At first glance, it seems to me that this big settlement announced today between Google and the book publishers regarding Google Book Search sounds a lot like an ASCAP model for online book transactions. Specifically, of the key provisions of the agreement, it’s this last one about the Book Rights Registry that makes me think of ASCAP:
Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works – Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.
That’s basically what ASCAP does today, and I think this sounds like a pretty good plan for books going forward. But I also find myself wondering: Could this be the beginning of a move toward a more comprehensive online collective licensing system for other types of content as everything moves online. For example, could this model work for music? EFF has argued it could. And some in the music industry appear to be moving in that direction. (Talk about your strange bedfellows… EFF and the RIAA potentially on the same side of an issue!)
Of course, you’d need to get a lot more companies than just Google to play ball to make it work for music — specifically, you’d need all the ISPs on board. For books, by contrast, the reason today’s deal will likely work is because Google has been the only online operator with the scale and interest in putting the entire contents of so many books online. But all music is already online and much video is heading online, too. So, I think it would be much, much more challenging to make collective licensing work for music and video the way it appears it might work for books. (We’d probably need compulsory licensing instead, which I am no fan of). The key to these voluntary collective licensing systems is large, trusted intermediaries that can clear a massive volume of transactions. Google can do that for books as today’s deal makes clear. It will be interesting to see if others suggest that music and video can and should work the same way. I’m skeptical, and I’m also a bit hung up on some fairness issues about how it would work, which I might touch upon in a future essay.
But I’m no copyright expert so I’d be interested in hearing what my colleagues and others think.
Update: Looks like someone beat me to the punch with the ASCAP comparison. I just starting reading through my RSS feed and finding reaction from others and came across Mathew Ingram’s post arguing that, “In effect, Google is setting up a body that does what ASCAP and similar groups do for musicians.”
Should U.S. businesses involved in Internet commerce do business in nations governed by oppressive regimes? This is a question that many libertarians—including some of us on TLF—have grappled with for some time.
Now Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have signed on to a set of principles for conducting business in countries that disregard human rights. Today’s Wall Street Journal reports:
Under the new principles, which were crafted over two years, the technology titans promise to protect the personal information of their users wherever they do business and to “narrowly interpret and implement government demands that compromise privacy,” according to the code.
It’s welcome news for defenders of liberty that U.S. Web giants plan to play hardball with foreign governments who would use information gleaned from Internet firms to violate their citizens’ human rights. Several troubling reports have surfac
ed in the past few years about American companies abetting egregious actions by oppressive governments. In January, Indian police beat a man whose arrest stemmed from Google’s cooperation with the Indian government. And in 2005, Yahoo gave information to the Chinese government that led to the arrest of a journalist accused of giving out state secrets (the case was later overturned).
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Presumably, everyone reading this post has purchased software at some point in the past 15 years. If you have, you may have agreed to a contract unwittingly. Breaking the seal of the shrinkwrap around the box might bind you to the terms and conditions contained inside. This is but one of many new ways you can be determined to agree to contractual terms you may have never seen.
In the last decade, Gateway came under fire for its means of doing business with consumers. A customer would order her computer over the phone, but when it would come, it would contain a list of terms including things like a mandatory abritration clause – and always stating that the customer was deemed to have accepted the terms by not returning the computer (at her expense) by some period of time. A number of court cases raised the question whether this practice really created a binding contract.
As libertarians, we are generally in favor of contracts. But a contract is a mutually consensual agreement. The critical question for shrinkwrap contracts and the like is whether both parties have really assented. In the Gateway cases, there are three main interpretations of what is going on: Continue reading →
If you’re here in D.C. next Thursday, you might want to drop by the New America Foundation to watch Jonathan Zittrain and me go at it about his important new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Our debate will take place on Thursday, November 6th from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. at New America Foundation headquarters (1630 Connecticut Ave, NW, 7th Floor). My old friend (but frequent intellectual sparring partner) Michael Calabrese will also be speaking. Michael is the Director of New America’s “Wireless Future Program” and one of the all-around nicest guys in the world of tech policy. You can RSVP for the event here.
I’ve been quite critical of the thesis that Jonathan sets forth in his book, and I have discussed my reservations in a lengthy book review and a series of follow-up essays here and elsewhere.
(Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). We’ve also debated his book on the an NPR-Boston affiliate station if you care to hear a preview of our debate next week. That show is online here.
I encourage you to join us for what promises to be a very interesting discussion. As I pointed out in my original review of his book, if you have never had the chance to hear Jonathan speak, you’re in for a real treat. He is, bar none, the most entertaining tech policy wonk in the world.
Again, RSVP here.
Jesse Walker has a terrific feature story looking “Beyond the Fairness Doctrine” in this month’s issue of Reason magazine. I highly recommend it. It’s an in-depth exploration of what an Obama Administration means for the future of tech and media policy. Walker rightly opens the piece by noting that “The fairness doctrine is still dead, and it probably will stay dead even if Barack Obama becomes president.” The danger, however, is that an Obama FCC will still pursue a variety of onerous regulatory objectives that could do a great deal of damage to markets and free speech.
Walker touches upon the various issues that will likely be a priority for an Obama Administration and the Left-leaning media reformistas like Free Press, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, and New America Foundation. Those policy issues include: net neutrality, “localism” mandates and increased “community oversight” regulations, media ownership rules, minority ownership requirements, increased merger meddling, spectrum policy, and other new “public interest” obligations.
