Via TechDirt, Hillary Rosen, former head of the RIAA, writes about file-sharing lawsuits and digital rights management:
But for the record, I do share a concern that the lawsuits have outlived most of their usefulness and that the record companies need to work harder to implemnt a strategy that legitimizes more p2p sites and expands the download and subscription pool by working harder with the tech community to get devices and music services to work better together. That is how their business will expand most quickly. The iPod is still too small a part of the overall potential of the market and its propietary DRM just bugs me. Speaking of DRM, it is time to rethink that strategy as well……… At some point, I will write more comprehensively about those years and these issues….then again, maybe not.
I hope she expands on these thoughts sooner rather than later.
Relatedly, the Register has an article on the legal battle over the Pirate Bay:
One pressure group associated with the site claims that the Swedish police were misled and incompetent in their actions.
“[Anti piracy group] Antipiratbyran has clearly misled the police in this case,” said Tobias Andersson of Piratbyran, a spin-off of Piratebay.org dedicated to promoting file-sharing. “They seem to have convinced incompetent police that the servers in question are filled with copyright protected materials.” The Piratbyran statement said that there is “no illegal material on the actual server”.
The servers contained not media files but links to BitTorrent files containing material. Christopher Wallin of the IT group of Swedish law firm Delphi & Co said that this is not likely to be a successful defence. “Our opinion is that that is silly. That is an argument they have been making for the last two or three years,” said Wallin. “They have committed a contributory offence, it is a contribution to copyright infringement.”
That defense wouldn’t fly in an American court, but it’s possible Swedish law is different.
Whatever you might think of the Pirate Bay from a legal or moral perspective, they’re proving to have undeniable entertainment value:
Swedish hackers are evidently not too pleased with the shutting down of Pirate Bay. This weekend they launched a DOS attack against the Swedish government’s website, as well as the Swedish police site. Both were offline for a couple of hours. The government’s website was functioning again at around 8am on Sunday, according to news site The Local. A group calling themselves World Wide Hackers claimed responsibility for the attacks in a phone call to the newspaper Aftonbladet.
On Saturday, hundreds of demonstrators with pirate flags gathered in downtown Stockholm. In G¶teborg, the country’s second largest city, another 200 protesters took the streets. They demanded that The Pirate Bay’s servers, which were seized on Wednesday, are given back and the investigation against the site’s operators closed.
Now, my ignorance of Swedish politics is as complete as my knowledge of Swedish law, but I have to say this doesn’t seem like a very effective PR strategy. Most of the intellectually serious defenders of services like Grokster focused on the potential of peer-to-peer technologies for distributing non-infringing content like open source software and public domain works. The pirate party seems to be taking the opposite approach, celebrating the role of peer-to-peer networks in copyright infringement, and generally providing the opponents with an easily-caricatured image.
On the other hand, one of the crucial differences between Swedish and American political systems is that the Swedish Riksdag has proportional representation. According to Wikipedia, that means they only need four percent of the vote to earn seats in parliament. In that kind of system, self-caricature might actually be an advantage. They don’t need to attract the median voter, they just have to attract the votes of the 4 percent of voters who support their cause. The exaggerated pirate antics may be an effective strategy for increasing their media coverage and attracting the requisite 4 percent of the vote.
Unfortunately, the party’s website has only a small amount of its content available in English, so it’s hard to judge how serious their ideas are. They say they want to abolish the patent system and replace it with something better, but the English summary doesn’t elaborate on what the “something better” would be. And for copyright law, they propose a broad exemption for personal copying, and a reduction of copyright terms to five years. That strikes me as fairly radical, although it does fall short of advocating a repeal of copyright outright. Their proposal to ban DRM and contract terms approximating DRM strike me as a bad idea.
In a new Brainwash column, I make the case against computerized voting machines:
Did George Bush steal the 2004 election?
Some left-wing activists are convinced he did. They point out that initial exit poll results in swing states predicted a Kerry victory. And they note that Walden O’Dell, the head of voting machine manufacturer Diebold, wrote in a 2003 fundraising letter that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
Personally, I don’t find their evidence very compelling. Exit polls can be wrong for a variety of reasons, and the O’Dell quote only proves that he was a partisan Republican, not that he did anything illegal.
What’s disturbing, however, is that our nation’s headlong rush to adopt computerized voting machines has given such conspiracy theories a certain air of plausibility. There’s little evidence of foul play in this case, but there are good reasons to be concerned. Last month, a consumer group released a report warning of serious security problems with Diebold voting machines. The report shows that it’s possible to install malicious software in minutes that could surreptitiously miscount votes.
