites for search purposes. This comparison fails. On the Internet, website owners have allowed their sites to be searchable via a Google (or other) search engine by not adopting one or more technological measures. That is not true of printed books found in library shelves. Moreover, books in libraries can be researched in a variety of ways without unauthorized copying. There is, therefore, no “need,” as Google would have it, to scan copyrighted books.
This is very confused. Let’s start with the business about “technological measures.” I assume that they’re talking about robots.txt, a file that webmasters use to tell search engines which content they are allowed to index. It’s worth noting that robots.txt is an opt-out convention. If a site doesn’t have a robots.txt file, search engines will index it.
So it seems like Google’s approach is entirely consistent with the web-search precedent. Just as robots.txt provides web site publishers with a mechanism for notifying search engines which pages not to index, Google is providing book publishers with a mechanism for indicating which books are not to be indexed. Publishers who fail to provide Google with a list, like webmasters who fail to put up a robots.txt file, can be said to have “allowed” their content to be indexed.
This paragraph also shows an ignorance of search engine history. Websites, like books, can be “researched in various ways without unauthorized copying.” Indeed, that’s where the search engine industry started. The first major Internet search engine, Yahoo!, was a keyword-based search engine analogous to a card catalog. Sites were added to the directory manually by a human being who would read the web site and write a summary for the directory.
Then in 1995, along came AltaVista, which offered the first full-text search of the web. The results were so obviously superior that Yahoo! licensed the technology in 1996. Soon every search engine had full-text functionality. So web sites, too, can be “researched in a variety of ways unauthorized copying.”
So the reason that all search engines today make copies of websites isn’t that it’s impossible to index them without doing so. Rather, it’s that full-text searches are vastly superior to the alternatives, and full-text searching is impossible without making a full-text copy.
If there had been an Association of Web Site Publishers in 1995, they could have made precisely the same argument about AltaVista. Had they prevailed, it’s hard to predict how things would have evolved, but it seems unlikely they would have gone as well. Search engines would have spent a great deal of time contacting and negotiating with web-site owners for permission to include them in their indexes. Some web sites might have signed exclusive deals with a particular search engine, or demanded that search engines pay a fee to include them in their searches. The most comprehensive search engines might have required users to subscribe, as LexisNexis and Factiva do.
Or maybe enlightened webmasters would have realized that search engines were a win-win proposition and permitted them to index their sites. Maybe they would have developed a standard way to indicate permission to index, and things would have evolved about the same way. But regardless, the analogy the publishers are trying to draw is bogus. Full-text searches–of books or web sites–require the creation of copies. If Google Print is copyright infringement, then so is Google itself. I hope it’s obvious to everyone that declaring Google illegal would be a bad idea.
Walt Mossberg has a great column criticizing digital rights management technology. He gets the fundamental point that DRM harms consumers by needlessly restricting how, when, and where they can consume content they have legally purchased:
I believe that consumers should have broad leeway to use legally purchased music and video for personal, noncommercial purposes in any way they want–as long as they don’t engage in mass distribution. They should be able to copy it to as many personal digital devices as they own, convert it to any format those devices require, and play it in whatever locations, at whatever times, they choose.
And he suggests boycotting DRM’ed products, such as copy-protected CDs, that overly restrict consumer choice.
However, he makes a fundamental error:
Instead of using DRM to stop some individual from copying a song to give to her brother, the industry should be focusing on ways to use DRM to stop the serious pirates–people who upload massive quantities of music and videos to so-called file-sharing sites, or factories in China that churn out millions of pirate CDs and DVDs.
Princeton CS professor Ed Felten’s reaction is right on the money:
This is a nice vision, but it’s not really possible. It’s abundantly clear by now that no DRM system can stop serious pirates. A DRM system that stops serious pirates, and simultaneously gives broad leeway to ordinary users, is even harder to imagine. It’s not going to happen.
