Wikipedia, Whipping Boy

by on July 11, 2006 · 0 comments

Today brings a strange WaPo article on the supposed weakness of Wikipedia because several of the original contributions on Ken Lay after his death were inaccurate, even intentionally so. The article was corrected within a few days of his death, and that, WaPo would have us believe, is a bad thing – better to not have the article at all, than to have it within a matter of days, I suppose.

Everything new is old again, it seems, and the breathtaking power of Wikipedia is already leading some to clamour for whatever is next. (How about a book, updated by experts every year or so, and sold door to door out of the trunks of chevys?)

That’s Rob Hyndman. I have to say I don’t really understand why Wikipedia gets taken in for so much criticism. Wikipedia is accurate 95 percent of the time, and it probably covers a wider range of subjects than any other publication on Earth. And it’s made available to the world for free.

Now, if you’re a journalist or an academic writing a peer-reviewed paper, you probably shouldn’t cite Wikipedia as your source. But so what? People older than 12 don’t generally cite traditional encyclopedias in their research either. Most of the time, 95 percent accuracy is more than sufficient. And if you need 100 percent efficiency, Wikipedia gives you a good starting point by giving you an idea of what to look for.

More to the point, when will the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Ken Lay be updated to reflect his death? 18 months from now? For that matter, does EB even have an entry on Ken Lay? It’s downright bizarre to fault Wikipedia for being slightly inaccurate for a few hours, when EB provides the reader with no useful information at all until months after an important event occurs.

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Blue Ray Flaw

by on July 11, 2006

Ars reports on the first of many security holes in next-generation DVD standards:

The folks at c’t magazine have discovered a simple tool for beating the content protection on Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats: the print screen button. By pressing the print screen button once per frame, you can capture an entire movie at full resolution. Of course, you’d want to automate this task, but c’t has shown that it can be done. They’re promising more details in the forthcoming print version of their magazine.

The few machines on which they’ve confirmed the hack have been running Intervideo’s WinDVD, though it’s likely that this hack isn’t specific to WinDVD. C’t also reports that Toshiba now has updates planned to disable the screen capture function while the software is running, and they may also update the AACS key in order to force users to either patch their software or be unable to decode the content.

The industry will stick its thumb in this hole, but if the record of past DRM efforts is any guide, that’s not likely to save the dike.

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Network Neutrality and Jitter

by on July 11, 2006 · 14 comments

Ed Felten has a great new paper out on network neutrality regulations. Here’s his policy conclusion:

The network neutrality issue is more complex and subtle than most of the advocates on either side would have you believe. Net neutrality advocates are right to worry that ISPs can discriminate–and have the means and motive to do so–in ways that might be difficult to stop. Opponents are right to say that enforcing neutrality rules may be difficult and error-prone. Both sides are right to say that making the wrong decision can lead to unintended side-effects and hamper the Internet’s development.

There is a good policy argument in favor of doing nothing and letting the situation develop further. The present situation, with the network neutrality issue on the table in Washington but no rules yet adopted, is in many ways ideal. ISPs, knowing that discriminating now would make regulation seem more necessary, are on their best behavior; and with no rules yet adopted we don’t have to face the difficult issues of linedrawing and enforcement. Enacting strong regulation now would risk side-effects, and passing toothless regulation now would remove the threat of regulation. If it is possible to maintain the threat of regulation while leaving the issue unresolved, time will teach us more about what regulation, if any, is needed.

And here’s one other thought that struck me while reading the paper:

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The Economist on iTunes

by on July 10, 2006 · 2 comments

The Economist discusses the economics of the iTunes-iPod tie in relation to the French interoperability law, which apparently was passed a couple of weeks ago. They make the familiar razors-and-blades analogy that has been discussed here on TLF before. The weird thing is, they never get around the actually making an economic argument about why the tie is economically beneficial:

The law’s opponents reach for different analogies. They compare the iPod not to the Walkman, but to printers, games consoles and razors. Buy an inkjet printer, for example, and you must buy the manufacturer’s cartridges to be sure that it will work properly. (Although French parliamentarians will not come to your rescue, European regulators might.) Indeed, manufacturers make much of their money from the cartridges, not the printer itself, which is often sold cheaply. Economists explain this business model as a clever way for companies to “meter” their customers, charging them according to use. If they could not tie their customers to their cartridges, they would charge more for the printer itself, and the kind of person who now uses his printer rarely would not buy one at all.

