I would say this month’s movie store battle came out a draw. iTunes movie prices range from $9.99 for older selections to $14.99 for new releases after the first week (for reasons that aren’t clear to me, you save $2 if you buy movies the first week they’re released). People use the familiar iTunes interface and can play the movies on their iPods. And early next year, Apple will be releasing a $299 product code-named iTV, a set top box that nicely solves the “last foot” problem by streaming movies wirelessly to your TV.
The big downside, though, is that Jobs apparently only succeeded in getting \ one of the big Hollywood studios, Disney, to sign onto the service at launch. Perhaps his seat on Disney’s board made the negotiating process easier. So as Ars noted last week, the studios have split. If you want Disney movies, you’ve gotta sign up with iTunes. If you want anybody else’s movies, you’ve gotta sign up with Amazon.
Hopefuly this situation won’t continue. It would be awfully irritating if you had to buy iTV to watch your iTunes/Disney movie, and some other device to stream your Amazon Unbox movies to your TV.
Update: It’s worth noting that nothing was said about DVD burning, which presumably means it’s not going to be allowed. So your options will be to watch the video on your tiny iPod screen or shell out $299 for iTV.
Update 2: Commenters are pointing out several other ways you can get view content: on your computer screen, or using an A/V cable to hook your iPod up to your TV. Both excellent points.
Randy Picker has a great dissection of the Unbox licensing agreement. He finds three notable (mis)features: first, the software reserves to right to phone home to look for software updates and enforce the terms of the DRM software. Second, if you uninstall the software, Amazon reserves the right to delete all of your purchased movies and terminate your right to watch them. And finally, Amazon reserves the right to change your rights under the EULA unilaterally.
As Prof. Picker notes, these terms are not likely to be a big hit with consumers:
I suspect my tone sounds a tad hostile but I don’t really mean it that way. For better or worse, this is exactly the design we should anticipate with digital rights management software and therein lies the central market conundrum for DRM. Indeed, I am surprised that folks are surprised by the design. It may be sensible for the law to validate DRM as it does in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as I have argued before, but that is a far cry from saying the consumers will embrace it. The law should facilitate sales of purple shirts with pink and yellow polka dots, but no one should buy them.
Given that Amazon intends to support both online sales and rentals, it either needs to implement built-in expiration or some sort of phoning home to the mothership. The rental structure contemplates a 24-hour window in which to watch the download and a 30 day period in which to start watching.
I’m surprised that he’s surprised that people are surprised. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself) I’ll explain why below the fold.
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My friends over at the Center for Democracy and Technology have just launched an important new website entitled NetDemocracyGuide.org. The site aims to provide the creators of blogs and other Internet sites and services information about what their rights are in light of stepped-up Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulations in the wake of new campaign finance laws (McCain-Feingold). [See this, this, and this for some background.]
CDT’s new site assures us that:
“The new campaign finance rules for the Internet leave the vast majority of uncompensated citizen-initiated election activities on the Internet free from any regulation. With few exceptions, you may develop websites, blog, e-mail campaign material, raise money, and collaborate with your friends on election related activities online without worrying about running afoul of the rules. Campaign finance obligations kick in only in very limited circumstances – primarily where payments are made to place advertisements and other communications on third party blogs and websites.”
That’s great but I remain concerned and think that the empire still plans to strike back. Moreover, the very fact that a site like this has to exist at all is a little bit scary. The cyber-citizenry should not have to live in fear of over-zealous FEC regulators or members of Congress who will increasingly be scrutinizing online speech for supposedly “illegal” forms of political advocacy. Remain vigilant and monitor the new CDT site for updates regarding your blogging rights!
Patricia Dunn, the chairman of HP’s board, is resigning. The news comes jut a couple of weeks after the public learned that she had used an illegal technique called “pretexting” to obtain the phone records of her fellow board members and nearly a dozen journalists.
So when a corporate executive illegally obtains the phone records of 2 dozen people in order to spy on them, she’s forced to resign in a matter of weeks. On the other hand, when a high-ranking government official does the same thing to as many as 200 million people, he gets a promotion. What’s wrong with this picture?
Chris Anderson was nice enough to send me a review copy of his new book, The Long Tail, which has been storming the best-seller lists. So far (a third of the way through) the book lives up to the hype: it’s a quick read that’s packed with interesting stories and insights about the changing rules of the information economy. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, you should.
For those who haven’t yet encountered Anderson’s work, he argues that by reducing the costs of distributing information, the Internet has radically expanded the set of products that are economically viable. A big Wal-Mart might have 5,000 CDs on its shelves, but at the iTunes Music Store, I can choose from among hundreds of thousands of albums. Anderson dubs these less-popular works the “long tail” of music, and he demonstrates that while each of these “misses” aren’t commercially significant by themselves, when you add them up, they comprise a significant part of the total demand for music. Anderson demonstrates that the same phenomenon can be found everywhere you look: Amazon makes a substantial fraction of its book revenue from books that can’t be found in any Borders. A substantial fraction of Netflix rentals can’t be found in any Blockbuster.
