A Federal Communications Commission staffer reports that commissioners are considering a 30% cap on the number of households a single cable operator may serve. Multichannel News notes that the cap would primarily affect one company:
Citing Kagan Research, Comcast recently told the FCC that it serves 26.2 million subscribers, or 27% of the country’s 96.8 million pay TV subscribers. Under a 30% cap, Comcast could, in a few years, find itself refusing service to customers seeking to sign up for its fast-growing voice-video-data triple-play bundle. The 30% cap would also effectively block Comcast from buying a cable company with more than 3 million subscribers.
If cable operators were the only source of video programming, it might make sense to have a rule like this. But, as everyone knows, they aren’t. There are the broadcasters, the Direct Broadcast Satellite providers and now the big telephone companies and the Internet. It’s hard to imagine any one company dominates this media galaxy. But if so, that’s why we have the Antitrust Division.
Intuitively, some people feel if we have more cable TV owners and CEOs, it stands to reason we’ll get more diverse views and programming. In reality, most investors and managers are motivated not by individual political, cultural or artistic agendas, but on serving customers, i.e., providing whatever sells. Others recall that, for whatever reason, back when we had heavy-handed regulation television seemed much more “tasteful” than it does today. But that’s only because society’s values used to be different. It’s impossible to legislate taste and morality.
A 30% cable cap will allow the FCC to extort anything it wants from Comcast, the only cable company with a market share approaching 30%. Because, eventually, Comcast will need to seek a waiver. We don’t know who will be running the FCC when that happens, nor what their political, cultural or artistic agenda may be.
There’s Viacom vs. Gootube in the courts of law.
And here are some of the relevant discussions in Washington, D.C.:
At the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus’ State of the Net Conference 2007, there was a panel discussion entitled, “User-Generated Content – Can Copyright Tolerate Mixing & Mashing?” Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post moderated. Panelists were Jim DeLong of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Pam Samuelson of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and Steven Starr of Revver.com. Video here. (See if you have a better experience with it than I did.)
And tomorrow, PFF is having an event on Capitol Hill titled “What Goes Up Must Come Down: Copyright and Process in the Age of User-Posted Content.”
This is the age of user-generated content. Let’s hear what you think of these events in the comments.
We’ll be holding the third installment of our wildly successful Alcohol Liberation Front events on Monday, March 19. We’ll be meeting from 5:30-7 PM at Science Club. If you’d like to join us, please drop me an email so we know to look for you.
If you’ve got a Mac with an iSight camera, (like the one that came with my shiny new MacBook) what you’re looking at on the right there is your own face, rendered by Apple’s graphics system to look “painted.” I think that’s awfully damn cool.
Update: I got some reports that this was screwing up PC users, so I’ve moved it below the fold…
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A couple of Google lawyers have announced on the Google ‘blog that the company will be making the data from their server logs “much more anonymous, so that it can no longer be identified with individual users, after 18-24 months.” That’s a big, important change, as Google’s privacy policy has never before pledged to destroy or anonymize data about all of our searches.
Now, there are some interesting details – details that are highlighted by the text I quoted above. “Anonymous” is correctly regarded as an absolute condition. Like pregnancy, anonymity is either there or it’s not. Modifying the word with a relative adjective like “more” is a curious use of language.
Google has a challenge, if they’re going to anonymize data and not destroy it, to make sure that a person’s identity and behavior cannot be reconstructed from it. As AOL’s fiasco with releasing “anonymized” search data showed, clipping off the obvious identifiers won’t do it. As data mining capabilities advance, anonymizing techniques will have to keep ahead of that.
There are interesting things that can be done to synthesize data, making it statistically relevant while factually incoherent. Hopefully, Google will sic some of its finest famously-smarty-pants engineers on the task of making their anonymous data really, really anonymous.
I’m pleased to announce that my employer, the Show-Me Institute, has a new blog. If you have any Missouri ties, or just want to read the brilliant thoughts of me and my esteemed colleagues, I encourage you to check it out.