Of course, as Walker also correctly points out, it is difficult to see how things could get much worse than they have been under Bush Administration’s FCC and the leadership of Chairman Kevin Martin. Walker was kind enough to quote my thoughts on this point: “Martin is the most regulatory Republican FCC Chairman in decades,” I told him. “He wants to control speech and will use whatever tools he has to get there.”
I stand by those words, but I am also aware that things could get worse — much worse — under a Democratic FCC influenced by radical Leftist activists like Free Press. Indeed, in our new book A Manifesto for Media Freedom, Brian Anderson and I inventory the many looming threats to media and technology freedom that exist today and show how most of them arise from the Left. As Walker notes in his article, however, it is unlikely that a re-empowered Democratic FCC would come right out of the gates with the same sort of command-and-control approaches they’ve employed in the past. And we’ll still have to worry about some right-of-center lawmakers and regulatory joining some of these misguided campaigns. “The real danger,” Walker concludes in his piece, “is more subtle and more mundane. It’s a bipartisan bureaucracy slowly, steadily increasing its power.” Make sure to read Jesse’s entire piece. Great stuff.
Read Matt Lasar’s article on Ars today (“Satellite Radio Minority Channel Decision Looms for FCC“) about how somebody has suggested that Irish-Americans “deserve a channel on satellite radio which informs, educates and entertains them with all things Irish.”
Folks, you just can’t make up stuff this good.
In a City Journal article earlier this year, I wondered “how long some local papers have left when they are barred from restructuring their businesses or partnering with other local media operators to stem the bleeding and reinvent their business models.” I was responding to the Senate’s smack-down of a half-hearted reform effort that FCC chairman Kevin Martin pushed through in November 2007, which proposed relaxing the FCC’s newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule. That rule, unrevised since going into effect in 1975, prohibits a newspaper operator from also owning a radio or television station in the same media market. However, waivers were granted to grandfather in some combined newspaper and broadcast operations that had existed long before the ban took effect. Martin’s proposal was to simply tweak the rule to permit similar combinations in just the nation’s 20 largest media markets.
Martin’s limited liberalization proposal, however, led to howls of disapproval from FCC democrats like Michael Copps and many folks on both side of the aisle in Congress. Supposedly, this was nothing more than a “giveaway” to the newspaper industry, which critics said was doing just fine. It really makes you wonder if any of those critics even both reading the news about newspapers today.
As I have documented here on many occasions, as well as in my big Media Metrics report, the newspaper industry is in huge trouble with every financial variable of importance rapidly heading south. Alan Mutter does a good job here of summarizing “the secular forces dragging down newspapers: Declining readership, shrinking advertising, high fixed costs and growing online competition that makes it increasingly difficult to charge the premium ad rates that were possible prior to the Internet.” As a result of these forces, everyday brings another headline like this one today in the New York Times: “The Star-Ledger of Newark Plans 40% Cut,” or this one in the Wall Street Journal: “Some Newspapers Shed Unprofitable Readers.” The numbers are just miserable, and they just get worse and worse.
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Like many others, I have long been troubled by the fact that the Supreme Court does not allow TV cameras or live audio coverage of the cases it hears. I know all the arguments against live video or audio coverage and I find them all quite unconvincing when weighed against the public’s right to hear the oral arguments and decisions that will have such a direct bearing on their lives and liberty. We should be allowed to see, or at least hear, these arguments and decisions as they happen.
Anyway, as I was reading through an article today in Broadcasting & Cable about how “C-SPAN Seeks Oral Argument Tapes in Fox Swearing Case,” I couldn’t help but think about how particularly ironic it was that our nation’s highest court would be considering one of the most important free speech cases in decades — FCC v. Fox — and it yet wouldn’t be allowing any of us to listen in live when it takes place on November 4th! If we are lucky, the Court might grant C-SPAN expedited access to the tapes of the arguments, but it may be that we have to wait many weeks to hear what was said.
Seems silly to me. Worse yet, it means I will have to camp out in front of the Supreme Court the night before and freeze my butt off in the hope of getting a seat in the courtroom to hear the live argument! Which brings up the final bit of irony I always like to point out about restricting cameras and microphones from courtrooms: Why are they letting anyone in the courtroom at all if they so fear instantaneous public access to the arguments?
From the Columbus Dispatch:
Information on [Joe “the Plumber”] Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.
The security of information about you in government databases is contingent on you keeping your head down.
I was amused to read that a draft Army intelligence report identified micro-blogging service Twitter as a potential tool for terrorists. On the other hand, it’s regrettable that this terrorism mania persists to foster this kind of report and media attention. There’s no distinct terror threat from Twitter. (Do check out the send-up of an Osama Bin Laden Twitter feed by clicking on the image.)
Sure, it’s possible that terrorists could use Twitter, just like it’s possible with any communications medium. Twitter is right up there with telephones, pen and paper, email, SMS, and smoke signals as a potential tool for terrorism. Each of these media have different properties which make them more or less susceptible to use for wrongdoing — and more or less protective of legitimate privacy for the law-abiding.
Like most common digital communications, Twitter is a pretty weak medium for planning bad things. Copies of every post are distributed far and wide — and all “Tweets” are housed pretty much permanently by a single organization.
If you want to get caught doing something wrong, use Twitter to plan it.
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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.