I point to source code disclosure and paper voting records as stopgap measures to minimize these dangers, but conclude that ultimately, computerized voting may just be a bad idea. At the very least, we should hold off on installing additional computerized voting machines until we’ve had more time to study the existing ones and better understand their flaws.
I’m doing some research to try to get a handle on Paul Krugman’s accusations against my former colleague Pat Michaels in the Ukia Daily Journal. (It was also in the New York Times, but it costs money there–methinks the paywall people at the Times need to talk to the syndication people) Michaels responds to the accusation on Cato’s blog.
I haven’t figured out what I think about the dispute yet, but I wanted to flag an inaccuracy I found in the course of my research. RealClimate.org is a prominent blog about “climate science by climate scientists.” They’ve done a number of blog posts criticizing Michaels for alleged inaccuracies, including the one featured in Krugman’s column. One of the unfortunate things about the climate debate is that it’s extremely vitriolic: the pro-Kyoto folks consider the “skeptics” to be pseudo scientists in the pay of private industry, while the “skeptics” accuse their opponents of trumping up the results to get more research funding. As a result, they often accuse each other of lying and misleading the public, and it’s often hard to tell for sure who’s telling the truth.
So here’s one example where Michaels’s critics wrongly accused him of misrepresenting his opponents. Gavin writes that Michaels misquoted climatologist James Hansen by removing the qualification “Given these constraints on climate forcing trends” from the sentence “we predict additional warming in the next 50 years of 3/4 +/- 1/4°C.”
“What are these constraints that Hansen mentions?” he asks, “Precisely the control of CO2, methane and black carbon emissions that Michaels insists are unnecessary!”
But that’s not quite right, as I’ll explain below the fold.
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I want to put in a belated plug for Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter’s Cato Policy Analysis, “Amateur-to-Amateur: The Rise of a New Creative Culture.” They do a fantastic job of describing how the rise of the Internet has enabled the emergence of a new model for cultural production.
They walk the reader through the “supply chain” of the culture industry (creating new works, selecting works for publication, producing copies of the work, distributing them to consumers, and promoting them) and shows how technolog is radically decentralizing each of them. Fifty years ago, only wealthy people and commercial movie studios could afford the technology needed to create professional-quality videos. Today, you can do the same thing with a few thousand dollars of equipment, and the cost of that equipment drops every year. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to become a nationally-known pundit, you needed to spend decades working your way up through the ranks of a large, hierarchical media organization like the
New York Times. Now, as Julian explains, you just start a blog, and the size of your audience is limited only by the quality of your work. A decade ago, creating an encyclopedia required hiring dozens of full-time employees to solicit and edit articles. Today, a far more comprehensive encyclopedia is being produced by volunteers, and it’s available for free on the Internet.
Some people dismiss these developments as anomolies, or at least as isolated incidents. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source software, and the rest are just manifestations of people having too much free time on their hands, the theory goes–the real work is still done in hierarchical, commercial enterprises. What Lastowka and Hunter do a good job of demonstrating, I think, is that these phenomena deserve to be regarded as a new form of production on par with the 20th century’s industrial production model. It’s in its early stages yet, so naturally it still accounts for only a minority of cultural products, but that’s not surprising, given that industrial production methods had a 100-year head start.
I do have a criticism of the paper, however.
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The Christian Coalition now has a whole section on its website devoted to network neutrality regulations. Unfortunately, the letter from president Roberta Combs is chock full of misleading arguments, as well as some outright errors. For example:
Since its birth, the Internet has existed on phone lines, which were covered under what are known as “common carrier” regulations, (or “net neutrality”), which prevented discrimination by network providers based on content or where a call originated. This principle carried over to the Internet and helped make it a dynamic engine for free expression and economic growth.
I’m not sure what “has existed on phone lines” is supposed to mean. The Internet has always used a variety of interconnection technologies. In any event, as I’ve written before, common carrier regulations have never applied to the Internet backbone. Nor has it applied to cable modems or to dedicated high-speed lines like ISDN or T1 lines.
She goes on to raise wildly implausible scare stories:
Under the new rules, there is nothing to stop the cable and phone companies from not allowing consumers to have access to speech that they don’t support. For example, a cable company with a pro-choice board of directors could decide that it doesn’t like a pro-life organization using its high-speed network to encourage pro-life activities. Under the new rules, this could happen–and it would be legal!
