The Wall Street journal has a debate between Fritz Attaway of the MPAA and law professor Wendy Seltzer about digital rights management. Frankly, I think Attaway needs a remedial course in reading comprehension. In her first post, Seltzer points to several examples of video innovations that are stifled by the DMCA: excerpting video content, playing DVDs on Linux computers, and building a video jukebox. Attaway responds by stating that there is “absolutely no evidence to support” the assertion that the DMCA stifles innovation. Well, what about the three examples that Seltzer just offered? Are those not evidence?
Seltzer tries again, pointing out that DRM will prevent consumers from using their legally purchased content in new ways. In the past, she pointed out, the creators of new devices like VCRs and TiVo’s didn’t have to ask permission before they were allowed to deploy their devices.
Attaway responds with a non-sequitur: “I think we are getting to the philosophical heart of the issue. You want to be able to take for free the intellectual property others invested their time, talent and money to create.” Nothing in Seltzer’s post said anything of the sort. She’s plainly talking about the freedom to make creative uses of a DVD or other media that one has legally purchased. Yet Attaway, bizarrely, seems to believe that if we allow people to play DVDs on their Linux computers, that people will stop buying DVDs.
I think the fundamental disagreement here is one about technology, not philosophy. Attaway believes that the flaws and restrictions imposed by DRM are temporary–kinks that will be worked out as more sophisticated technology is developed. If that were true, Attaway’s argument would have some merit. But the reality is just the opposite: as the media world becomes more complex, the flaws of DRM will only become more glaring. DRM is technological central planning. Centrally planned economies become less efficient as they grow more complex. For precisely the same reasons, centrally planned technologies perform worse as they become more complex.
Last month, former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote a funny post about network neutrality:
If the phone and cable companies get their way, it will take you five minutes to download this blog. In fact, you can forget blogs altogether. In fact, you can forget anything put into the Internet by small guys like me (literally and figuratively)…
The phone and cable companies want to charge content providers depending on how fast and reliably their content is delivered–so, say, eBay, Yahoo, and Google pay a bundle for first-class fast service while you and I and the other millions of small guys who want to put stuff up are shoved into the slowest of slow lanes because we can’t afford to pay the freight.
I wonder if Reich realizes his blog is hosted by Google.
The Washington Post reports today that “Virginia’s public and private colleges and universities soon will be required to submit the names and Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of students they accept each year to state police for cross-checking against sexual offender registries.” The law, recently signed by Gov. Tim Kaine, is aimed at tracking sex offenders. It “also requires Department of Motor Vehicles officials to turn over personal information to police any time a Virginian applies for a license or change of address.”
“I’ve got two kids in college right now,” said Kenneth W. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach), the bill’s chief sponsor in the state Senate. “You’re going to have a . . . hard time explaining to me why my daughter is living next door to a sexual offender. My guess is every parent out there would have the same expectation that I do.”
Since it doesn’t take more than a stolen laptop to put 2.2 million identities in jeopardy, and since one person’s Social Security number can be used fraudulently by up to 80 different people, I’m not sure I want my information spread any wider than it already has to be. And it’s not clear to me why I, an innocent (I assure you) private citizen is forced to get a background check before I can enroll in a private institution, which may otherwise not care about my background. If your daughter is living next to a ex-offender, it’s because that’s life. What’s next? Legislating safety scissors and circles of paper?
This morning, CBS announced it had reached a final agreement with Dan Rather terminating his contract and his 44-year relationship with that network. When reports of the impending break-up came of few days ago, the public reaction was surprise. Not surprise that he was leaving, but surprise that he was still around at all. It seems that since he left the anchor’s chair, Rather fell victim to forgotten-but-not-gone syndrome. Although still part of the 60 Minutes CBS team, his output was slight, with fewer shows airing than any other anchor there.
It wasn’t the ending Rather wanted. As I wrote two years ago, Rather aspired to Walter Cronkite status. Cronkite, Rather’s predecessor at CBS, was a national icon, a kindly figure who the nation looked up to. Rather never achieved that status. Not only was he a bit too eccentric, and openly ideological –but the role of broadcast anchor itself became more and more irrelevant during Rather’s tenure.
Rather’s final downfall was swift, being caught reporting as news–then defending beyond all reason–clearly forged documents pertaining to George Bush. There was no good excuse for his behavior–either he was actively involved in a fraud, or (perhaps even more damning given his self-image as a crack journalist) he failed as a reporter. As Rather himself might have put it, he was beaten like a rented mule. CBS, after a decent interval, gently pushed him out of Cronkites’ chair.
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A couple of weeks ago, Andrew noted that the usual suspects didn’t have a whole lot to say about the Pirate Bay shutdown. I don’t know anything about Swedish law, so I have no idea if their legal claims are plausible. But it seems at least possible that they are, and I I think the implications of that would be interesting.
A few years back most Americans ridiculed France for trying to tell Yahoo, and American company, not to make Nazi memorabilia available to their citizens. We said–correctly, I think–that France doesn’t have any jurisdiction over American web sites hosted in the United States, and that a French court certainly couldn’t override our First Amendment. Although sadly, Yahoo! ultimately buckled under pressure and banned Nazi memorabilia.
