Well it didn’t take long for a young, rebellious punk to turn into a paranoid, condescending parent. I’m already talking to my kids in ways that used to make me resent my own parents. And I’m already beginning to think about how to watch over their every move like a hawk to make sure that they stay out of trouble.
The difference between raising a kid today versus the past, however, is that technology–much to the dismay of independent-minded children–makes this task even easier for parents. In my recent paper discussing how”Parents Have Many Tools to Combat Objectionable Media Content,” I mentioned how new cell phones targeted to kids come embedded not only with a variety of parental controls, but also GPS / geo-location technology. This enables parents to monitor the movements of their children wherever they may go.
Even though my kids are still too young to have their own cell phones, I’ve already begun thinking about how I might use such tracking technologies in the future. Even though both of my kids are under five years of age, I sometimes sit around thinking about what they are doing or exactly where they are at. This is despite the fact that I know exactly where my kids are: My daughter is always at her pre-school and my son is always at home with our nanny. Yet, I’m still paranoid, and sometimes find myself wondering if they are exactly where they should be. Could they have wondered off? Are the teachers or my nanny taking the kids places I don’t know about? Has someone snatched them?!?
I know this is all quite pathetic in one sense, but that’s the sort of paranoid thinking that sometimes goes on in the heads of parents. And in my most paranoid moments, I sometimes think how cool it would be if I could just convert the wi-fi radar on my laptop (which searches for nearby hotspots and maps them on a big radar screen on my computer) into a kid-tracker instead. It could track their cell phones, or their GPS-enable watches or lunchboxes. Or perhaps even the RFID chip I could plant under their skin!
Again, this is the sort of stuff that what have driven me into to hyper-rebellion as a kid, especially as a teenager. The thought of my parents tracking my every move would have driven me nuts, and I my computer-nerd brother and I probably would have worked hard to defeat or trick any geo-location technologies that our parents might have tired to use with us. (My brother would have probably reprogrammed them to trace our cats instead of us.)
Is there a happy balance here? I think so.
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Last night a FCC commissioner came out in favor of…DRM? Yes, at a reception sponsored by the DC Bar Association in her honor, Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, the newest addition to the FCC, spoke eloquently on a number of issues but perhaps most remarkable was her advocacy for strong copyright protections. Hailing from The Music City, Nashville, this former Tennessee Regulatory Commissioner proclaimed her love for country music and the artists that wish to use DRM to protect their content.
Now I have no beef with DRM and think content owners should be free to utilize any scheme they want if informed consumers are willing to spend money on it. But regardless of your views of DRM (and TLF bloggers differ I know), I don’t think any of us here want the FCC to get more involved in this matter. The broadcast flag was an FCC rule that allowed the recording of digital broadcasts only by approved hardware devices that could recognize whether or not a certain data stream can be recorded, or if there are any restrictions on recorded content. That rule was invalidated last year in a case before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the FCC had exceeded its authority by creating this rule.
Commissioner Tate said that despite the FCC’s lack of legal authority, she can still use her bully pulpit to bring awareness to content protection issues. Fair enough–policymakers, even Supreme Court justices, use their position of prominence to discuss many issues. The convergence of communications and copyright is indeed a legitimate policy issue. Hopefully Commissioner Tate will use her pulpit to advocate for market-driven solutions, not greater FCC authority. She would be effective at this too. She comes across as warm and engaging and persuasive.
Copyright protection shouldn’t be hindered by government through some sort of affirmative access requirement (see France). However, copyright protection shouldn’t be mandated by government either–hardware companies and content interests must learn to play together with the marketplace, not the Grand Ole FCC, as their venue.
There’s a crowd of people who still run around lamenting the death of the old UNE-P regulatory regime. They persist in their misguided belief that infrastructure sharing somehow offers us the path to broadband nirvana.
It’s all quite silly, of course. Forced sharing doesn’t lead to true infrastructure innovation or competition. Indeed, it leads to the exact opposite: technological stasis and plain vanilla networks. If you want real competition and innovation, you have to give carriers the incentive to invest in (and upgrade) their own networks with the promise that they will be able to reap the rewards of positive growth should it occur.