Apple’s business model, however, turns this on its head. Apple makes its money from sales of the iPod, not sales of music; the printer, not the cartridge; the razor, not the blade. As Bill Shope, an equity analyst at JPMorgan, puts it, the music store is a “loss leader” that serves only to boost sales of the iPod. It is as if record stores existed only to sell record players.

The article goes on to explain why this arrangement benefits Apple, but it never gets around to explaining why it’s good policy to allow Apple to tie the iPod to iTunes. I understand the argument when you’re selling cheap printers and expensive ink cartridges. That allows manufacturers to capture more of the value of the printer (by charging heavy users more) to cover development costs while simultaneously making the printer more affordable for light users, who otherwise might not be able to afford one at all.

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Digital Downloads in Double Digits

by on July 10, 2006

Yahoo reports on music sales for the first half of 2006:

Physical album sales continued to decline in the U.S. during the first six months of 2006, down 4.2 percent in comparison to the same period last year.

However, Nielsen SoundScan figures indicate that digital sales might boost the business as a whole. Sales of digital albums soared 126 percent during the first half of the year, while digital tracks rose 77 percent.

Looking at the entire sales picture–comprising physical albums, digital albums and digital tracks–overall sales to date this year have gained about one-tenth of a percentage point over the first six months of ’05.

A total of 270.6 million physical albums were sold domestically through the end of June, representing a drop of 12 million units from last year’s six-month total of 282.6 million.

Digital albums improved by 8.2 million units, with 14.7 million units sold since January versus just 6.4 million units in the first half of 2005. Digital tracks gained by 122 million units; 281 million tracks were sold in the first six months of the year versus 158 million in the same period last year.

If we assume, as Ars did in January, that an album is equivalent to 12 stand-alone tracks, we can calculate the rough market share of downloads as a proportion of all music sales in the US. For 2004, downloads comprised 2.3 percent of the market, while for 2005, it was 7.3 percent. This year, it appears there were 270.6 million physical albums sold, 8.2 million digital albums, and the equivalent of 23.4 million albums worth of individual tracks. Adding that up, there were 31.6 million online sales out of a total of 302.2 million sales, or 10.5 percent for the first half of 2006.

It looks like sales growth isn’t quite keeping pace with last year’s growth rate, but it’s still a safe bet that downloads will be the dominant revenue source for the music industry by the end of the decade. It’s also worth noting that download revenues are probably much higher margin than physical CD sales, so even if industry revenues remain flat, industry profits are likely to rise significantly as more and more users shift to online downloading.

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CleanFlicks and the DMCA

by on July 9, 2006 · 8 comments

Here’s another interesting wrinkle in the CleanFlicks decision:

CleanFlicks first obtains an original copy of the movie from its customer or by its own purchase from an authorized retailer. It then makes a digital copy of the entire movie onto the hard drive of a computer, overcoming such technology as a digital content scrambling protection system in the acquired DVD, that is designed to prevent copying. After using software to make the edits, the company downloads from the computer an edited master copy which is then used to create a new recordable DVD-R to be sold to the public, directly or indirectly through a retailer. Thus, the content of the authorized DVD has been changed and the encryption removed. The DVD-R bears the CleanFlicks trademark. CleanFlicks makes direct sales and rentals to consumers online through its web-site requiring the purchaser to buy both the authorized and edited copies. CleanFlicks purchases an authorized copy of each edited copy it rents. CleanFlicks stops selling to any retailer that makes unauthorized copies of an edited movie.

This is an unambiguous violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules. Yet interestingly, the judge didn’t even mention the issue. I have to assume that means Hollywood didn’t make a DMCA argument in its lawsuit. I wonder why not? Perhaps they were confident they’d win on the other grounds, and didn’t want to inflame social conservatives against the DMCA?

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More on the CleanFlicks Decision

by on July 9, 2006

Joe Gratz has tracked down a copy of the Clean Flicks decision. And he has some excellent analysis of the case here:

While the First Sale Doctrine protects resellers from copyright liability, CleanFlicks is doing more than reselling. They’re making unauthorized copies. Maybe otherwise-infringing copies should be legal if one authorized copy is warehoused or destroyed for each unauthorized copy made, but that’s not the current state of the law. (If it were, there would be pretty nasty proof problems involved in keeping copiers from playing with their numbers.)

