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.
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Via Techdirt, BusinessWeek reports 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.
Mark Blafkin sets the record straight on the Mac-vs-Windows story I told in my “iPatents” post:
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.
Blafkin continues…
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In between all the great panels I was covering this week at CES, I spent time on the floor walking endless laps around the massive Las Vegas convention center. (Seriously, I have blisters on my feet right now). There were tons of cools gadgets and new services being showcased. Here are a few things that really stood out for me:
* High-def format war solutions: LG announced a dual format high-def DVD player called the “Super Multi Blue Player” that will play both next-generation high-def DVD formats (HD-DVD & Blu-Ray). I think that’s great news and other dual players are likely to follow now. Also, Warner Brothers will start developing dual-format “Total High Def” hybrid movie discs that have both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD versions of the movie on them.
* Cell phones that double as TVs: I visited a few wireless booths where manufacturers were highlighting cell phones that could show live TV. At the Qualcomm booth I actually got to play with an upcoming Verizon phone that will be powered by Qualcomm’s MediaFlo technology. The picture looked very good and the channel surfing was on par with what we’ve come to expect from most cable boxes.
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Good news from the Senate:
At first [Hollywood] approached the FCC, and the FCC complied by dutifully trotting out some new broadcast flag regulations. Unfortunately for the content industry, the FCC doesn’t generally have the right to tell manufacturers how to build their products. The rules were thrown out by an appeals court in 2005.
Undaunted, the industry tried again in Congress. Last year, when a rewrite to the 1996 Telecommunications Act was being considered, broadcast flag legislation was in fact attached to the bill and even made it through committee before bogging down.
Sununu’s bill will attempt to rein in the FCC and prevent it from reviving the broadcast flag without Congressional authorization to do so. “The FCC seems to be under the belief that it should occasionally impose technology mandates,” Sununu said in a statement. “These misguided requirements distort the marketplace by forcing industry to adopt agency-blessed solutions rather than allow innovative and competitive approaches to develop. We have seen this happen with the proposed video flag, and interest groups are pushing for an audio flag mandate as well. Whether well-intentioned or not, the FCC has no business interfering in private industry to satisfy select special interests or to impose its own views.”
Whatever your views on DRM more generally, it’s awfully hard to make a libertarian argument for giving the FCC authority to dictate how consumer electronics companies will design their products.
Over at the ACT blog, Mark Blafkin pinpoints what makes the iPhone really great: 200 patents!
The Apple iPhone is the result of tens of millions of dollars in research and development by some of the smartest minds in computing. The investment necessary to develop a radically new interface like Multi-touch requires that Apple have a way to protect that investment. If Nokia, Sony, and Motorola could all simply copy it in their new phones, why would Apple even bother? Besides, I’m sure Apple has had enough of playing R&D Lab for the rest of the industry.
That’s why Mr. Jobs declared, “Boy, have we patented it!” There are a lot of bad software patents out there, but devices like the iPhone make us all realize why we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are some things so cool, so innovative, they deserve patent protection.
I have yet to see a list of the patents Apple requested, and Blafkin doesn’t provide such a list, so it’s hard to judge how much of them are baby and how much are bathwater. But Blafkin’s supposedly rhetorical questions aren’t actually that hard to answer. Why would Apple bother to develop something like Multitouch without the benefit of patent protection? Quite obviously, it’s because if the product is as good as Uncle Steve’s presentation made it look, Apple is going to make a ton of money on it. And they would be able to make a ton of money even if they hadn’t applied for a single patent.
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This afternoon at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin spent an hour talking about his public policy priorities with Gary Shapiro, the head of the Consumer Electronics Association.
The only real news from the discussion was Martin’s disappointing announcement that the Commission would not be granting the cable industry’s request for relief from the set-top box “integration ban,” which prevents cable and telco video providers from providing set-top boxes with integrated security features. (My PFF colleague Tom Lenard penned an excellent essay on this silly regulatory industrial policy if you need more background). These rules just retard sensible market innovation and drive up consumer costs.
Chairman Martin also used the opportunity to put in another plug for a la carte regulation. “It would be positive for consumers” and “a good thing” he said. He cited the FCC’s second report on the matter which he commissioned and ignored the agency’s earlier report which came to opposite conclusion. (Details here).
On other issues, Chairman Martin waffled back-and-forth and didn’t seem to come to any definitive conclusions. For example:
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Congratulations are in order to our friends at Techdirt, who recently raised a round of funding to expand their Insight Community and welcomed Mark Fletcher, founder of Onelist and Bloglines, to their board of directors.
One of the remarkable things about Techdirt is how the Internet has allowed a small number of (exceptionally smart) people to do a lot with a little. According to the article I linked to above, they raised $600,000. That seems like a remarkably small number for a web site that gets more traffic than your average mid-sized newspaper’s website. And of course, Techdirt reached its current level of prominence before raising this round of financing, so I imagine this will allow them to be even more successful in the months ahead.
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