Mike Linksvayer points out the release of Songbird 0.2, an early preview of an open source iTunes competitor based on the Mozilla code base. And he predicts that Songbird (or a product like it) will do to Apple what the Web originally did to AOL and other proprietary online services in the 1990s:
Someone mentioned to me today that if the web were like iTunes you could only connect to msn.com, which reminded me of speculation that earlier aggressive intellectual protectionism online could have led to a proprietary cul de sac in online services. In that post I said without explanation that aggressive protectionism is being allowed to kill or stunt online music. People have been noting for awhile that protectionism enabled iTunes’ dominance, or as Techdirt put it “How The Recording Industry’s Obsession On DRM Made Apple So Powerful.”
I’ve downloaded Songbird and played with it a bit, and it is pretty impressive in some ways. However, I don’t think Apple will have any reason to sweat until they implement iPod integration. Songbird has a “devices” menu, so I assume that’s coming. It’s also a little strange that they don’t offer MP3 ripping functionality, given that some of its developers previously worked on WinAmp.
But what they’ve implemented so far is quite impressive. I hope eMusic is talking to them about tighter eMusic/Songbird integration, as this would give eMusic customers a much cleaner way to buy music than the current clunky “download manager.” And of course Songbird would benefit from having a music store as tightly integrated as iTunes is with the iTunes Store.
It appears that some of this functionality is available via extensions, but if they want to put a serious dent in Apple’s market share, they’re going to have to bundle the most important extensions seamlessly with the main product.
Radley Balko at The Agitator notes that Antigua may retaliate against U.S. anti-Internet gambling law (already found to violate World Trade Organization rules) by refusing to enforce U.S. intellectual property law:
There’s no appetite for slapping trade sanctions on US goods; that would hurt Antiguan companies and consumers far more than Americans. Instead, the country may refuse to enforce American patents and trademarks. This would make it possible for Antiguan-based companies to produce knock-offs of American intellectual property, like video and music recordings or computer software. Such a tactic would get the attention of major US firms like Microsoft Corp. and entertainment titan Time Warner Inc. It would also put tiny Antigua’s trade war against the United States on front pages around the world.
Antigua, land of the free . . . downloads?! That may be too free for some people’s tastes, or the wrong kind of free, but it’s interesting to see how the digital world / information economy disrupts traditional power arrangements.
Ars reports on the NBCU 2.0 initiative, NBC Universal’s bid to cut costs and diversify into more cutting-edge media formats in a bid to keep up with the pace of change:
NBC plans to slash costs on prime-time programming by no longer producing expensive comedies and dramas for the first hour of prime time (8pm in the Eastern and Pacific time zones, 7pm Central and Mountain). Instead, expect to see more of the reality TV we’ve become accustomed to. Think more “Deal or No Deal” and less “Friday Night Lights.”
NBC will also consolidate the news bureaus for its three networks (NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC) and network-owned affiliates on the east and west coasts. Workforce reductions go hand-in-hand with consolidation, with the network expecting to cut 700 jobs–about 5 percent of its workforce–over the next two years. Between layoffs, news consolidation, and other cost-cutting measures, the network hopes to chop $750 million in costs by the end of 2008.
This is a classic example of the long tail thesis in action: NBC’s prime-time programming are the “blockbusters” of the TV world, and they’re bleeding viewers as more and more alternative programming is created and distributed without NBC’s overhead.
I’m impressed by the decisiveness of NBC’s management. As NBC Universal television group CEO Jeff Zucker puts it: “we have to recognize that the changes of the next five years will dwarf the changes of the last fifty.” These guys know full well that their core business is going to fall off a cliff once Internet-based video distribution matures, and they appear to be doing their best to assure that’s not the only card in their hands when it happens.
