Commenting on my presentation of the book will be James Lewis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Jay Stanley from the ACLU.
The REAL ID Act is under seige from state leaders who are bridling at this unfunded surveillance mandate, and legislation was introduced at the end of the 109th Congress to repeal REAL ID. But the immigration debate this year will surely fuel the push for a national ID with the demand for “internal enforcement” of immigration law. Identity Crisis lays the groundwork for all these discussions.
The event is streamed for those not in the area. To register, go here.
At an Apple Store a few weeks ago a clerk had to take down info from my driver’s license so that I could qualify for the education discount that previously only required that I flash my school ID. “Sorry, Sarbanes-Oxley,” she said. Really? “Yeah. Also, if you buy a custom Mac now, you have to have it shipped to your home; you can’t pick it up at the store anymore.” Whah?
Well, if you need one more reason to believe that the unintended consequences of SOX really suck (especially for Mac people, it seems), today comes word that SOX may force Apple to charge Mac users for a feature that would otherwise be free. See, Wi-Fi comes in three flavors: 802.11b, g, and n, each respectively faster. The “n” standard is still a draft, but it’s almost complete. Apple has been shipping computers with unadvertised “n” capability that they have left dormant. That is, you buy a notebook with what you think is just a “g” Wi-Fi card and three months later, when the standard gets ratified, Apple sends you a software update that unlocks it into an “n”. Voila, surprise instant upgrade and a happy customer.
Unfortunately, the word is that Apple will charge $4.99 for the upgrade, which is a suspiciously un-Apple thing to do. iLounge editor Jeremy Horwitz offers an explanation: “Because of the [SOX] Act, the company believes that if it sells a product, then later adds a feature to that product, it can be held liable for improper accounting if it recognizes revenue from the product at the time of sale, given that it hasn’t finished delivering the product at that point. Ridiculous.”
Update: Houman Shadab took this story and ran with it. He posts a great explanation (via iLounge) of how SOX accounting rules could result in the $5 charge. I’m posting it in full after the jump.
I’ve got a new article up at The American about the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD fight:
The two camps, each desperate to avoid Betamax’s fate, held dueling press conferences. The more bullish of the two was the Blu-Ray camp, which declared its “victory as the premiere high definition DVD format of choice,” touting broad support from both Hollywood and the consumer electronics industry. But backers of HD-DVD were unbowed, announcing plans for hundreds of new titles in the next year.
Predicting the winner of this battle has become a popular pastime among technology pundits. But there’s a real risk that the combination of consumer confusion and the rapid improvement of Internet-based distribution technologies will doom both formats to niche status.
This article doesn’t have too much of a policy angle to it. When I started on the article, I had planned to discuss the various irritations created by digital rights management restrictions, but I concluded that although those are likely to annoy consumers, they probably won’t be the deciding factor in the success or failure of the formats. The HDCP format gives the movie publisher the right to decide which restrictions on playback will apply to each movie. In theory, a studio can disallow playback entirely on devices that don’t meet HDCP standards. But given that there are thousands of HDTVs out there that were sold before the HDCP standard was finalized, my guess is that they’ll never turn that “feature” on. Hollywood may shoot itself in the foot from time to time, but I doubt they’re so suicidal as to cripple one of their most lucrative revenue streams.
The International Telecommunication Union has elected its new Secretary-General to a four-year term. Hamadoun Toure recently said that the United Nations will not try to take the lead in determining the
future of the Internet.
It is not my intention to take over the governance of the Internet. There is no one single issue that can be dealt with by one organization
alone.
This is good news for those (like me) that feared aggressive UN posturing to create a "superstructure" regulatory presence over all things Internet. The reality is that what we conceptually view as "the Internet" is actually a multitude of technical layers that would be difficult-if not impossible-to regulate under one governmental body.
I spent this morning reading and listening to King’s speeches, and it got me a thinkin’…what if King had the power of the Internet to help spread his message? King was a gifted orator, and his impassioned yet precisely measured delivery hits at the most visceral of levels. Just think of the YouTube possibilities….
One doesn’t have to have been alive in 1963 to understand King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s about fundamental human dignity. King was dreaming back to 1776, when Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence of certain unalienable rights – Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. King was also dreaming back to 1863, when Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address proclaimed that our country would have a second chance at freedom, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
It’s enough to make a technology liberator think that compared to King’s fight for basic human dignity, squabbling over “technology freedoms” – copyright and patent reform, restrictive FCC rules, and even King’s estate’s copyright suit against CBS, etc. – pales by comparison. And it would be ridiculous to say otherwise. But technology can help disseminate information more quickly – information about race-related police beatings, government abuse of civil liberties, and other violations of peoples’ rights.
And as is often the case for those of us here at the Tech Liberation Front fighting for technology freedom, King was mainly dreaming of the future:
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Freedom would have been ringing from Stone Mountain of Georgia and Lookout Mountain of Tennessee more quickly, I think, if the Web of today existed in the 1950s and 60s. But today’s Internet is helping to bring the fight for freedom globally, and technology has the possibility to spread King’s message in new ways to people in China and other authoritarian regimes.
