An excellent explanation by Eben Moglen about why geeks are so outraged about Novell’s agreement with Microsoft:
Our friend Mark Blafkin objects that free software partisans have often claimed that Microsoft patents were a threat to free software when it suited them. This is true, but it’s kind of beside the point. The problem with Microsoft’s behavior isn’t what they say about their patents. The problem is the implicit threat their statements embody.
When Microsoft says “Linux infringes 245 patents and they’d better pay up,” that’s entirely different from a potential litigation target saying “Linux infringes 245 bogus patents and so we’d better change patent law to make sure we don’t get sued.” It’s kind of like the difference between a shopkeeper saying “I’m worried the Mafia breaking my store’s windows so we need increased police protection” and a Mafia don saying “that’s a nice shop you’ve got, it would be a shame if something happened to it.”
I subscribe to Stereophile magazine. Every month I take great pleasure in reading the latest product reviews, particularly those involving either of the following:
Unobtainium plated interconnects sheathed in endangered panda skin for optimum voodoo-shielding
Any devices employing any form of magnetic levitation technology
Zenph takes audio recordings and turns them back into live performances, precisely replicating what was originally recorded. The software-based process extracts and encodes the details of how each note was played. The encoding is played back on an acoustic grand piano allowing listeners to experience the performance as if they were in the room when the original recording was made. This re-performance is then recorded afresh using the latest recording techniques. This release features new recordings of that experience specifically designed for surround-sound, stereo or headphone listening.
What are the copyright implications of doing this? A few things to consider:
The Goldberg Variations are obviously in the public domain. Gould’s 1955 recording, as a derivative work, is not.
Nothing you hear on this recording is in any way sampled. No audio from the 1955 recording persists.
The original recording was essentially traced, so the exact timing and velocity of each note matches Gould’s performance perfectly.
It’s being marketed as Gould’s 1955 performance.
Please post any thoughts you might have to the comments.
The morning after North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper
(and others) “asked” MySpace.com to hand over the names of sex offenders on its
site, what do I do? I testify in Raleigh about a social networking bill. Talk about entering the lion’s den!
This is the latest development in what is becoming an intense battle over social networking safety. And as I saw first hand in North Carolina, state
legislators are happy to be on the record for any bill that purports to protect children, even if it means mandating age verification techniques that ultimately work against the children we’re trying to protect.
Update: a good overview of the hearing is an article in today’s Raleigh News & Observer newspaper.
I testified on SB 132, now under consideration in North Carolina that would, among other things, require social networking sites like MySpace to verify the ages of their members and facilitate parental consent and parental access to their children’s social networking pages.
At first glance these seem like reasonable proposals.
Unfortunately, they aren’t.
The American Spectator reported yesterday that House leaders have decided to “aggressively pursue” reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine this year. In January, Rep. Dennis Kucinich raised a stir by saying he would pursue the issue, but — while always entertaining — the far-left Kucinich doesn’t always speak for his party’s leadership. The Spectator report indicates that that leadership is now behind the effort in a big way.
The report also includes some mind-bogglingly frank statements by a House staffers on the reasons for the effort. “Conservative radio is a huge threat and political advantage for Republicans and we have had to find a way to limit it,” a “senior advisor to Pelosi” is quoted as saying. A Government Reform committee staffer is then quoted as saying: “Salem [Broadcasting Co.] is a big target, but the big one is going to be Limbaugh. We know we can’t shut him up, but we want to make life a bit more difficult for him.”
The quotes are amazingly reminiscent of statements by Richard Nixon and his staff, who routinely used the Fairness Doctrine to cow opponents in the media. The surprising thing, though, isn’t the sentiment — most everyone after all knows the political dimension of this issue — but the fact that staffers would let themselves be so quoted. The statements sound (suspiciously) more lilke GOP talking points on the issue than anything a halfway experienced staffer would let himself utter.
If these quotes are accurate, however, those of us on the anti-regulation side may as well put our pens away now. We couldn’t possibly make a better case against this regulation than those staffers have.
The question then would be: will they get equal time to rebut their own arguments?
Over at my other blog, Brian Moore points out that government idiocy is an international standard. According to a story on Bhutanese officials worrying that their subjects will become restive after seeing a more affluent life on their TV screens:
“Advertisements create desires, which cannot be satisfied by people’s current economic position,” wrote Phuntsho Rapten of the Centre for Bhutan Studies. “Crimes and corruption are often born out of economic desires.”
I can’t top Brian’s retort:
Do you know what else causes desires which cannot be satisfied by people’s current economic position? Being in a really crappy economic position. Gosh, I wonder why those 31.7% of Bhutanese below the poverty line have so many desires? How crass and materialistic of them.
It certainly would be terrible if all those enticing images caused peasants to get restive for political and economic reforms.
Legislation is expected to be introduced in Congress very soon that would regulate television programming deemed to be “excessively violent.” This follows the release of the FCC’s recent report calling on Congress to act and to give the agency the power to regulate such programming on broadcast television and potentially even cable and satellite TV.