I expect we’ll see a lot more stories like this in the coming years. Newspapers, record labels, and Hollywood studios are all facing a future with hundreds of nimble competitors with fixed costs an order of magnitude smaller than theirs. I think companies like NBC that recognize the threat now and act decisively to cut costs and move into new markets will find themselves much better positioned a decade hence than the companies that try to shoehorn their 20th century business models into 21st century markets.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week, I consider the patent dispute between Qualcomm and Broadcom over this patent. Here’s the abstract:
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Mike Masnick points out that the British are now considering extending copyright to 95 years, as the United States did in 1998. I’ll heartily concur with Mike’s analysis:
On archiving, he brushes off the concern of the library by suggesting that the copyright owners can do a fine job archiving everything on their own, and that there’s really no need for librarians to worry about such petty little things. “The British Library isn’t the only archivist in town. The idea that if it weren’t for the British Library no archiving would be going on is false.” However, if it’s a really big concern, he might, possibly be willing to carve out an exception. Of course, he’s missing the fact that these firms are archiving content only based on commercial viability, leaving plenty of other works out in the cold. A large part of the debate is over how to archive “orphan works” that have no direct commercial value, but cannot be copied due to copyright restrictions. Because commercial entities are only interested in content that has commercial value, they’re not archiving the rest of it. This is just one of the reasons why orphan works laws make sense.
The bigger issue, though, is copyright extension, and again, the guy from BPI is really far off-base. The purpose of copyright is to put in place the incentives for people to create creative works that they might not have done otherwise. Once that work is created, it’s hard to see any reason to increase the incentive. After all, the work has already been created. However, here, the BPI representative totally twists the purpose of copyrights around: “Copyrights are the asset bases of British record companies. If we enhance the asset base, we can go on to make other, more exciting entrepreneurial investment decisions. If we increase the length of the term, we increase the value of these assets.” …That’s not the purpose of copyright at all.
Indeed it’s not. This is a good example of Ed Felten’s Pizzaright Principle. More fundamentally, it’s an example of Frederic Bastiat’s broken window fallacy in action. Obviously, if you change the law to enhance the profitability of a particular industry, that industry may invest the increased profits in beneficial ways. But that money isn’t created by the government–it’s taken out of the pockets of consumers who would otherwise have spent the money on other products like iPods or tennis shoes. Apple or Nike are just as likely to invest their increased profits in beneficial ways.
Wired has an article presenting David Wagner and Ed Felten’s recommendations for more secure voting machines. Their specific proposals–voter-verified paper trails; simpler, publicly available source code; ditch removable memory cards–all sound sensible to me. But I think it’s striking that in summary, what they advocate is transforming voting machines into glorified printers:
Touch-screens are easy to use and are flexible enough to accommodate disabled voters and multiple languages. Optical-scan devices provide reliable paper trails.
We recommend a third alternative that combines the best attributes of both–a ballot marking machine, such as one made by Election Systems and Software.
These devices let voters make their choices on a touch-screen. But instead of directly recording the votes digitally onto a memory card, the machine prints the votes onto a full-size paper ballot. Voters or election officials then place the completed ballots onto an optical-scan reader (.pdf), where the votes are recorded digitally.
I suppose this would marginally reduce the error rate by ensuring that all paper ballots are marked clearly. But on the other hand, more complexity means more potential for failure. Printers jam, software has bugs, power cords get tripped over, etc. And even if the machines work flawlessly, it’s not clear to me that it would be worth spending millions of dollars just to save voters the trouble of marking their own ballots.
Update: Felten points out that these are Wired‘s recommendations after talking with Wagner and Felten, and so not all of the recommendations reflect Wagner or Felten’s personal views. My mistake.
This is an example of exactly the sort of sting operation that Hance and I have been saying we need a lot more of to solve the online child predator problem. Law enforcement officials have arrested 125 people nationwide as a result of a massive sting operation to root out Internet child pornography. According to the Reuters report: “Those arrested are accused of using a commercial Web site to access videos and images of hard-core pornography involving children as young as infants engaged in sexual activities with adults, according to federal officials.”
“When I say ‘hard-core’ pornography, I am talking about child pornography that includes images of children as young as six months involved in bondage and sodomy,” U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said. “This type of depraved conduct is something a civilized society cannot tolerate.”
Amen to that. This now becomes a good case study to see if our government is really serious about this issue. Will our government do the right thing and put these scumbags behind bars for a long, long time, or will they give them a slap on the wrist and let them walk after just a few years of hard time, meaning they’ll be out on the streets and behind keyboards again soon?
