Earlier this week music label EMI announced that it would sell songs on Apple’s iTunes without digital rights management. Yesterday Microsoft said it would do the same thing for its Zune Marketplace.
So do we have the beginnings of a significant move toward DFM – DRM-Free Music? Is this evidence that the market is working and responding to consumer demand? I think (hope) so.
EMI plans to offer DRM-free music for $1.29, compared to $0.99 for DRM-protected music. That buck 29 will also get you double the bit rate, or 256kbps, on downloaded songs. 256kb/s is still a far cry from the 1,411 kb/s that you get when buying a CD, but it will sound good enough for most listeners except for the audiophiles among us.
It makes sense to pay more for a product if you get more rights to do something with it. But I know that there are those people that might say DRM shouldn’t be around anyways, so consumers are paying more for something they should already have. Ultimately, consumers will decide with their dollars whether to buy a DRM version or a DFM version of their favorite music. Stay tuned….
Net Loss, from the WSJ, April 5, 2007 …
Europe’s old state telecom monopolies have been broken up, only for competition and consumers to face a new threat: re-regulation by Brussels. Nowhere is this prospect more apparent than in the debate over “Net neutrality.” Like the U.S., the EU can either allow the Internet to develop as rapidly and excitingly as possible, or it can freeze progress in its tracks.
Unfortunately, the latter option looks more and more likely. Draft laws are due in July on the EU’s “standardization policy for the information and communication technology sector.” EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding says the goal of the new policy is “to foster content creation and distribution in the multiplatform media business.” That sounds encouraging enough until you view it through the Commission’s promise to “closely monitor attempts to call into question the neutral character of the Internet.”
My friend Tim Carney points out the absurdity of the NAB’s lobbying campaign against the XM-Sirius merger:
The National Association of Broadcasters has paid top dollar for the Carmel Group to produce a paper arguing that XM and Sirius satellite radio should not be allowed to merge, the NY Post is reporting (and Drudge is linking). The crux of their argument is that a joint XM-Sirius will not face competition. This implies that digital radio and terrestrial radio generally do not compete with satellite radio. If the don’t compete, then why is NAB spending so much to block the merger?
Frankly, the fact that NAB is so opposed is the strongest argument I can think of for allowing it.
Also, check out Tim’s excellent article in the Examiner on the NAB’s lobbying campaign.
Mark Blafkin concedes I’m right that the GPL respects the freedom of users to choose whether to use proprietary software alongside free software. But he insists I’m missing the big picture:
This brings us to one fact that Tim got blatantly wrong. Stallman HAS attacked the OpenOffice team for relying on proprietary code in the past. This article from NewsForge chronicles the dispute over OpenOffice’s reliance on Java code and the FSF’s plans to rewrite the code to remove any of those dependencies.
Despite what Tim asserts, Stallman is not content with promoting his goals merely through persuasion and cooperation. The GPL comes complete with the copyright equivalent of land use restrictions that limit what you (and now your customers) can do with that software. It essentially says that if you build a new barn on top of your land (aka GPL Software), you need to share your designs with the entire world. Does that REALLY jive with traditional libertarian beliefs? The GPL is designed to force anyone who uses that software to accept the ideology of the FSF either for moral or pragmatic reasons.
If you look closely, what I said was that Stallman has never “criticized efforts by the Open Office team to allow free software users to use Microsoft Word documents.” Stallman’s criticism of OpenOffice for building atop a proprietary platform makes perfect sense in light of his focus on users’ freedom. Free software built upon proprietary software is going to be subject to any restrictions that apply to the underlying proprietary software. Since Stallman’s focus is on preserving users’ freedom to use software as they choose, this makes perfect sense to me. Stallman objects to integrating free and proprietary software, because it runs the risk of undermining users’ freedoms. But he’s never objected to interoperability between free and proprietary software.
But let’s talk about the big picture. As I’ve said before, libertarianism is not “marketarianism”:
Continue reading →
It’s sure to be the best thing since ALF 3! American.com‘s “2.0” happy hour!
Host: David Robinson
Location: Panache Restaurant
1725 Desales St. NW, Washington, DC View Map
When: Thursday, April 5, 6:00pm
Phone: 202 657 9892
Please join us to celebrate the launch of the new, improved American.com. Those in attendance will include David Robinson, managing editor; Marianne Wasson, associate editor; Ben Newell, editorial assistant; members of the web design team; and most importantly, a bunch of our contributors.
Panache has agreed to extend its happy hour until 8 PM — featuring $5 martinis and house wines. Come raise a glass…
About the site:
American.com is the web site of The American—AEI’s magazine of business and economics. We have a new look and a great mix of stories, from an expert take on the Blackstone IPO to reflections on Islamic banking to a review of a new book on the economics of wikis. We offer original content—and links to the best business coverage from around the web—every day.
