Many in the press (NYT, AP) are commenting this morning about on how Google on Monday encouraged the Federal Communications Commission to design their forthcoming auction of radio-frequencies to take advantage of real-time airwaves auctions. It’s one more bit of news emerging from the 700 Megahertz (MHz) auction, which the FCC must begin before January 2008. In the words of telecom analyst Blair Levin, of Stifel Nicolaus, it is shaping up to be “a pivotal auction” that could provide “new blood for broadband… or [a] telco/cable sweep.”
But there was another noteworthy filing at the FCC on Monday. The White Spaces Coalition — whose members include Dell, EarthLink, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft and Philips Electronics — met with commission officials and provided them with a prototype device for operating in vacant television broadcast channels. Philips’ devices joins one previously submitted by Microsoft. (Look at page 3 for a picture of the “Microsoft TV White Spaces Development Platform.”)
Just as the 700 MHz band offers new hope for telecom and video competition, many technology companies are looking to the vacant TV bands. The reason is simple: television channels so scattered, principally because they were designed around the 1940s-era NTSC standard, named after the National Television Standard Committee. As a look at the broadcast band for the ZIP code 20006 demonstrates, using FCC metrics, no more than four of the 21 channels between 30 and 50 are occupied: 32, 45, 47 and 50. That leaves 17 available within the “white spaces” between the frequencies where those stations broadcast. The occupied channel numbers will vary from city to city, which is why advanced sensing capabilities are needed to even begin to complete utilizing the spectrum in the television zone for something other than broadcasting.
or
http://www.publicintegrity.org/telecom/telecomwatch.aspx?eid=2940
(I had a major computer meltdown last week, so I’m a little late getting to this issue but..) The MPAA recently announced that it will take into account depictions of smoking in a movie when considering its rating. Apparently, it will now be more likely that a movie’s rating is more stringent if we see characters lighting up on screen.
Private ratings systems occasionally evolve to take into account changing societal norms, but this recent change to the MPAA system seems to be influenced more by politics. Excuse the pun, but there’s obviously a lot of groups out there today that make a stink about smoking. They are certainly welcome to pressure movie producers and other media providers to eliminate smoking from their art, but when they threaten government regulation as an alternative it’s an entirely different matter.
One wonders where the line will be drawn now that smoking has been deemed worthy of an “R” rating. Would a serious drama depicting drug or alcohol abuse that contained no other offending material also automatically qualify for a higher rating? If not, why not?
The best way to address this issue is with more education, not censorship. There has been no shortage of education campaigns and PSAs about the dangers of smoking over the past decades. Those efforts have made a difference. Smoking is less glamorous than ever before and the risks of smoking are widely understood. Critics should stick to those efforts instead of threatening artists with regulation if they don’t purge any depictions of smoking from their craft.
First eMusic, then Yahoo!, then Apple, and now Amazon have joined the anti-DRM camp. This adds momentum to the general perception that DRM-based business models are outdated and on their way out, at least in the music market. It’s only a matter of time before the labels cave.
It’s striking that this announcement is occurring less than a year after the unveiling of Amazon’s Unbox. As I said then, the use of DRM was a major reason the service sucked so much. Thanks to the much larger file sizes, the online movie market is a few years behind the online music market in its evolution. But I think recent developments in the music market presage similar developments in the movie market a few years from now. Ultimately, DRM is a bad business strategy because it doesn’t stop piracy but it does punish your own paying customers. The labels and online music vendors are realizing that now. Hollywood is still in denial, but they’ll figure it out eventually.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Tim Lee, Mark Blafkin of the Association for Competitive Technology, and Ryan Paul of Ars Technica. Topics include,
- Microsoft claims free software is infringing its patents
- the FTC blasts state regulation of online real estate services, and
- Google prevails over Perfect 10 in an important copyright case
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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I missed this IPI essay when it came out last month. In its opening paragraphs (and its conclusion) the paper purports to be a critique of technologists’ arguments against the DMCA, with my own paper and EFF’s Unintended Consequences as exhibits A and B. There have been relatively few substantive criticisms of my paper (it got little more than a sneer from IPI’s president, for example) so I was excited about the opportunity to read a serious, essay-length critique of my arguments against the DMCA.