In response to these proposals, I wanted to draw your attention to an event that I will be hosting this week as well as a new study (and a few old ones) that PFF has published on this issue:
(1) EVENT THIS FRIDAY: PFF will be hosting a congressional seminar this Friday, May 18 from Noon-1:30 on “The Complexities of Regulating TV Violence.” The event will take place in Rayburn House Office Building , Room B354. Panelists will include:
* Henry Geller, Former General Counsel, Federal Communications Commission
* Robin Bronk, Executive Director, The Creative Coalition
* Robert Corn-Revere, Partner, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP
* Jonathan L. Freedman, Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto and Author, Media Violence and its Effect on Aggression
(2) NEW STUDY: PFF has just released a new study, “The Right Way to Regulate Violent TV,” which outlines the many ways parents have to deal with potentially objectionable media content, including violent programming. The 23-page study highlights the many technical and non-technical parental control tools and methods that families can use to tailor video programming to their own needs and values. In the report, I argue that:
Bob Hagen from Global Crossing reminds us that as of today, the ISPs are legally required to help the government spy on you, although (so far) only with a court order:
On March 10th, 2004, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and the Drug Enforcement Agency submitted a petition to expand the scope of CALEA to include communications that traverse the Internet (again, at the carriers’ expense). The proposed changes to CALEA were approved in August 2005.
To those law abiding citizens that view this as an Orwellian infringement of their civil liberties, there are tools available that you can use to preserve your privacy and anonymity on the Internet. Since CALEA only addresses the interception of data, it does preclude the use of encryption to transform that data into gibberish. Here are some free tools that utilize strong encryption and are devoid of hierarchical trust models such as PKI:
Yesterday I highlighted the publication of the transcript from an event I hosted on age verification proposals for social networking sites. Today I want to highlight another excellent event that followed close on the heels of my event and expanded upon several of the issues we discussed that day.
On May 3rd, my friend Tim Lordan, Executive Director of the Internet Education Foundation, hosted a panel discussion on Cap Hill entitled “Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization.” The event featured the comments of 4 of the leading experts in the field of online child safety, including:
* Dr. David Finkelhor, Director, Crimes against Children Research Center (CCRC), University of New Hampshire
* Dr. Michele Ybarra, President, Internet Solutions for Kids and author of several studies on youth online
* Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet & American Life Project
* danah boyd, Researcher, University of California, Berkeley and Fellow, University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications
It was an eye-opening discussion that shattered many of the myths driving legislative efforts aimed at regulating Internet sites or activities in the name of protecting children. I strongly encourage you to read the transcript, or just watch the video of the event here. It will change the way you think about these issues.
What’s most bizarre about this piece is how incredibly superfluous it seems. Like the idea of accountable discussion forums, where every idea is linked to a verifiable real name? Well, there are plenty of those already. Worried about people “hate-mongering” or calling each other “the vilest names”? There’s no reason a site can’t limit that behavior while preserving pseudonymity, and indeed, so long as there are some people who don’t care about being hateful under their own names, that seems like a better way to address the problem. And the author’s imagination is so grossly impoverished that the only legitimate reason he can imagine to permit the use of a nom de Net is for the protection of whistleblowers, for whom he’ll grant sites ought to make exceptions on a “case-by-case basis.”
Fortunately, this sort of “transparency” has precisely no chance of becoming the general rule, for precisely the same reason the op-ed misapprehends the problem from the outset. Pseudonymous speakers are not “elevated to the podium”—note how the passive voice obfuscates as well as any handle—we elevate or ignore them when we decide what to read, how much credence to give it, and whose views to link and propagate in our own writing. Indeed, the “podium” metaphor—as though the Internet were a big room in which we all sit and listen to whomever’s got the mic for the next five minutes—is a pretty good early warning signal for the cluelessness that pervades the piece. Fora for anonymous speech are common because lots of people like them, because the annoyance of filtering out the boors is, for many of us, dwarfed by the benefit of having the freedom to air your views without worrying about what Bob in HR or Aunt Hortense would think if they came across them on Google. And even though some of the more prominent formerly-pseudonymous bloggers—Jane Galt and Atrios, say—have since ditched their masks, I’d bet theres a significant proportion of both their daily readers who wouldn’t even recognize the names “Megan McArdle” or “Duncan Black.” Why? Because when you’re making a cogent argument based on verifiable facts, supported by links, and with equal openness for others to poke holes in the argument or link contradictory information, the names of the people, names just don’t matter a whole lot. When the ideas and arguments are transparent, identities don’t need to be.
Quite so. One of the things I find odd about these sorts of articles is it’s never clear what we’re supposed to do about them. There are lots of different websites on the Internet, and if there was widespread annoyance over anonymous speech, one assumes that consumers would begin gravitating toward sites with stricter policies. It’s not obvious what’s served by hashing the issue out in the pages of the Washington Post.
Reading through the comments on this post on the economics of open source, I was surprised to find the following comment by Tony Healy of the Institute for Policy Innovation:
Clearly, free software is a big boon to Google and every other large corporation, just as low wages are. But neither provide benefits to programmers. Many advocates of open source actually have explicit open source lobbying roles with corporates, but misrepresent their claims as being in programmers’ interests. That is, their job is to lobby for free inputs.
Unfortunately the progamming profession is young and has no awareness of its own interests, nor consciousness of labour market disciplines that are part of the structure of older professions. Also, the lack of access barriers removes the consciousness of their own value that is implicitly taught to people entering other professions.
I would be fascinated to know what “labor market disciplines” and “barriers” he’s referring to, and which “older professions” he thinks programmers should be emulating. Maybe he thinks programming should be more like the medical profession? Or the real estate industry?
It’s absolutely true that increased competition often drives down the wages of producers in a particular industry. It may very well be that by eliminating barriers to entry in the software profession, free software is exerting downward pressure on wages in the software industry. (although it also makes them more productive, so my guess is that it will actually lead to higher wages in the long run) In either case, it’s bizarre to see somebody from a nominally free-market organization citing the intensely competitive nature of the market for programmers as a problem that needs to be solved. As he himself notes, competition among producers means lower prices for consumers. If that’s the effect free software has on the software industry, isn’t that something we should be celebrating?
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.