Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
This is a Red Hat marketing video, but I think it’s pretty cool:
I’ve written about this in the past: in the long run, open systems tend to triumph over closed ones. I don’t think that Red Hat will necessarily be the open system that conquers the OS market. Personally, I’m rooting for the increasingly-open Mac OS X. But sooner or later, the inefficiencies of creating large software products using a centralized, Soviet development model will render that model unsustainable.
News outlets are fascinated with the news business, so quite a few stories have been flying around the last few days about the Gannett newspaper chain’s decision to use citizen journalists.
Writes the Washington Post, for example:
Gannett is attempting to grab some of the Internet mojo of blogs, community e-mail groups and other ground-up news sources to bring back readers and fundamentally change the idea of what newspapers have been for more than a century. . . .
The most intriguing aspect of Gannett’s plan is the inclusion of non-journalists in the process, drawing on specific expertise that many journalists do not have. In a test at Gannett’s newspaper in Fort Myers, Fla., the News-Press, from readers such as retired engineers, accountants and other experts was solicited to examine documents and determine why it cost so much to connect new homes to water and sewer lines. The newspaper compiled the data and wrote a number of reader-assisted articles. As a result, fees were cut and an official resigned.
It’s all quite reminiscent of Friedrich Hayek’s articulation of how the price system turns local knowledge into a useful form and thus better organizes human action than any centrally planned system.
The blogosphere (writ large) can and often does surface relevant knowledge better than any group of reporters, no matter how smart or dedicated. Gannett is wise to recognize this and incorporate superior local knowledge-gathering into its business model.
To make it a copyright trifecta today, here’s an interesting story about ambiguity in how copyright applies to RSS feeds. Does merely offering an RSS feed imply that anyone can take the feed and repurpose it on another site? Many “splogs” (spam blogs) aggregate unsuspecting RSS feeds to attract keyword-driven traffic and thus make money with Adsense.
EFF’s Fred Won Lohman says, “Frankly, until there is some case law on this or related issues, we simply can’t be sure of the answers to these questions.” IP prof Eric Goldman says “In my mind, there’s no question that a blogger grants an implied license to the content in an RSS feed. However, because it’s implied, I’m just not sure of the license terms.”
I’m not sure how an RSS feed is different from any other content on the web. Unless text on a site makes it clear that a feed is available to be used any way you’d like, why would should we presume that the owner is giving up any rights? Sure, RSS is XML, which makes it easy for others to repurpose your content, and presumably you wouldn’t be publishing easy-to-repurpose XML unless you intended others to do that. However, the most prevalent consumer application of RSS are newsreaders, so I think it’s much more reasonable to assume that personal news aggregation sites publish RSS. As far as copyright is concerned, I don’t see how this kind of use is any different than browsing content on the web.
Some sites, like the New York Times, offer RSS feeds with special instructions about using them on your own site. As long as that’s not the case, the usual web norms (increasingly accepted by courts) should apply: copying even large chunks of content with attribution is fair use (a la Google News or Eyebeam’s reBlog), taking entire sites wholesale is not.
Glen Whitman wonders why karaoke manufacturers record their own versions of hit songs rather than taking the originals and stripping out the vocals. The result is a nice summary of the law of copyright as it applies to covers and compulsory licensing. Glen’s conclusion:
Here’s your choice as a karaoke producer: You can use your own musicians and sound technicians to recreate the work, and then pay a few cents per song (multiplied by the number of copies made). Or you can use the original track and strip out the vocals; but in order to do so, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, with all the transaction costs and probably higher price that would entail.
Is this system efficient? On the one hand, it’s clearly a waste of resources to hire musicians and sound technicians to reproduce works that already exist. In addition, the perceived quality will generally be lower than the original, since karaoke singers generally want something as close to the original as possible. On the other hand, extending the property rule to cover indirect duplication would create a hold-out problem: copyright owners could demand high prices for the right to create karaoke tracks. Real resources would be wasted on the negotiation process; worse, if negotiations ever broke down, some great songs might never get converted to karaoke form.
A Wikipedia critic claims that plagiarism is rampant on the site:
Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.’s search engine. He removed matches in which another site appeared to be copying from Wikipedia, rather than the other way around, and examples in which material is in the public domain and was properly attributed. Brandt ended with a list of 142 articles, which he brought to Wikipedia’s attention. The site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, acknowledged that plagiarized passages do occasionally slip in but he dismissed Brandt’s findings as exaggerated.
