CNN famously made its mark during the first Gulf War, as its 24-hour, on-the-spot reporting brought that conflict into people’s homes in a way never done before, marking a revolution in TV news. A story in today’s Washington Post suggests that the current Lebanon war may mark another revolution in how people get information However, this time the change isn’t coming from a news organization, but from videos posted by countless individuals on youtube.com
Up till now, youtube has been known mostly as a place to watch home videos shot by others, and perhaps the odd Jon Stewart clip. But, the Post reports, in recent days it has taken on a more serious role. As the Post explains it: “In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video Dumpster for a global audience to share first-hand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds.”
While not likely to replace professional journalism, the amateur posts on youtube have a substantial audience. According to Robert Niles of USC’s Online Journalism Review: “in real numbers, I think any broadcast executive would consider it a huge audience–it’s just dispersed around the globe. It would probably challenge hourly ratings at NBC or CNN.”
A trend worth watching.
Heritage has just released a new paper by my colleague James Carafano, THF’s homeland security guru, on the federal role in emergency communications. The paper finds that throwing more money, or spectrum, emergency communications systems is not the answer. “The commercial space uses the spectrum about 20 times more efficiently than governments,” Carafano writes. “The spectrum licensed to federal, state, and local public safety users supports fewer than 3 million users across the U.S. In contrast, commercial operators (such as Sprint and T-Mobile) support about 80 million users in a comparable amount of spectrum.” Instead, he argues, policymakers should focus on:
– Scaling back bloated, bureaucratic programs and wasteful homeland security and interoperability grants;
– Focusing on developing capabilities to enhance regional information sharing and response to catastrophic disasters;
– Revising federal policies and laws to open dual-use spectrum for commercial and emergency management use, as well as facilitating the sharing of spectrum among local, state, and federal users;
-Setting national standards to promote open-architecture, non-proprietary systems that are compatible with commercial standards;
-Establishing services that can provide an emergency wide-area network wireless system to support existing responder communications equipment and emerging capabilities like VoIP; and
-Assigning specific missions and responsibilities to agencies for the implementation of critical policies.
Worth a read.
David Robinson, guest blogging at Freedom to Tinker, points out this fascinating preview at Engadget of Zune, Microsoft’s answer to the iPod/iTunes juggernaut. Engadget predicts that Microsoft will “buy out” iTunes switchers, scanning the user’s iTunes library and buying the users those same songs encoded in Zune’s DRM format.
Like Robinson, I hadn’t thought of this possibility. The recording industry almost certainly gave Microsoft a steep discount on song-repurchases. It’s conceivable they even let Microsoft do this for close to nothing, simply to undercut Apple’s market power and (consequently) its negotiating position vis-a-vis the labels. If a substantial fraction of music listeners are using Microsoft’s Zune service, that gives the labels a credible threat to walk away from the bargaining table if Apple plays hardball next time contract renewals come around.
As Robinson said, some of us in the anti-DMCA choir probably underestimated the potential of markets to undercut the monopoly created by the DMCA. The development arguably undermines the argument I made last year that the labels are giving away the store to Apple. However, I don’t think development eliminates the concerns over the DMCA by any means. The barriers to entry into the music business remain extraordinarily high. To do what Microsoft is doing here, you not only have to build an MP3 player and develop jukebox software, but you also have to sign deals with all the major labels. Even if we assume the labels are giving Microsoft the music for free, it’s unlikely that very many other companies have the resources to replicate Microsoft’s feat. A company that wanted to develop a portable music player without also building an online music store and negotiating with the labels is still out of luck.
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EFF has filed an amicus brief in the Perfect 10 v. Google appeal to the Ninth Circuit. The case focuses on whether an image search engine can be held liable for displaying thumbnails of copyrighted images that were posted on third-party web sites without permission of the copyright holder. Judge Matz’s decision appears to be in tension with the Kelly v. Arriba Soft decision, which found that search engine thumbnails are a fair use. Here’s EFF’s argument:
Copyright law grants to rightsholders a limited set of statutorily defined exclusive rights, supplemented by narrowly drawn, judge-made principles of secondary liability. That set of rights plainly reaches the infringing activities of websites that amass and post unauthorized copies of Perfect 10’s photographs. Unsatisfied with the remedies afforded by copyright law against these infringers, Perfect 10 and its supporting amici urge this Court to expand the reach of copyright law to the four corners of the digital universe, ensnaring everyone from the individual web surfer who comes across a Perfect 10 image online, to search engines like Google that index these images alongside billions of others on the Web. Like the District Court below, this Court should reject this effort to hold the whole world liable for the infringing acts of a few.
As I wrote back in February, Judge Matz’s fair use analysis is deeply flawed:
Google Image Search doesn’t give any particular preference to web sites that serve up AdSense ads. And AdSense serves up ads regardless of what search engine brought the user to the site. If Google cancelled Google Image Search altogether, there’s little reason to think AdSense would suffer financially–users would likely find the same pages using other search engines… Google Image Search and AdSense are unrelated products. It makes no sense to consider them as a single product for the purposes of fair use analysis. That should be obvious to anyone with substantial experience using the web. It seems like a reasonable assumption that Judge Matz isn’t the most Internet-savvy guy around.
In my college days, I majored in both journalism and political science, but I briefly flirted with the idea of a major in psychology as well. (Actually, I was just trying to extend my college partying days as long as possible but I ran out of money!) While I was briefly flirting with the idea of a psychology major, I took a psyc class that featured a brief discussion of a subject that would forever change the way I look at the world and media issues in particular: “third-person-effect hypothesis.” Simply stated, the hypothesis predicts that people tend to overestimate the influence of communications / media on the attitudes and behavior of others relative to themselves. For example, many people will see media “bias” where there is none (or very little) and they will often advocate a “re-tilting” of the news in their preferred direction. (Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, there’s plenty of research to back up the thesis.)