Anderson’s book explores the implications of this shift. He argues that once consumers have the option of wandering far from the beaten path of mainstream hits, many of them discover stuff they like a lot better than the mainstream fare. Now that “long tail” products are readily available, the demand for them is growing, as more and more consumers find new products they never would have found in a pre-Internet age. This, in turn represents a serious threat to the hit-dominated culture of incumbent content companies, whose businesses are carefully tuned to cranking out mainstream fare that will appeal to the broadest possible audience. The upshot is that over time, the tail will be more an more important, transforming our culture from the homogenous, hit-dominated world of the 20th Century to a decentralized culture with thousands of micro-niches of varying sizes. In short, Anderson argues that the blockbuster isn’t an inevitable feature of modern media, but rather is an artifact of the centralized distribution technologies of the 20th Century.
I don’t have any real quarrel with that thesis. But “what he said” doesn’t make for an interesting blog entry, so below the cut, I’ll offer a quick criticism.
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CNet has a harsh review of Amazon’s new video download service:
I left work after that and rebooted my laptop at home. That’s when the real trouble began. I noticed that the Amazon player had launched itself. Annoying. I looked in the program for a preference to stop it from launching itself, and there was none. Typical. So I went to msconfig and unchecked Amazon Unbox so that it would definitely not launch itself at start-up. When I rebooted, it was no longer there. However, my firewall warned me that a Windows service (ADVWindowsClientService.exe) was trying to connect to the Net. I clicked More Info in the firewall alert and found it was Amazon Unbox. Downright offensive. It still was launching a Net-connection process that even msconfig apparently couldn’t stop. Forget it. That’s not the behavior of good software. I went to uninstall it.
After the Install Shield launched and I chose uninstall, I got a login screen for my Amazon account. I just wanted to uninstall it. I shouldn’t have to log in to my account to do that. So I canceled the login, and the uninstall failed. I tried that three times, and it failed each time. Finally I gave up and logged in and the uninstall finished.
So, in summary, to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can’t burn to DVD and can’t watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it? No way. Sorry, Amazon. I love a lot of what you do, but I will absolutely not recommend this service. Try again.
As Ed Felten has explained, it’s not a coincidence that DRM software tends to act like spyware.
Via Patri Friedman, there’s a controversy brewing over the boundaries of online privacy. Ryan Singel at the Wired blog has a good summary:
A guy who identifies himself as Jason Fortuny, a 30 year old network administrator, posted a graphic ad on Seattle’s Craigslist, pretending to be a woman wanting some BDSM sex.
Not surprisingly, many men responded, many with photos and more than a few with pics of their genitals.
Some used their work accounts, provided their real names and gave out their cellphone numbers. One looks to be a contractor for Microsoft, while another used a .mil address to reply.
Fortuny, whose MySpace profile says he likes to “push people’s buttons” then posted all the photos and correspondence on what may be the web’s lamest wiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica.
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As I mentioned back in July, Tim Carney was kind enough to send me a review copy of his new book, The Big Ripoff. With dozens of example, Tim does an excellent job of documenting just how frequently Big Business and Big Government are in bed together.
I particularly liked chapter 7, “Regulators and Robber Barons,” which is chock full of real-world examples of regulatory capture. Carney demonstrates that much of the time, the standard media story of big government pushing regulations on businesses and businesses resisting them is wrong. In many cases, what happens is that established businesses argue in favor of regulations that they perceive as hurting their competitors (often smaller competitors) more than themselves. For example, in 2001, the largest biotech companies lobbied for increased FDA scrutiny of biotech crops which, as the FDA’s own proposed rule acknowledged, would have a disproportionate impact on smaller biotech companies that lacked the resources to jump through the FDA’s hoops. He tells the story of FedEx, an upstart cargo carrier who in the 1970s was prevented from expanding by government regulations that were strongly supported by the Flying Tigers, the then-dominant air cargo company. And he discusses the controversy over “a la carte” cable regulation, which most of the cable industry opposed, but which CableVision–a company that had already invested in the equipment to offer a la carte services–lobbied for. Carney argues that CableVision calculated that imposing a la carte mandates would hurt its competitors more than it would hurt itself.
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A quick recap and then some thoughts. As part of the digital TV transition, broadcasters will return spectrum they currently use in the 700 MHz band to the federal government. Congress decided that 24 MHz of that returned spectrum will be given to public safety agencies and the rest (36 MHz, I believe 60 MHz) will be auctioned.
The system by which spectrum is doled out to, and used by, public safety agencies is broken. If you or I want mobile communications, we don’t file for an FCC license or build our own towers, we simply go to a wireless carrier who has a comparative advantage and economies of scale and buy capacity from them. Public safety agencies, on the other hand, build their own infrastructure, which, as Thomas Hazlett has said, is much like “shipping each police department tons of steel, plastic and rubber to make them responsible for constructing their own patrol cars.” Not only is that inefficient, but because they don’t often coordinate, their different systems are incompatible.
Nextel founder Morgan O’Brien’s new venture, Cyren Call, recently filed a petition with FCC that proposes creating a nationwide, completely interoperable wireless network that could be used by public safety users. To help finance it, private users would also be sold capacity on the network, but would be bumped off in case of emergency to give public safety users priority. The catch, however, is that Cyren Call’s plan calls for this network to be built not on the 24 MHz of spectrum set aside by Congress for public safety, but on 30 MHz of the spectrum slated for auction, which Cyren Call wants (Congress, presumably) to give free and clear to a national “public safety broadband trust.”
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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.