ACLU, EFF, and AU’s CSM take on TV News, YouTube

by on October 22, 2008

A swarm of acronyms descended on other acronyms on Monday.  The ACLU, EFF, and AU’s Center for Social Media (CSM) wrote an open letter (PDF) to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and other acronymed networks asking that each of them think twice before sending takedown notices to YouTube for what they see to be fair use content concerning the election.  The letter notes that:

Not only are such notices contrary to the law, but they also threaten to silence an exciting new source of political expression.

TechDirt seemed to miss the point by reacting to the letter with this statement in a recent story:

If the law is the problem, fix the law — don’t ask everyone else to play by different rules. That just sweeps the problems of the law under the rug, where they’ll get a lot less attention.

But the trifecta of concerned acronyms aren’t asking for TV networks to play by a different set of rules, or even to restrain themselves from excercising their legal right to file a takedown for infringement, they’re asking for the networks to follow the letter of the law and recognize blatant cases of fair use.  This seems fair and totally reasonable.

What I take issue with and what seems to be asking a lot in terms of legality, is the coalition’s second letter sent on Monday (PDF), this one addressed to YouTube.  It asks YouTube for two things:

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Should Government Funding Be Part of a Broadband Plan? Have Your Say on November 18

by on October 22, 2008 · 7 comments

Readers of Tech Liberation Front may be interested in a new breakfast series that BroadbandCensus.com has recently begun.

The next event in this series, “Should Government Funding Be Part of a National Broadband Plan?” will be held on Tuesday, November 18, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., and will include Stan Fendley, the director of legislative and regulatory policy for Corning, Inc., Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), and John Windhausen, Jr., president of Telepoly Consulting. I will moderate the discussion.

Two weeks after Election Day, this Broadband Breakfast Club meeting will consider one of the hottest topics in telecom: can and should funding for broadband work its way into a pending fiscal stimulus package?

Future meetings of the breakfast club (December 2008 through March 2009) will consider the role of broadband applications in harnessing demand, how the universal service fund will be changed by high-speed internet, the role of wireless in universal broadband, and the extent of competition in the marketplace.

The Broadband Breakfast Club meets monthly at the Old Ebbitt Grill, at 675 15th Street, NW, in Washington. (It’s right across the street from the Department of the Treasury.)

Beginning at 8 a.m., an American plus Continental breakfast is available downstairs in the Cabinet Room. This is followed by a discussion about the question at hand, which ends at 10 a.m. Except for holidays (like Veteran’s Day), we’ll meet on the second Tuesday of each month, until March 2009. The registration page for the event is http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com.

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3rd Annual “National Freedom of Speech Week”

by on October 21, 2008 · 6 comments

National Freedom of Speech Week is here again. As I point out each time it comes around, it’s good opportunity for those of us in America to remember how lucky we are to live in a country that respects freedom of the press, speech, and assembly. In my essay commemorating the first Freedom of Speech Week, I explained why I felt this way:

what speech critics consistently fail to appreciate is that in a free society different people will have different values and tolerance levels when it comes to speech and media content. It would be a grave mistake, therefore, for government to impose the will of some on all. To protect the First Amendment and our heritage of freedom of speech and expression from government encroachment, editorial discretion over content should always remain housed in private, not public, hands.

However, there will always be those who respond by arguing that speech regulation is important because “it’s for the children.” […] Personally, I think the most important thing I can do for my children is to preserve our nation’s free speech heritage and fight for their rights to enjoy the full benefits of the First Amendment when they become adults. Until then, I will focus on raising my children as best I can. And if because of the existence of the First Amendment they see or hear things I find troubling, offensive or rude, I will sit down with them and talk to them in the most open, understanding and loving fashion I can about the realities of the world around them.

I would hope that the critics of the First Amendment would do the same instead of seeking to undercut our nation’s rich history of freedom of speech and expression. It is one of our Founders’ enduring gifts to future generations and a precious freedom worth fighting for.

Happy Freedom of Speech Week everyone.

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Loud TV Ads: No Need for Regulation

by on October 21, 2008 · 24 comments

This summer, I posted a tongue-and-cheek piece thanking policymakers for taking steps to save us from loud television ads. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) have proposed H.R. 6209, the “Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act.” (the “C.A.L.M. Act”) to address the supposed scourge of “volume manipulation” in TV ads by making sure that TV ads are not “excessively noisy or strident.” The FCC would be empowered to regulate “the average maximum loudness” of ads to make sure they “shall not be substantially higher than the average maximum loudness of the program material that such advertisements accompany.”