When I first read about this hypothesis, I experienced a profound personal epiphany; a real “ah-hah!” moment that helped me finally unlock the secret to why so many people alleged media bias where I personally saw none. Specifically, it helped me understand why good friends of mine on both the political Left and Right saw different forms of bias in the exact same news. As someone who was, and remains, rabidly independent (I’ve never voted for either major party in my life and I doubt I ever will), I was always fascinated by this. When I sat down with classmates, friends, roommates or others to watch the news, I’d witnessed endless bickering among them about supposed slant one way or the other. But, with a few exceptions, I never quite saw or heard that bias myself. I’m not saying that all news is perfectly unbiased, it’s just that a large percentage of the time it is not biased and yet people argue that it is, but in decidedly different ways and directions.
What explains this? The answer is “third-person-effect hypothesis” and “hostile media effect” theory. To explain, let me step back and begin by telling you what got me thinking about this again.
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Wired has a story about Tesla Motors, a company that’s been getting a lot of buzz lately, and is likely to get even more press when its cars launch next year. They’re launching an electric sports car. Whereas most electric cars in the past have been “punishment cars” focused on efficiency and cost at the expense of range and performance, Tesla has gone in the opposite direction, targeting wealthy buyers and focusing on building an electric car that can compete with hgih-end sports car. It can apparently do 0-60 MPH in about 4 seconds.
Their plan is to build the sports car first, and then if that’s successful they’ll branch out and make lower-cost, family-oriented vehicles. They seem to believe that Detroit has largely focused on squeezing an electric motor into a gas-powered car, and that you can squeeze considerable efficiency out of an electric car if you design it from the ground up to run off of batteries. Given the incredible improvements in laptop battery life over the last decade, it seems like this might very well be true.
I’m not convinced that they can make the things competitive with traditional gas-powered cars, though. I see three problems, all related to fundamental properties of gasoline as opposed to batteries. First gasoline has phenomenally high energy density. That is, a kilogram of gasoline contains far more energy than an equivalent weight of even the best batteries. As a result, a lot more space in your electric car has to be taken up by batteries than the volume of the gas tank in an ordinary internal combustion engine car. You can see the batteries in their diagram of the Roadster: they run the width of the car and appear to take up as much room as a row of seats.
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On May 8, 1998, Paramount Pictures released a summer blockbuster in which a comet was discovered on a collision course with Earth. A team of astronauts is dispatched to destroy the comet with nuclear weapons before it hits Earth. After some setbacks, the astronauts do save the planet from total destruction, but they lose their lives in the effort.
On July 1, 1998, Touchstone Pictures released a summer blockbuster in which an asteroid was discovered on a collision course with Earth. A team of oil drillers is dispatched to destroy the asteroid with a nuclear weapon before it hits Earth. After some setbacks, the drillers do save the planet from destruction, but one of them loses his life in the effort.
The first film, Deep Impact cost $75 million to make and brought in $349 million worldwide. The second, Armageddon cost $140 million to make and brought in $553 million.
One of the assumptions behind the pro-platform rights argument I laid out last week was that increasing the rewards for platform creation lead firms to engage in socially-beneficial R&D spending. The hope is that increasing the returns to platform-creation will stimulate new R&D spending, which will in turn lead to innovations that expand the size of the economic pie. And, we hope, the pie should grow enough to offset the social costs of platform rights that I’ve laid out in previous posts.
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It’s a small step to be sure, but I still think it’s pretty exciting that Sony BMG has allowed Yahoo! Music to release a Jessica Simpson song sans digital rights management. Yahoo’s Dave Goldberg has been a rare voice of sanity on DRM over the last few months, and it looks like his persistence may be paying off. Or maybe music execs have been reading my column from last November arguing that they’re handing control over their industry to Steve Jobs.
It remains to be seen if this is just a one-off publicity stunt or the start of a wider trend. But as Apple continues to twist the screws on the labels and as it becomes ever more obvious that FairPlay isn’t stopping a single person from downloading the music they want form illicit file-sharing sites, even music industry executives may come to realize the increasingly obvious point that DRM benefits Apple and Microsoft, not them.
Here at the Technology Liberation Front, we’ve just undergone a review and reshuffling of our topic categories. Several under-utilized categories were removed or consolidated. In addition, we’ve added several new ones:
Broadband and Neutrality Regulation
Competition Policy (Amazingly, we didn’t have an antitrust category)
Copyright
DMCA, DRM, and Piracy
Open Source, Open Standards, and Peer Production
Patents (these last four replaced the old “Intellectual Property” category)
Wireless and Spectrum Policy
Media Regulation (These last two replaced the old Media/Wireless category)
We’re still working on re-categorizing some of the posts that belong in the new categories, so some of the category archives are still pretty sparse. The re-categorization of old posts should be done within a couple of weeks.
Julian points out an analysis by Orin Kerr of Judge Walker’s ruling that the EFF lawsuit against AT&T can go forward despite the government’s attempts to have it dismissed on national security grounds:
It’s a very long opinion, but here’s the gist of it: Judge Walker rejected DOJ’s argument that the suit had to be dismissed outright under the state secrets privilege. Walker ruled that enough of the various programs had been acknowledged by the government and AT&T that the existence of the programs wasn’t a state secret. I assume an appeal will be coming soon, but in the meantime the case will be set to go on to the discovery stage. Notably, the state secrets privilege will continue to play a key role at that stage: the gist of Walker’s opinion is that he’ll scrutinize each discovery request for privilege rather than dismiss the case outright at the beginning.
Kerr also notes this comment from the judge: “AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal.” It’s in a parenthetical “note,” and so it’s just dicta, but that’s still a PR victory for EFF.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.