Boy was I disappointed.
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Outside the tech policy area, but I just had to vent . . . .
In a blog post from Found|Read titled Dangers of a Threesome – (clever) – hapless Kevin Wolf writes of bringing two equal partners into a company formed around a business idea of his. He is distraught because the two partners recently fired him. His third conclusion from this episode – third! not first – is “If the idea for the business originated with you, consider keeping a controlling voting interest in the company.”
No shit. (‘Scuse my French.)
Found|Read is part of the impressive GigaOM network of online news sources and blogs, which produces a wide array of interesting information and thinking. But I wouldn’t listen very long to a running coach, sitting on the ground with skinned knees, who advised me that I should lace my shoes.
Over at Ars, I analyze yesterday’s Perfect 10 decision:
Perfect 10 attempted to distinguish its service from the Kelly precedent in two ways. First, although Google doesn’t typically display advertising on image search result pages, some of the sites containing infringing images participate in Google’s AdSense program. Second, Perfect 10 had licensed its images for sale in thumbnail form to cell phone users, and the company argued that the thumbnails in Google’s search results undermined the market for cell-phone thumbnails. The district court sided with Perfect 10 in 2004, and Google appealed the decision.
Writing for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, judge Sandra Ikuta firmly rejected both of those arguments. She noted that there was no evidence that any mobile phone users had actually used Google’s image search engine to download Perfect 10’s images. And while she acknowledged that Google did generate a small amount of revenue from infringing websites that participated in the AdSense program, she ruled that “the transformative nature of Google’s use is more significant than any incidental superseding use or the minor commercial aspects of Google’s search engine and website.”
Perfect 10 seems to have taken a “kitchen sink” approach in its attack on Google, and the as a result the decision is kind of sprawling, touching on a variety of theories for both direct and indirect liability. As far as I can see, almost all of them worked out in a pro-Google (and in my view, a pro-innovation) direction. The possible trouble spot is the Napster issue, where the Ninth Circuit sent the case back to the district court for further consideration. But as long as Google can make a plausible case that they can’t be expected to police each of the billions of websites they link to, they should be fine.
Wow. More proof that we have a long way to go before public officials really “get” the Internet. From a Reuters story:
A British judge admitted on Wednesday he was struggling to cope with basic terms like “Web site” in the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet. Judge Peter Openshaw broke into the questioning of a witness about a Web forum used by alleged Islamist radicals.
“The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is,” he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws. Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms “Web site” and “forum.” An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: “I haven’t quite grasped the concepts.”
Good news from the Ninth Circuit, which overturned Google’s loss in last year’s Perfect 10 decision. Here’s what I said about the case back when it was decided:
Google Image Search is a search engine for images. It does not serve ads. AdSense is a third-party ad program whereby any website on the Internet can allow Google to place ads on their site in exchange for a cut of the revenues. The relationship between these programs is… well, there isn’t really a relationship, except they’re both Google products. Sometimes users find infringing pages using Google Image Search that have AdSense ads on them. The court decided this was evidence that Google Image Search was profiting off of infringement.
But that’s ridiculous. Google Image Search doesn’t give any particular preference to web sites that serve up AdSense ads. And AdSense serves up ads regardless of what search engine brought the user to the site. If Google cancelled Google Image Search altogether, there’s little reason to think AdSense would suffer financially—users would likely find the same pages using other search engines.
If this standard is to be taken seriously, search engine companies are going to have to divest themselves of all other online services that might involve infringing copyrights. Yahoo! will have to sell off GeoCities. Microsoft will have to stop selling IIS, its web server.
But Mike at Techdirt warns that the case might not be over:
However, the court ruled that because some of the sites also included Google AdSense ads, Google was directly profiting. Of course, that seems like a totally different issue, so the entire decision was something of a mixed bag, at times saying that thumbnails by themselves aren’t infringing, but there were cases where they were. The latest is that an Appeals Court has overturned the lower court ruling, saying (again) that thumbnails are fair use… but still opening up potential liability if Google could have done a better job to “prevent future damages.” That seems to leave the whole thing wide open for the lower court (which the case is being sent back to) to screw up all over again. So, despite what the headlines might read, this case is far from over.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.