So nmuch for the ‘new and improved’ GPL, by James V. DeLong, from CNET:
In the month since the release of the third draft of the Free Software Foundation’s GPLv3, much of the open-source community has been oddly incommunicado.
Slashdot and GrokLaw, the major homes for the community’s individual members, bulge with posts. But reaction from the corporate wing of the movement–starting with its semi-official spokesman, the Linux Foundation–is silence.
Why the companies hit the mute button just when one would expect a coordinated chorus of huzzahs is a matter for speculation, but here is a hypothesis: Maybe because after two years of drafting, redrafting and re-re-redrafting, the product finally went to the corporate general counsels, and these folks promptly went ballistic over the ambiguities, uncertainties and risks.
Here are two new data points in a discussion Jerry and I had back in September: will the Internet kill TV, and if so what will Internet-based TV look like?
First, Matthew Ingrahm points out Prom Queen a web-only soap opera that’s released in daily 90-second segments and has apparently racked up 5 million total viewers over the last month.
Second, Rob Hyndman points to the TEDTalks video series. As Hyndman points out, there is a long tail of video content out there: shows that individually couldn’t attract a large enough audience to secure a spot on a traditional cable lineup but that collectively could generate significant traffic. As the Internet eliminates the artificial bottlenecks now imposed by the need to organize our video watching into “channels,” the number of different things people watch is poised to explode.
My guess is that our children will have as much trouble imagining a world with only 100 channels as we do imagining a world with only 3. And there’s a good chance our grandchildren won’t even know what a “channel” is.
Predictions about life in the year 2000, from the year 1900. Including:
On Package Delivery .
.. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.
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The comment period on Department of Homeland Security regulations implementing the REAL ID Act ends early next week. A broad coalition of groups has put together a Web page urging people to submit their comments. The page has instructions for commenting, a quite helpful thing given how arcane the regulatory process is.
Feel free to comment — good, bad, or indifferent – on the regs. My views are known, but the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t know yours.
Those who care about free speech should consider why government taxes are higher on communications than on other goods and services. This new study by The Heartland Institute and the Beacon Hill Institute is eye opening.
Here’s a paragraph from the study:
According to the Tax Foundation, the national average retail sales tax rate (combining local, county, and state sales taxes, weighted by personal income) is 6.61 percent. Taxes and fees on cable TV and telephone subscribers average 13.52 percent, twice as high. In other words, telephone calls and cable services are taxed at two times the rate as clothing, sporting goods, and other household products.
Lots going on this week on the wireless Net neutrality front. You will recall that a couple of weeks ago several of us here were blasting the new paper by Tim Wu and the petition by Skype asking the FCC to impose Carterfone-like regulatory mandates on the wireless industry. This new battle is now just known as “the wireless Net neutrality fight” here in Washington. And this week some important studies have been released opposing it by the CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade association, and economists from the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and the Phoenix Center. I don’t have time to summarize them, but here are the links to each major report if you are interested:
(1) Filing of CTIA – The Wireless Association In the Matter of Skype Communications Petition to Confirm A Consumer’s Right to Use Internet Communications Software and Attach Devices to Wireless Networks (April 30, 2007).
(2) Robert W. Hahn, Robert E. Litan, and Hal J. Singer, “The Economics of ‘Wireless Net Neutrality,'” AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, AEI-Brookings Joint Center Working Paper No. RP07-10, (April 2007).
(3) George S. Ford, Thomas M. Koutsky and Lawrence J. Spiwak, “Wireless Net Neutrality: From Carterfone to Cable Boxes,” PHOENIX CENTER POLICY BULLETIN No. 17 (April 2007).
In October, I wrote about the five stages of DRM failure. At that point, I wrote that the MPAA was just moving from the anger stage to the bargaining stage. Now, it’s looking like they’ve reached the bargaining stage in earnest:
In his speech to industry insiders at the posh Beverly Hills Four Seasons hotel, Glickman repeatedly stressed that DRM must be made to work without constricting consumers. The goal, he said, was “to make things simpler for the consumer,” and he added that the movie studios were open to “a technology summit” featuring academics, IT companies, and content producers to work on the issues involved. He also pointed to the $30 million MovieLabs project that the studios are currently funding as proof of their commitment to interoperability.
Speaking to Ars after the speech, Glickman acknowledged that the plan was still in the early stages. I asked him specifically about DVDs, which are currently illegal to rip under the DMCA, and how the law would square with his vision of allowing consumers to use such content on iPods and other devices. “You notice that I said ‘legally’ and in a protected way,” Glickman responded, suggesting that some form of DRM would still be required before the studios would sign off on such a plan. He noted, however, that no specific plans have been made.
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Vonage has asked the Federal Circuit to send its patent case back to the district court to consider whether the Teleflex decision renders Verizon’s patents invalid. As I argued last week, at least one of Verizon’s patents should be extremely vulnerable to challenge under Teleflex:
The third patent at issue is patent 6,359,880, “Public wireless/cordless internet gateway.” The patent describes a variety of prior systems that allow telephone calls to be made wirelessly. Some use cellular technology to achieve coverage over large areas, while others serve as a gateway to a traditional phone line, and only work over limited areas. The patent also discusses the existence of several Internet telephony applications that allow Internet users to engage in voice communications via the Internet. However, the patent argues, no prior systems have combined wireless calling with Internet telephony.
In this sense, the patent is a precise analog of the patent at issue in KSR v. Teleflex, due to be decided in the next two months by the Supreme Court. In that case, KSR held a patent that covered the combination of two otherwise obvious components: a gas pedal and an electronic sensor. Here, as in Teleflex, Verizon admits that both VoIP and wireless calling were well-known technologies at the time the patent was filed. However, they claim, no one had thought of having both features in one system.
Vonage should have a pretty strong case that the wireless calling patent is obvious. For the other two patents, they’ll probably have to rely more on Teleflex’s general theme of “common sense,” which doesn’t seem like quite as much of a slam dunk but can’t help but strengthen their hand somewhat.
Ed Felten reports on the high-def video cartel’s hopeless campaign to keep a 128-bit key that can be used to unscramble HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs secret.
I’m not going to post the key here, because I don’t especially want to get a takedown notice myself, but a little searching is likely to turn up dozens of copies posted around the web. As Felten points out, once the key has been posted to a significant number of websites (and “significant” here probably means about a dozen), it becomes counterproductive to continue to pursue it, because sending out takedown letters only generates more publicity (like this post!) which in turn causes more people to hear about the key and get a copy for themselves.
The whole incident makes me feel nostalgic for my college days, when I had friends who got T-shirts with the DeCSS algorithm printed on them. It took four years for the DVD CCA to formally concede that suppressing the DeCSS code was impossible. Hopefully the people in charge of the AACS keys will give up sooner than that.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.