Judge Matsch also marched through the fair use factors, properly recognizing that they represent only a part of the Fair Use Doctrine. His transformativity analysis was rather unsatisfying; it seems that, in Judge Matsch’s view, only additions of content, not deletions, can be transformative. I agree that these particular deletions were not transformative, but the opinion’s language is overly broad.

The EFF filed an amicus brief seeking to rebut the studios’ argument that “the intermediate hard drive copies allegedly [used] to create [CleanFlicks’] final products violate a copyright holder’s exclusive right of reproduction[.]” The brief was successful; the court focused on the DVD-R copies CleanFlicks made, ignoring the intermediate copying in its infringement analysis.

Finally, I meant to mention the Family Home Movie Act, which explicitly legalized devices like ClearPlay, which edit out objectionable content from DVDs on the fly. It seems to me that ClearPlay would have been on much firmer ground than Clean Flicks even without this explicit exemption (since ClearPlay never makes any unauthorized copies) but in any event, parents wanting to shield their children from naughty words and images still have ClearPlay as an option. The FHMA did not mention DVD editing services like CleanFlicks.

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Digital First Sale Doctrine

by on July 9, 2006

Matt Yglesias notes last week’s ruling that services like Clean Flicks, which buy Hollywood movies, take out the naughty parts, and resell them to parents, are infringing copyright. On a policy level, I agree with his general take:

Overwhelmingly, the impact of a service like CleanFlix is to make versions of works available to people who otherwise wouldn’t be consuming them at all. Even in a CleanFlix world, authors of “unclean” content will still enjoy extremely close to 100 percent of the pre-CleanFlix market. There’s no reason at all to think that the existence of this sort of service will seriously reduce future production of new things.

Artists and so forth who think their interests are being served by pushing a strong-IP doctrine on this front are essentially dupes. The people who control the existing distribution channels for film have a very serious interest in using the new-style super-strong IP rules to insulate themselves from the winds of technological change. So, in essence, they’re pushing forward on all fronts, stomping on various totally non-harmful cases of putative infringement and attempting to radically curtail people’s ability to do what they want to do with content they’ve purchased.

The defendants’ activities clearly had little or no negative financial impact on copyright holders. Arguably, in fact, services like Clean Flicks increase sales by widening the set of movies socially conservative parents are willing to purchase.

However, on the legal merits, this is hardly an easy case. I haven’t been able to find the actual decision so consider this wild speculation on my part, but it seems to me that a literal-minded interpretation of the four fair use factors very well might find this is not a fair use–the “effect of the use upon the potential market” is the only factor that clearly weighs in favor of a finding of fair use.

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eBay-Google Battle Over Online Payments

by on July 7, 2006 · 4 comments

I find this eBay versus Google battle over payment services quite interesting. In case you missed it, eBay stuck it to Google this week by notifying the world that it would not allow Google’s new “Google Checkout” payment service to be used to clear transactions on eBay. A lot of people are up in arms about this claiming that eBay has excessive market power and that antitrust actions need to be considered (or at least threatened).

But I think there’s a different way of looking at this scuffle.

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Software Patent of the Week: The Threat to Open Source Software

by on July 7, 2006

Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. Open source advocate Bruce Parens makes my job easy this week by explaining what’s so troubling about last week’s patent infringement lawsuit against Red Hat:

The suit against Red Hat’s concerns the use of software “objects” to encapsulate a database record and make it easier to access, a technology called Object Relational Mapping or The ActiveRecord Pattern. That technology is used in the Hibernate software developed by jBoss, which Red Hat recently purchased. FireStar Software claims that it invented the technology, and that it is covered by its U.S. patent number 6,101,502. However, over the past two decades there has been much prior art for object-oriented databases, including TopLink, an object relational system developed in the early 90’s and now owned by Oracle, so it may be that the filers of FireStar’s patent made no invention.

There’s also the question of obviousness, whether the principles claimed in the patent would be obvious to a normally-skilled practitioner of the software art and thus not be an invention at all. The function of an object is to encapsulate data, and object-oriented programming has been known since the Simula language introduced it in 1967. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing another patent lawsuit in which the defense claims that there should be a much higher standard below which purported inventions would be considered obvious and thus not patentable. A higher standard of obviousness could help, but the real solution is to go back to the original intent of the Patent Office and stop granting patents on software.

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