Still, the critcs persist, we’ll never have any real competition without some degree of infrastructure sharing. Nonsense! Let me cite a little statistical and anecdotal evidence to explain just how wrong the infrastructure socialists are.
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A couple of people have suggested that I should stop bombarding y’all with rants against the DMCA and focus on something else for a change. To that end, I’ve begun reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, a book about the coming technological super-race that got a lot of buzz last fall, and has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read since then. Over the next few weeks, I will instead bombard you with rants (and possibly raves) about that.
I’m skeptical of his basic claim (which I won’t re-hash here–check out the Amazon link above if you want a good summary) both because I’m suspicious of utopian claims in general, and because strong AI is a problem that has consistently bedeviled computer scientists. Since the 1960s, computer scientists have been predicting that human-level artificial intelligence is just two or three decades away, and so far the goal seems to be getting further away as we learn more about the difficulties involved. Which isn’t to say we’ll never get there, but I don’t think you can simply extrapolate Moore’s law out to the point where computer chips have as many transistors as brains have neural connections, and assume that at that point we’ll have human-scale intelligence.
But I’d like to start with a more specific nitpick, which I’ll give below the fold…
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A few months ago, I was pleased to see this post by ZDNet editor David Berlind, in which he did a great job of explaining why “open DRM” is a contradiction in terms:
Until last night, when I met Brad Templeton, chairman of the board at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my position has basically been that DRM as an idea is a bad idea (especially the way it is being implemented) but that if we must have it, then at least let’s have one that’s based on an open standard so that the content you buy can flow frictionlessly from one of your devices to the other without running into a playback gotcha. But, based on what Templeton told me, I now realize that even an open standard won’t do much to solve the problem. This for me–a huge proponent of open standards–was such devastating news that Templeton will tell you that at first, I refused to believe it. But it’s true and perhaps just as troubling is how open source software is one of the reasons why.
Templeton taught me something about how DRM works that I had never stopped to consider. As it turns out, a proprietary DRM scheme relies on the proprietary closed source software that works with it to form the one-two punch of what makes DRM function. The great thing about open standards is that they make it possible for anybody including open source developers to implement them in their software. But if there was an open standard for DRM, the resulting open source implementations would very likely defeat the purpose of the DRM in the first place. The reason proprietary DRM works is that the vendor is in control of both the DRM technology that secures the content and the playback technology that knows how to unlock it and play it back. So, by virtue of what the proprietary playback software is capable of, that vendor is completely in charge of what happens to the content once it’s unlocked.
But in a Friday post, he seemed to be changing his tune, at least when it comes to Sun’s “open source” DRM scheme:
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I wasn’t expecting my Tuesday post razzing Tom Giovanetti to get so much attention, and so I didn’t spend a lot of time making my point in the post clear. Giovanetti’s reaction on his blog has been basically that he doesn’t think there’s a DRM angle to the problem at all.
Without knowing the technical details of his particular device, it’s hard to know to what extent his specific box employs DRM technology. It’s conceivable that it doesn’t, although I think that’s unlikely.
However, my real point was a little broader than that: current trends in the design of digital media devices will make problems like Mr. Giovanetti’s more common. And a major driver of those trends is the DMCA.
In the olden days, consumer electronics devices were built to open standards. The specifications for a TV tuner, an RCA jack, or a compact disc, were publicly available. Anybody was free to build devices to the standard. That meant that if I didn’t like how a particular device worked, I could swap it out with a device from a competing manufacturer. That’s also how the PC market works: I can get my CPU from AMD or Intel, my graphics card from nVidia or ATI, my RAM and hard drive from several different companies, etc. Every component has alternatives, and any component will–more or less–work with other components that comply with the relevant standard. And there’s no centralize authority dictating what features devices must or must not have.
The next generation of digital media devices is evolving in a much different direction. In the DRMed world, every platform has an owner that has complete control over what components are allowed to work with the platform, and what features those components can have.
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If you live in the DC area, you should mark your calendar for Wednesday, April 26, when the Cato Institute will be having a half-day conference on copyright law. Three TLF contributors will be participating. First, co-blogger (and conference organizer) Jim Harper will be appearing on the first panel on “the foundations of copyright.” He’ll be sharing the stage with Jim DeLong of PFF, who I imagine will argue for IP, and David Levine, author of Against Intellectual Monopoly. I bet you’ll see some lively disagreement there.