It seems to me that there’s some ambiguity here between plagiarism and copyright infringement. Some of the articles were determined to be “OK because copied passages came from the public domain.” That’s a defense against copyright infringement, but not against plagiarism. This confusion is intensified by the final paragraph of the article:
Editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked. Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark’s entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: “Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933.” The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.
Aren’t government documents automatically placed in the public domain? If so, isn’t the remedy simply to include an attribution that the material came from the state of Wyoming’s website?
Techdirt is reporting that voting machines in California, manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems, allows you to cast multiple votes if the machines are placed in “manual mode.” Apparently the machines emit a “loud beep” when the “manual mode” button is pressed, but that hardly strikes me as an adequate safeguard, especially given that poll workers often receive limited training.
I’ve been beating up on Diebold lately, but the fundamental problem isn’t Diebold-specific. The problem is simply that e-voting is needlessly complex (and therefore error-prone) and inherently insecure. That will continue to be true no matter who’s manufacturing the machines.
Here’s what I’ve been waiting for since the day I bought my Microsoft XBOX 360. If these rumors are true, Microsoft could soon be making downloadable high-definition movies available via its XBOX Live / XBOX Marketplace service. You’ll need a pretty fast Internet connection, of course, but luckily I do via Verizon’s outstanding FIOS (fiber) service. I currently download all sorts of HD movie trailers and game demos via the XBOX Marketplace and they look great and work perfectly. I can just leave my XBOX running overnight and order up a bunch of content and it’s all sitting there when I wake up in the morning. Or I can just download that content while I’m playing games and the system notifies me once the clips and demos have finished downloading.
So, it’s only natural that Microsoft would want to take the next step and allow users to download entire movies at some point. This would be a welcome alternative to the somewhat cumbersome MovieLink and CinemaNow systems that I’ve looked into. They don’t have much HD material on their services.
Microsoft will also be willing to work with the studios to ensure secure delivery and proper compensation, so I don’t see any copyright concerns here. Importantly, however, the XBOX 360 does not have HDMI or DVI digital outputs, only analog component video connections. Consequently, some users are still concerned that studios might down-res HD video content in the future via the “image contraint token” copy protection scheme. So far the studios have not felt the need to do that, however. But they might in the future if illegal redistribution of copyrighted content becomes a bigger concern. Right now, it’s just too hard to pirates to move big high-def files around on current generation networks, so it’s not a big deal yet. Read this IGN.com story for more details.
Regardless, I hope Microsoft makes this happen, and soon. I have already pre-ordered Microsoft’s upcoming HD-DVD sidecar ($199) from Amazon and it is due to be delivered in a few weeks. It will play next-generation movies of the HD-DVD format, but that still doesn’t give me a Blu-Ray solution. So, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to download all my HD movies via my XBOX Live connection in the future instead of having to purchase a Blu-Ray player.
Now it looks like I’ll next need to go buy that rumored 100GB hard drive for the XBOX if MS makes it! That 20-gig drive I’ve got now won’t be able to hold too many HD movie downloads.
Yesterday the FCC ruled that the Massachusetts Airport Authority cannot prevent Continental from putting up a Wi-Fi antenna in its Logan Airport lounge. Some folks, such as Julie Ask of Jupiter, have see this ruling as validating the “no one owns it” character of unlicensed spectrum. As I’ve argued before, unlicensed spectrum works in part because it is used consistent with physical property rights. This is why Ask goes on to say that she “dread[s] the day that a Muni network is overlayed or my neighbors set up 802.11n.” This particular case is actually about property and competition.
In recent blogs, I’ve been documented the troubling reports of government losing laptops and compromising private information. And as I mentioned in another report, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), the Chairman of the committee, has introduced H.R. 6163, the “Federal Agency Data Breach Protection Act” to try to get this problem under control, although the legislation would really do nothing of the sort.
Sadly, there’s more news to report on this front.
Via Slashdot, Diebold is pissed off about HBO’s new documentary “Hacking Democracy.” They say it’s full of inaccuracies. For example:
The first of these material errors is the statement that Diebold tabulated more than 40 percent of the votes cast in the 2000 Presidential election. Diebold was not in the electronic voting business in 2000. Diebold purchased Global Election Systems in 2002, but Global had at the time only eight percent of the market.
Oh wait, it turns out that they haven’t actually seen the film. But they say the promotional materials on HBO’s website suggest the film contains these errors. Of course, they couldn’t be bothered to provide a URL or an in-context quote of the claims in question, so for all I know Diebold is wildly misrepresenting what it says on the website, which could be different from what the documentary says.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