As always, I say lock ’em up and throw away the key. Again, that’s the more sensible approach than the current move to regulate the Internet and social networking sites through intrusive age verification schemes or data retention mandates.
I am shocked (shocked!) to hear that politics is interfering with Google and EarthLink’s muni wi-fi plans in San Fran. On his blog, Davis Freeberg discusses how a bunch of San Fran “nuts and fruits” (his term, not mine) have turned out at planning meetings to make silly demands of Google and EarthLink before they are allowed to launch service:
“Some of the crazier demands that were suggested at the meeting included a “requirement” for every San Francisco renter to sign a lease addendum with their landlords before being allowed to install a WiFi card in their PC, forcing Google to agree to transport kids back and forth to the Zoo in their Google busses and a requirement for EarthLink to pay the electrical costs for running computers in order to prevent brownouts.
… Despite the announcement made last April free WiFi instead has turned out to be vaporware thus far with Google and Earthlink discovering that dealing with the local San Francisco political scene is about as fun as being set up on a blind date with Mike Tyson after being rubbed down in meat sauce.”
Over at TechDirt, Mike has more coverage of the unfolding fiasco. And the latest issue of MIT Technology Review includes a story by Mark Williams on the San Fran wi-fi follies entitled “Golden Gate Lark.” I found the concluding paragraph of his report particularly interesting because it goes beyond politics and gets to the real reason I think most muni wi-fi projects are doomed to fail–they will probably be obsolete before they are even launched:
“In January 2005, the city of Orlando pulled the plug on its free downtown Wi-Fi service because only 27 people a day were accessing it, at a cost to the city of $1,800 a month, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Though San Francisco’s potential network might be larger, that only makes questions of design more urgent: the city could discover too late that its network was too expensive, too spotty, or already dated.”
Perhaps the most important misleading claim made in Bill Moyers’s informercial for Internet regulation is the notion that we’re in imminent danger of telcos using their control over the “last mile” to influence the direction of political debates. Moyers’s format didn’t allow him to go into the argument in much detail, but fortunately Yochai Benkler does on page 156:
[The network owner, D, has] the power to shape A’s information environment by selectively exposing A to information in the form of communications from others. Most commonly, we might see this where D decides that B will pay more if all infrastructure is devoted to permitting B to communicate her information to A and C, rather than any of it used to convey As message to C. D might then refuse to carry A’s message to C and permit only B to communicate to A and C. The point is that from A’s perspective, A is dependent on D’s decisions as to what information can be carried on the infrastructure, among whom, and in what directions. To the extent of that dependence, A’s autonomy is compromised. We might call the requirement that D can place on A as a precondition to using the infrastructure an “influence exaction.”
Sometimes, highly styized examples like this can illuminate important points by removing extraneous details. In this case, Benkler has done just the opposite: he’s abstracted away all the real-world characteristics of the web that are relevant to this issue. When we add them back in, it becomes obvious that this argument doesn’t work.
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Bill Moyers has an incredibly one-sided special on PBS tonight on telecom policy. So far, about halfway through the program, the anti-regulatory side has been represented by Mike McCurry and one Republican Congressman. McCurry was billed as a lobbyist for the telecom industry, and his every sentence was followed by a rebuttal from a pro-regulatory representative. The pro-regulatory side has gotten roughly a dozen representatives, none of whom were labeled as lobbyists for Google or Microsoft. They got lengthy interviews consisting mostly of softball questions.
Astonishingly, Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America cited the Interstate Commerce Act, which imposed nondiscrimination rules on the railroad industry, as a model for network neutrality regulation. As I explained in the New York Times back in August, they’d be wise to pick a different example:
After President Grover Cleveland appointed Thomas M. Cooley, a railroad ally, as its first chairman, the commission quickly fell under the control of the railroads, gradually transforming the American transportation industry into a cartel. By 1935, when it was given oversight of the trucking industry, the commission was restricting competition and enabling price increases throughout virtually the entire surface transportation industry. Decades later, in 1970, a report released by a Ralph Nader group described the commission as “a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market.”
Of course, viewers of Moyers’s show didn’t hear that side of the story, as they didn’t bother to ask any critics of regulation to respond to Cooper’s arguments.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.