I’ve noted before that there’s been a trend recently of left-of-center academics citing great libertarian thinkers in their writings about copyright and patent law, peer production, industrial organization, and related topics. Tim Wu and Yochai Benkler cite Hayek and Coase, respectively, in their writings. The latest example is Cass Sunstein’s (relatively) new book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. I haven’t read it yet, Patti Waldmeir of the Financial Times says:
Sunstein, one of the biggest of America’s internet big thinkers, has written an intriguing new book in which he argues that Hayek’s insights about the genius of markets are equally true of the internet. Sunstein argues, for example, that sharing scientific information online would cure some of the worst problems of the US patent system and foster innovation much more efficiently than costly patent litigation. Sunstein recognizes all the potential flaws of such collaborative projects. Groupthink can be dangerous. But, says Sunstein, the wisdom of the many is a great thing, and sharing knowledge online can lead to remarkable advances for companies, for governments and for the rest of us
Now, obviously, many libertarians (and perhaps Hayek himself) would take exception to some of the details of Sunstein’s argument. But I still think it’s a positive development that the problems Hayek and Coase focused on–how do we organize our economy and society to optimize the dispersion and use of knowledge–are increasingly recognized as central to high-tech policy debates.
Are there other examples of non-libertarian academics citing applying the insights of Hayek, Coase, or other libertarian thinkers to tech policy issues?
MEMPHIS, Tenn., January 13, 2007–A new House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, will turn its oversight to a range of government agencies, particularly the Federal Communications Commission, Kucinich announced here on Friday night.
Kucinich, a 2004 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who stated his intention to run again in 2008, said that his committee will hold holdings criticizing the FCC on the issue of media ownership.
In a speech before the National Conference for Media Reform here, unexpected visitor Kucinich announced his chairmanship of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee.
The new subcommittee, Kucinich said in the speech, would be a platform to hold “hearings to push media reform right at the center of Washington.”
“You are the message,” he said to the cheering crowd.
Via Techdirt, BusinessWeekreports that Hollywood (aside from Disney) is holding steadfast in its determination to make movie download services unappealing to consumers. This is just baffling:
What does Hollywood want from Steve Jobs? For starters, more protection for their films. “His user rules just scare the heck out of us,” one studio executive told me. Indeed, under Apple’s video iPod digital-rights-management scheme, folks can share their flicks with as many as three other iPod users.
That’s good for the guys who get free flicks, but it’s bad for Hollywood, which goes bat crazy over the notion of pirated freebies on the Internet. To them, losing a customer courtesy of the video iPod is just as bad. Add into the equation the new Apple TV, which would allow folks to put that movie on their TVs, and Hollywood sees more and more of its DVD bucks headed out the door.
I don’t know if this is the exec misunderstanding Apple’s DRM scheme, the reporter misunderstanding the exec, or me misunderstanding the whole passage, but that doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s true that you can have your iTunes content on more than one iPod, but each iPod can only be linked to one copy of iTunes. So yes, you can have the same movie on three iPods. But it can’t be any three iPods–it has to be three iPods that have all of your content–and only your content–on them. Which means that, at most, this will allow family members to share movie downloads.
Now, the goofy thing about this is that even with the ability to watch movies on three iPods, Apple’s DRM scheme is still way more restrictive than what you can do with a traditional DVD. I can play a DVD on any DVD player in the world, and I can potentially share it with dozens of different people. If their goal is to make sure no one gets to watch a movie without paying Hollywood for the privilege, DVD-sharing is a much bigger threat than anything people can do with their iPods.
So I don’t understand who’s supposed to be “getting free flicks” or how Hollywood would be “losing a customer” by signing up with iTunes. Can anyone explain what the problem is supposed to be?
Mike Masnick has some good comments on the iPhone. Most interestingly, he points out that many of the technologies have been demonstrated before. Here is a really cool video demonstrating multi-touch interfaces from last February. The only thing it’s missing is Steve’s legendary Reality Distortion Field.
Sure, the Mac OS was light years ahead of Windows 1.0, and it took Microsoft until Windows 3.1 or even Windows 95 to get to near feature parity. Did that translate into the immense marketshare and “big profits” for Apple Mr. Lee’s theory would predict? Funny enough, no it didn’t.
In fact, it took Apple nearly 7 years to sell its first 5 million Macs. On the other hand, Microsoft sold 10 million copies of Windows 3.0, “a usable, less expensive alternative to the Macintosh platform,” in less than 2 years!
Blafkin seems to regard this as evidence that the Mac (and its successor machines) weren’t profitable for Apple, but it proves nothing of the sort. Apple did, in fact, make a ton of money on Macs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with prices of high-end models pushing ten grand and fat margins.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.