No one has ever invented an un-crackable DRM system. When a new DRM system is released, it invariably takes just a few weeks for someone to release a cracking tool.
That’s not a coincidence. Bits are inherently copyable. Building an un-copyable bit isn’t just a difficult engineering challenge. On a general-purpose computer, it’s impossible. If a computer can read a piece of data, it can make a copy of it. The best you can do is to obfuscate the content so that figuring out how to make the copy is difficult and time-consuming. But that kind of obfuscation won’t stop a professional pirate or a hobbyist cracker with a lot of time on his hands.
Incidentally, it’s worth noting that probably the world’s most famous DRM cracker, Jon Lech Johansen has moved from his native Norway to San Diego to work for Michael Robertson, the the founder of the ill-fated MP3.com and (later) Lindows/Linspire. Johansen produced software to crack the copy-protection on DVDs at the age of 16, and more recently he’s cracked the copy-protection on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. It’s not clear what he’ll be doing, but it’s a safe bet that Hollywood and the recording industry won’t like it.
Citizens Against Government Waste has issued a report on the Real ID Act.
This is a welcome look at Real ID. It’s known by civil libertarians as a dramatic step forward for our national ID system, but CAGW points out that it will also be a huge expense, costing the average driver around $90.
Would you pay $90 to be even more subject to government surveillance?
Kudos to CAGW for recognizing the privacy issues while it exposes the huge costs involved in the Real ID Act.
Last minute addition to the schedule for tomorrow’s event at Heritage on digital television: Ken Ferree, former FCC media bureau chief, and–until last week–COO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Ferree led the Commission’s DTV efforts during the Powell era, and is known for his outspoken views (of broadcasters: “They’d rather eat their children than give up their spectrum.”)
Ferree joins Tom Hazlett of George Mason University, Peter PItsch of Intel, former Ass’t Attorney General Chuck Cooper and New American Foundation senior fellow Jim Snider in what promises to be quite an interesting discussion. Stop by if you can, or watch it on the Internet. Details here.
New paper just out today from Heritage on the DTV transition, looking ahead to next week’s Senate vote on setting a “hard date” for the end of analog….
Since the days of Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle, television has been broadcast using the same technology and largely over the same frequencies. That is about to change. Later this month, Congress will vote on setting a firm date when TV broadcasters will have to end their analog broadcasts and return the frequencies used for them. Afterward, all TV broadcasts will use digital television technologies. This transition is critical–not so much for television viewers, few of whom watch television over the air anyway, but for consumers of innovative new wireless services that can put the old TV spectrum to better use…more
By now you’ve heard that Apple is launching a video-capable version of its wildly popular iPod. Apple is a real trailblazer, obviously, when it comes to innovative mobile media applications, but they’re not the only one.
For example, take a look at EchoStar’s incredible new application, the “Pocket DISH.” The PocketDISH allows consumers to access video, music, games and photos all on one small device. PocketDISH owners will be able to transfer programs from DISH Network receivers to the player and then enjoy their favorite programs on the go. It’ll be like having a TiVo in your pocket.
And the PlayStation Portable offers most of the same capabilities too. After enterprising hackers modified the PSP to do a heck of a lot more than just play games and watch movies, Sony decided to offer PSP owners downloadable software “patches” that expand the PSP into the ultimate all-in-one multi-media device. For example, click here if you’d like to find out how to watch TV using a PSP.
These amazing innovations once again illustrate the challenge lawmakers will face in the future regarding media regulation. Indeed, as I will argue in my next book, content controls are essentially doomed in our new world of media convergence and rapid technological innovation.
Think about it… how do you regulate devices like Apple’s video iPod, the PocketDISH, and the PlayStation Portable when consumers can use them (and modify them) to do just about anything and receive any type of media they want, wherever they want, whenever they want? Broadcast era content controls just won’t work in this environment absent extremely intrusive measures. But I’m sure that won’t stop lawmakers from trying.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