Sure, it would be legal. But it would also be commercial suicide, as millions of irate pro-lifers would switch to their local Baby Bell and call their Congresscritters. It’s ludicrous to think that any large telco would think about pulling that kind of stunt.
Finally, the letter trots out the only three examples of alleged network discrimination that the pro-regulatory side has been able to muster: The first was in Canada, and involved blocking a site that Telus subsequently got shut down by a court order for violating the privacy of its employees. The second was probably an accident, and was quickly corrected. And the third is a case in which the FCC’s authority was sufficient to address the problem.
In short, there’s nothing new here: Combs is repeating the same misleading arguments as left-wing sites like MoveOn.org. Which is a shame, because there are some smart telecom experts at conservative think tanks who I bet would have been happy to set her straight.
Business Week reports on the sad state of MovieLink, the music-download service created by major Hollywood studios that’s been getting a less-than-stellar reception from consumers. It seems that the studios want out of the download business, but they can’t find anyone to buy the thing:
Last year, Movielink brought in Salem Partners LLC, a Santa Monica-based investment banking firm to find buyers. It was Salem Partners that brought Blockbuster to the table, according to a source close to Movielink, although the deal was vetoed by one of the five Movielink studio board members. Salem Partners would not comment.
Another potential buyer early on was former Warner Bros. (TWX) home video chief Warren Lieberfarb, who put together a group of investors but couldn’t get the studio’s approval. The key roadblock: The studios’ refusal to change the terms of existing agreements to offer films for download, including an insistence that the films not be “burned” onto discs that could be played in DVD players.
Studios have long since resisted allowing burning, for fear that large DVD retailers like Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) and Blockbuster would rebel, threatening the huge sums studios now get from them. And for those movies that the studios would allow Movielink to sell, Hollywood would only offer a short-term, one-year deal to Movielink’s buyer. That frustrated buyers who worried that the studios would change their mind down the road.
Not surprisingly, potential buyers of the site want a service that consumers will actually want to use. And not surprisingly, consumers don’t seem too excited about buying movies they can only watch on their computers screens, not on their TVs or DVD players.
We sometimes hear that without digital rights management technology, Internet-based music and movie services wouldn’t be possible. Yet this appears to be a case where DRM is the primary obstacle to the creation of a successful movie-download business:
Business Week says that MovieLink only has enough cash in the bank to last about another year.
(Hat tip: TechDirt)
I received an email from Patrick Ross charging that yesterday’s post about the broken window fallacy misrepresented his views:
Your “broken window” argument falls apart when you look at my full post. I was criticizing Benkler for using traditional dollars-exchange-hands analysis when it comes to the size of the content industry (with flawed numbers, as I pointed out) yet also saying that it doesn’t matter what dollars-exchange-hands amounts are when discussing Wikipedia and SETI@Home. In other words, I pointed out he was selectively choosing metrics based on what backed any given argument. If anyone ignored Bastiat it was Benkler.
I’ll quote the relevant portion of his post and let you judge for yourself:
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Online security expert Bruce Schneier has an excellent article on the NSA spying program:
Data mining works best when you’re searching for a well-defined profile, a reasonable number of attacks per year, and a low cost of false alarms. Credit-card fraud is one of data mining’s success stories: All credit-card companies mine their transaction databases for data for spending patterns that indicate a stolen card.
Many credit-card thieves share a pattern–purchase expensive luxury goods, purchase things that can be easily fenced, etc.–and data mining systems can minimize the losses in many cases by shutting down the card. In addition, the cost of false alarms is only a phone call to the cardholder asking him to verify a couple of purchases. The cardholders don’t even resent these phone calls–as long as they’re infrequent–so the cost is just a few minutes of operator time.
Terrorist plots are different; there is no well-defined profile and attacks are very rare. This means that data-mining systems won’t uncover any terrorist plots until they are very accurate, and that even very accurate systems will be so flooded with false alarms that they will be useless…
Finding terrorism plots is not a problem that lends itself to data mining. It’s a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and throwing more hay on the pile doesn’t make that problem any easier. We’d be far better off putting people in charge of investigating potential plots and letting them direct the computers, instead of putting the computers in charge and letting them decide who should be investigated.
By allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on us all, we’re not trading privacy for security. We’re giving up privacy without getting any security in return.
(Hat tip: Derek)
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