Far more important, however, is the third panel on the DMCA. I’ll be participating, as will co-blogger Solveig Singleton, Business Software Alliance attorney Emery Simon, and Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro. Word on the street is that the BSA loves the DMCA while the CEA hates it, so I expect some fireworks on that panel as well.
It should be an entertaining and informative debate, so I encourage you to sign up today. There should also be a live video stream of the proceedings for those of you who don’t live near DC.
Very exciting things are happening in New Hampshire, where the House has passed a bill to refuse participation in the federal REAL ID Act. REAL ID is a bill that attempts to coerce states into issuing nationally standardized drivers’ licenses and identification cards. It also would have states enter information about citizens and residents into a national database.
I went to New Hampshire Monday to testify to the State Senate Committee on Public and Municipal Affairs, which is considering passing HB 1582 . . . or . . . perhaps it will accept a $3 million grant to comply with REAL ID, which would commit the state to spending ten times that amount in compliance costs.
The reason this is so important is that a national ID will help advance unified record-keeping, particularly by governments, rendering people more susceptible to surveillance and control. A national ID would be a major shift in power from individuals to institutions.
I deal with all these issues in my forthcoming book Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood
. The book also devotes several chapters to the way forward: how we can get the benefits of identification while minimizing the drawbacks. It comes out in May but it’s available for presale right now at Amazon.
And, yes, I will be plugging my book here on TLF for the next couple of months. It seems shameless, but I’m doing it for you. You need to read this book and learn about the magical, everyday process of identification!
Joe at TechDirt flags a unnecessary and mean-spirited bill to require call-center workers to identify the nation in which they’re located. Joe nails it:
It’s not clear why this is necessary or what such a rule would accomplish. Outsourcing call centers isn’t illegal, and it shouldn’t be the position of the government to try to shame companies that do it. Most likely, the bill’s supporters will claim that consumers have a “right to know”, though no such right exists. While some have complained about language problems with the foreign staff, this problem will take care of itself, as companies won’t keep using call centers that mess up transactions. In fact, some companies have already stopped outsourcing. One company offers customers a choice, allowing callers to speak to a US call center in exchange for slower service. This kind of bill should be identified what for it is, a transparent protectionist scheme. Perhaps, though, it will appeal to people who verbally abuse call center workers, since nationality can’t always be determined from accent alone.
Joe doesn’t mention that the bill is sponsored by “liberals” John Kerry, Teddy Kennedy, Pat Leahy, and Russ Feingold. It’s not clear to me what’s progressive about stigmatizing overseas workers who are just trying to feed their families.
In an editorial in CableFax earlier this week, Senator Ted Stevens, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, argued that: “Our government should not be in the business of choosing which programs are appropriate for our nation’s children. By showing the public how to use available blocking mechanisms, we ensure those in the best position to make viewing decisions–parents–are able to do so.”
Senator Stevens is absolutely correct. And, luckily, there are more blocking and filtering tools available to parents than ever before to achieve this goal. In my new Progress & Freedom Foundation study, “Parents Have Many Tools to Combat Objectionable Media Content,” I document the many tools or techniques that parents can use to restrict or curtail objectionable content in their homes before they call upon government to do this job for them. Perhaps the most troubling thing about calls for media regulation to protect children–especially when those calls are coming from conservative lawmakers or groups that otherwise stress individual responsibility over government intervention–is that it ignores the fact that parents have many better and more constructive alternatives to government regulation at their disposal. This study lays out these options–for ALL media sectors and technologies–in great detail. Also, the appendix to the paper also includes a “handy tip sheet” for parents searching for ways to combat objectionable media content in the home or keep kids safe online.
In striking down the Communications Decency Act in Reno v. ACLU, the Supreme Court declared that a law that places a “burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving” the same goal. This paper proves that many such “less restrictive alternatives” are available to parents today to help them shield their children’s eyes and ears from content they might find objectionable. Thus, we need not turn to Uncle Sam to play the role of surrogate parent.
The paper is attached above as a PDF file or can be found online here: http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/pops/pop13.9contenttools.pdf
If you’re interested in more on this subject, here’s a list of related PFF research:
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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.