I hope the parallel to the Pirate Bay case is obvious. Now, I do think that in some cases we have a right to expect that other countries respect our copyright law. Russia’s AllOfMP3.com, for example, is plainly making their money by flouting American (and other Western nations’) copyright laws.
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The Wall Street Journal has a write up of Craigslist, the online classified site that is steadily taking over the world. The author seems bewildered by the Craigslist phenomenon, seeming to think there must be some kind of trick or hidden agenda at work:
“The Internet at large, and free classifieds in particular–and even beyond that, Craigslist free classifieds in particular–certainly pose challenges to the newspaper industry as far as being able to raise their profitability over time.” Many in newspaper publishing would consider that an understatement. But Mr. Buckmaster is sanguine: “The demise of the newspaper has been overstated.” Phew. I expel a nervous chuckle of relief. In Mr. Buckmaster’s view, newspapers would be better off being a little more Craigslist-like: Go private, eschew Wall Street’s demands for continually “goosing profitability” and give your readers what they want. Much trouble in the world comes, in Mr. Buckmaster’s view, from losing sight of that essential goal.
After we’ve retired back to the living room for coffee, Mr. Buckmaster allows that the world is perhaps not quite that simple. When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but–imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”
Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company”–more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too. But there are no free lunches, even if Craigslist–and the meal Mr. Buckmaster and Ms. Best provided for me–sometimes seem to come close.
The oft-repeated (especially by libertarians) view that there’s no such thing as a free lunch is actually nonsense. Civilization abounds in free lunches. Social cooperation produces immense surpluses that have allowed us to become as wealthy as we are. Craigslist is just an extreme example of this phenomenon, because it allows social cooperation on a much greater scale at radically reduced cost. Craigslist creates an enormous amount of surplus value (that is, the benefits to users vastly exceed the infrastructure costs of providing the service). For whatever reason, Craigslist itself has chosen to appropriate only a small portion of that value, leaving the vast majority to its users.
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The LA Times ran a good story today on how the House telecom bill–thanks to a last-minute amendment–may raise the price of Internet phone calls. The provision reaffirms state authority to require voice-over-Internet providers to pay into universal service funds and to pay access fees to wireline carriers. In so doing, the bill apparently overturns an FCC decision two years ago preempting the states from such matters.
The cost could be significant. According to the article, the additional subsidy payments could increase VoIP bills some 7 percent. Summarizing the reaction of the VoIP community, Jeff Pulver said of the move: “It got me to the point of absolute depression.”
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Following a report concluding that research on primates such as monkeys will continue to yield benefits into the future, Spain considers extending “human rights” to apes. Experimentation on apes is restricted in England and New Zealand.
This is very interesting stuff for classical liberal and libertarian rights theorists. On the one hand,
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Matt Yglesias channels Adam Thierer:
the media’s become less concentrated. They’re up to six giants from just four–General Electric, Disney, Time Warner, CBS (which I believe is the successor to Westinghouse), plus new entrants Fox, and Viacom. So that’s six.
Six is a reasonably small number, but compared to what? What do the top six American car companies control? Oh, right, there are only two. And only two operating system makers. And so on and so forth. The tendency in any field would be for the top six firms to control a large portion of the aggregate.
What’s more, the curious thing about these six media monopolists is that between them they control zero of America’s most-influential newspapers. Nobody, I hope, will deny that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are important elements of the media. And yet, they’re owned by three separate companies, each of them apart from the Big Six. Beyond the Big Six electronic media companies and the Big Three newspapers, there’s also Gannett which owns the high-circulation USA Today along with a boatload of smaller newspapers. And then there’s Tribune Media with The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, and other papers.
He notes that PBS and NPR offer credible alternatives to the mainstream media. And on top of all that, the Internet is rapidly expanding peoples’ access to the world’s media sources. And it’s easy to multiply these examples. Matt doesn’t mention C-SPAN, the Economist, political magazines like The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect and Reason, or radio talk shows–yet these too are all ways for viewers to get access to news and information.
In short, there’s more news and information available, from more different perspectives, in more different formats, than any one person could hope to consume–even if you live in the middle of nowhere. The reason that the Big Six have the market share they do, I suspect, is the same reason that Coke and Pepsi command the lion’s share of the beverage market: they cater toward mainstream tastes and so manage to meet the needs of the vast majority of ordinary viewers. For all the bitching that ordinary voters do about the mainstream media, most of them continue to watch it, despite the availability of many, many alternatives.
Reason‘s Ron Bailey has an interesting review of Al Gore’s new movie:
Gore has won the global warming debate–the world is warming as a consequence of human activity, chiefly the loading up of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Yet he feels that he must exaggerate the dangers by propounding implausible scenarios in which sea levels rise 20 feet by 2100. He pretends that the science is settled with regard to the effect of global warming on hurricanes. And he pushes a scientifically tenuous connection between the spread of diseases and global warming. These are little inconvenient truths that cut against his belief that global warming constitutes a climate emergency. On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we’ll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He’s a global warming exaggerator.
As he points out, the folks who denied the existence of global warming will have a credibility problems when it comes to the policy question about what, if anything, should be done to reverse the trend.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.