Randy Picker has a great post on interoperability and the law:
In one classic case, Borland did this when it sold the spreadsheet Quattro Pro with an alternative interface that emulated that of Lotus 1-2-3, the dominant spreadsheet of the day. Lotus tried to rely on copyright law to defeat Borland and failed though do remember that the vote in the Supreme Court was 4-4 and ties go to the lower court winner, in this case Borland. When I switched my main browsing program from Internet Explorer to Firefox, Firefox looked on my hard disk to find the links that I had stored as IE Favorites, again reducing the transaction costs of switching.
But we see how design matters when we return to my tagged stories. I don’t know for sure—perhaps the computer savvy can tell me—but I don’t think much if any of my Google Reader info is stored locally on my machine. I have been using my wife’s laptop at home at night while my laptop has been dying and, once I have logged in, Reader works on her machine as it would if I were logged on my machine. I don’t think that there is any locally-stored info for FeedDemon to examine were I trying to switch over both my feeds list and my tagged stories. And the question is whether FeedDemon could write something that would burrow through my Google Reader “subscription”—that seems like a fair description—to extract my tagged stories. And these design issues are even more embedded than that suggests, as Nick Carr makes clear in his recent post on this.
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James Besson tipped me off to this interesting discussion of the implications of the Microsoft v. AT&Tcase:
The question posed by the Microsoft v. AT&T case, is whether that law should apply to situations where the only exported “component” in question is software written in the U.S. but copied and reinstalled in computers abroad. Interestingly enough, the near unanimous view in the software industry–judging from the briefs submitted by the parties I’ve listed above–is that it shouldn’t. (The specific facts of the case are these: Microsoft concedes that its Windows operating system infringes a U.S. patent belonging to AT&T (T) relating to coding and decoding human speech. It is willing to pay royalties on copies of Windows sold in the U.S., but contends that it shouldn’t have to pay for copies installed on computers abroad and sold there. AT&T, and the court below, say it should.)
In other words, all these parties with mighty software patent portfolios would rather, on balance, not be allowed to enforce those valuable assets abroad, so long as they could be assured that, in exchange, they also wouldn’t have to worry about being sued for infringing anyone else’s U.S. software patents abroad. That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of the U.S. patent system, at least as it relates to software patents; it sounds like the opposite. (Patent law is supposed to benefit industry by spurring innovation; yet it sounds like the software industry regards it as a net drag on in its industry.)
I find this an intriguing argument, although I’m sure if I agree with it. What do y’all think?
My favorite TLF reader points out this bizarre story about wireless “piggybacking,” over-zealous police officers, and (a lack of) child porn. It’s a safe bet that the police officers involved have better things to do than harass people using the WiFi connections of public libraries (!) from their cars. The notion that doing so would be criminal theft of service is absurd: presumably, no one would have thought twice if he’d accessed the network while physically inside the library building. It’s not clear how it suddenly becomes a crime once it’s outside.
It seems even more clear that the police were out of line in seizing the guy’s laptop and searching it for child pornography. No reasonable person would take the fact that someone is using the Internet from his car as evidence that child porn is being downloaded.
On the other hand, the trespassing charge isn’t crazy, especially if it happened more than once. Still, a proportionate remedy would have been to write the kid a ticket, not take his laptop.
WASHINGTON, March 13, 2007 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday released a paper about the entertainment industry’s move to take copyright controls global.
The report is the result of EFF’s participation in a closed-door session of the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), the predominant global standard for digital television. (America uses a different digital standard that supports high-definition.)
EFF’s report documents the extent to which the DVB consortium has signaled its assent to copyright control technology. EFF called these a series of “unparalleled restrictions” on consumers’ rights to enjoy lawful digital content. These include “enforcing severe home recording and copying limitation,” “imposing controls on where you watch a program” and “dictating how you get to share shows with your own family,” according to EFF.
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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.