Ken C. Pohlmann, one of my favorite A/V columnists, offers his thoughts on the Calm Act in his monthly column for Sound & Vision magazine in the November issue. “This bill is a totally dumb idea,” he argues, “and it has the added advantage of being unenforceable. What are we supposed to do? Levy a $550,000 fine when Janet Jackson has a volume-control malfunction?” Good question. As I pointed out in my essay on this, the thought of FCC bureaucrats sitting around squandering their time and taxpayer money on this nonsense is really appalling, and I can’t wait to see the reams of paperwork they would spit out when they have to open an proceeding about how “excessively noisy or strident” ads will be defined, measured, and then penalized.

“Fortunately,” Pohlmann points out, “practical solutions are already available from the private sector” such that regulation is unnecessary. He elaborates:
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Has anyone ever said “yes” to airline security questons like these?

by on October 21, 2008 · 13 comments

So, I was just checking in online for a flight tomorrow and got this typical warning message.

flight check in warning

It made me wonder: in the entire history of questions like these being asked by airlines, has anyone ever said “yes”?   After all, if you’re an actual bad guy carrying these things, you’re going to lie about it.  (As an aside, I notice that most airlines have stopped asking the questions: “Has anyone giving you anything to carry” and “Have your bags been in your possession the entire time”?  Perhaps they just got tired of hearing the same answers over and over again.  I always wanted to respond sarcastically with a line like: “Why yes, in fact, a very menacing-looking man just gave me a heavy package in a plain brown wrapper and asked me to carry it on the plane.”  But I knew nothing good would come of that — probably result in a complete body cavity search or something like that — so I always chickened out.)

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Comcast set to double broadband speeds

by on October 21, 2008 · 34 comments

Major speed enhancements are rumored to be coming soon from Comcast, which has been spending serious cash to upgrade its network to the DOCSIS 3.0 standard. Customers in many markets who now pay $42.95 a month for 6mbps/1mbps service will be upgraded to 12/2 — a doubling of both upstream and downstream speeds — with no corresponding price increase. This follows Comcast’s pattern of enhancing speeds without hiking prices. And the price point of the standard tier has remained unchanged in nominal terms for several years, so when you factor in inflation, it’s fair to say Comcast has actually been dropping prices.

It’s amazing to consider how broadband speeds have evolved in a relatively short period of time. Comcast’s highest tier was a mere 4mbps/384kbps just four years ago, when DSL speeds typically topped out at 3/768. For consumers who live in a competitive ISP market, DSL now offers 20/1, Fiber offers 30/5, and Cable will soon offer 22/5. All of these tiers are priced under $100 per month.

Though we may not be amidst a “price war” among ISPs per se, as Mike Masnick recently argued, there is simply no denying that price per megabit is declining rapidly. This is all thanks to competition, of course, which has pushed providers to invest in newer technologies that allow for faster broadband connectivity.

Market skeptics will assuredly respond to my optimism by pointing out that so long as Comcast sticks with its 250GB monthly usage cap, consumers are really just getting the same service with shinier packaging. Yet that fact hardly means we should scoff at Comcast’s new performance tiers.

As I’ve discussed on several occasions, I churn through a lot of file transfers each month, so I’m all for Comcast raising its cap (or, alternatively, implementing reasonable overage fees). But even with Comcast’s fairly generous limits, who isn’t ecstatic about being able to download any file in half as much time as before? Caps will surely evolve over time as demand for 1080p content delivered over the Internet grows, but for now, speed is a bigger concern than usage for most consumers.

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Book Review: Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine

by on October 20, 2008 · 25 comments

Siegel Against the Machine book coverOf the titles I included in a mega-book review about Internet optimists and pessimists that I posted here a few months ago, I mentioned Lee Siegel’s new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.  It is certainly the dourest of the recent books that have adopted a pessimistic view of the impact the Internet is having on our culture, society, and economy. Because Siegel’s book is one of the most important technology policy books of 2008, however, I decided to give it a closer look here.

Siegel’s book essentially picks up where Andrew Keen’s leaves off in Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture (2007).  I posted a two-part review of Keen’s book here last year [Part 1, Part 2], but here’s a quick taste of Keen’s take on things.  He argues “the moral fabric of our society is being unraveled by Web 2.0” and that “our cultural standards and moral values are not all that are at stake.  Gravest of all,” Keen continues, “the very traditional institutions that have helped to foster and create our news, our music, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are under assault as well.”