Lisa Lerer of Forbes was nice enough to do a feature story this week about my views on the panic over social networking and the push for age verification of such sites. Her piece is entitled “Why MySpace is a Safe Space,” and begins as follows: “Adam Thierer doesn’t look like much of a revolutionary. But last month he challenged both Washington and conventional wisdom with a fairly radical proposition: Perhaps MySpace and the Internet aren’t so scary for kids, after all.”
I don’t really regard what I’ve been saying in my recent essays or big new PFF study as “revolutionary.” Rather, if you spend any time studying this issue and these sites in a dispassionate, educated way, I think the conclusions I draw seem quite reasonable. Unfortunately, I don’t think many policy makers or critics have spent any serious time on these sites or seriously explored the relative danger of online social networking sites relative to offline social networking places. A classic “moral panic” has developed because of this: An older generation fears a new medium that it does not use or understand.
Anyway, read my discussion with Lisa for more details.
My TLF post last week on the new draft of the GPL v.3 (or as I referred to it, GPL Vendetta) sparked a number of exchanges. Neil McAllister at InfoWorld said in his article that V should be for Vindication, not vendetta. And in his post Tim Lee responded to Mark Blafkin’s thoughts on the draft GPL v.3. Mark has a recent response of his own where he ruminates on Richard Stallman’s alleged libertarianism.
All this interesting and passionate discourse leads me to wonder why we care so much about the GPL? Of the many tech policy issues, this one strikes a visceral nerve with a vocal cadre of techies. I’m less visceral and more analytically removed (not to imply that others aren’t analytical). I care not because I’m a programmer, but because markets care – the GPL has made major inroads into commercial enterprises! And as a lawyer, I care about how attorneys will be counseling their clients on the GPL 3 (as embodied in the current draft). In this regard, there’s an interesting SearchEnterpriseLinux.com article that features an interview of Jeff Seul, an IP attorney, where he states:
With other open source licenses out there, like the Mozilla public license, and the Apache license, you discover that they are brief and are in plain English. The GPLv3 is 12 pages with a 60-page explanatory document. I don’t know how people are going to cope with a 12-page licensing agreement with 60 pages of ancillary text – that’s 70-plus pages of text and it’s ambiguity run amok. If I ever had a client come to me, and they said they wanted to build a business around the GPLv3, and were asking for a legal opinion on it, this lawyer would not have the confidence in it to give them clear legal advice.
I wholeheartedly support the ability of the FSF to dictate its licensing terms – but ultimately the software market will – as counseled by lawyers – be the final arbiter of the GPL 3.
There’s been a big to-do the last few days over Craig Newmark’s article analogizing network neutrality to your ability to call the pizza joint of your choice without interference by your phone company. Cory, Julian, Ezra, and Tom all weighed in. Julian thinks that this scenario isn’t so problematic because companies can already buy extra phone lines to help their customers get through faster. Ezra insists that companies should be competing on the basis of pizza quality and delivery time, not their ability to shop for telecommunications services.
The thing I find frustrating about this discussion is that the usefulness of an analogy depends crucially on its similarity to the real world. And in this case, the pro-regulatory side has been so vague about what the real-world fear is that we can’t even begin evaluating whose analogy is more apt. Tom begins to get at this when he encourages us to differentiate between changes designed to make the network work better and changes that are simply designed to extort more money out of application service providers. An even better reaction is this post by son1:
Continue reading →
Leave it to the blogosphere (in the person of one David McElroy) to instantaneously debunk my ham-handed April Fool’s Day post claiming a security breach in the the NAPHSIS EVVE system. Congratulations, David. (Who says it’s such a good thing to have smart readers?!)
The National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems has developed and implemented the Electronic Verification of Vital Events system to allow immediate confirmation of the information on a birth certificate presented by an applicant to a government office anywhere in the nation irrespective of the place or date of issuance.
That sounds neat, but it is being incorporated into the REAL ID national ID system apparently without regard to the security issues involved. If we are going to use driver’s licenses for security purposes, each link in the chain of issuance is then a potential vulnerability.
What if the NAPHSIS EVVE system and others like it were comprimised and made to confirm the issuance of birth certificates that didn’t actually exist? We could have untold numbers of licenses issued based on fraud. The system we have now, which provides a modicum of security, could collapse as fraudulently acquired driver’s licenses proliferate.
Two weeks ago, at the meeting of the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, I asked Stewart Baker, Assistant Secretary for Policy at DHS, what counter-measures might be employed by attackers on the REAL ID national ID system. He said, “We have done some thinking about that . . .” I’m not sure our confidence should be inspired by that.
Every weakness in the system should be explored carefully. I summarized some of them in Appendix A of my testimony at the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last week.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.