As I noted in my earlier “Net optimists vs. pessimists” essay, after reading Cult of the Amateur, I didn’t think anyone else could ever be quite as over-the-top and Chicken Little-ish as Keen. But after working my way through Siegel’s Against the Machine, I realized I was wrong. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegel seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegel is currently a nose ahead in that race.

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Male Priorities, in Order: Sex, Net, TV

by on October 20, 2008 · 21 comments

There’s a new poll out this week from some group called Break Media that is getting some attention because it finds that 69% of online males say they can’t live without the Internet, versus just 31% for television. That’s more (unsurprising) proof of the substitution effect at work in the media marketplace today, with many people moving their media consumption online and abandoning old, appointment-based, couch-potato media. (Shhh… don’t tell the boneheads in Washington who are still busily regulating TV and radio as if “Leave it To Beaver” was still on the air. They might shift their attention to regulating the Net instead.)

Anyway, what I found more interesting about the poll was the finding that 74% of men would rather have sex than surf the Web. Perhaps more importantly, 79% of men “would rather meet a woman out on the town than online.” And they say traditional values are dead!

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Will NASCAR Fans Get Out the Vote for Kevin Martin?

by on October 19, 2008 · 11 comments

I’ve been trying to catch up after a week-long cruise with my kids down in the Caribbean and as I was doing my best to sort through thousands of e-mails and articles in my RSS reader, I stopped and did a double-take when I saw some headlines from last week about how the Federal Communications Commission is spending $350,000 taxpayer dollars to sponsor a NASCAR team.  For that money, NASCAR driver David Gilliland “has agreed to use his No. 38 car as a high-speed billboard promoting the February 2009 national transition to digital television,” according to Multichannel News.

In the annuls of idiotic government spending initiatives this one has to be a potential hall of fame entry.  Over on the PFF Blog, my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin has a humorous piece explaining why:

what signal does FCC sponsorship of a stock car racer send to the beleaguered American public in this autumn of our discontent? The FCC Chairman claims that this sponsorship is an “extremely effective way for the FCC to raise DTV awareness among people of all ages and income levels across the United States who loyally follow one of the most popular sports in America.” Well, those loyal sports fans will have to be following No. 38 at the three sponsored races with some pretty high-speed binoculars to catch the DTV message. Although the $350,000 does get the government posting of its informational website URL, www.dtv.gov, along the track — doubtless not the only advertisement to lure spectator eyeballs — it is primarily receiving posting on the car’s sides and on the driver’s helmet and suit. Let’s just hope No. 38 has a large fan base, does exceeding well in the three races, and, more importantly, avoids accidents, injuries, and fleeting expletives.

Maybe this is just another federal government bailout. On the same day that the FCC announced its investment in NASCAR, the Raleigh News & Observer ran an article entitled, “Global crisis threatens NASCAR.” It seems that “motor sport” team sponsorship has been down this year, “with sinking auto showroom sales, declining attendance and rising operating costs.” And let’s not even talk about the carbon footprint of stock car racing.

Of course, what’s even more pathetic about this move is that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s likely motivation for doing this is probably political:  He probably thinks this is a good way to win blue collar votes with all the NASCAR fans down in North Carolina for a future run for office. [It’s widely rumored that he will seek some office down in his home state after his tenure at the FCC is up.]  After all, NASCAR is hugely popular in that state.  I don’t know about you, but I’m none too happy subsidizing a get-out-the-NASCAR-vote effort for one of the most regulatory-minded FCC Chairmen in history.

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It Takes a Stack to Stop an Attack

by on October 17, 2008 · 6 comments

Yesterday at an event on Capitol Hill, I had the opportunity to formally release a paper I co-wrote with my colleague Steve DelBianco called “Hardening the Security Stack.” The “stack” is a common sense concept, but one that seems to get lost in the rhetoric about Internet security.

The idea is that there is no monolithic thing called “Internet security,” nor any monolithic entity that can single-handedly provide it. Internet security relies an interdependent network of tools, technologies and behaviors; and succeeds or fails based on the efforts of a wide range of stakeholders, from infrastructure providers at the core of the Internet, to end users at the edge. Those stakeholders make up the security “stack.”

There is no silver bullet. It sounds simple enough, but when policymakers and members of the high-tech community get it in their heads that one tool — or one stakeholder group — has the silver bullet to solve all of our Internet security woes, it can lead to some unfortunate outcomes. The latest example of this has been the recent furor over DNS Security Extensions or “DNSSEC.” Continue reading →

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