Patrick Ross has a good post about the Warner Bros. announcement that they’d be distributing their content via BitTorrent:
Kudos to Warner Bros. for working out distribution of movies on BitTorrent. The BitTorrent technology truly is amazing, but unfortunately like so many new technologies in the digital world it was quickly embraced by those disrespectful of intellectual property before legitimate market forces could move in. Kudos also to the folks behind BitTorrent for working with studios to help its service respect artists’ rights.
That said, I won’t be using this new service, although I purchase Warner Bros. movies (I own all 4 Harry Potter DVDs). I want to watch movies on my TV, not my computer, and so far Warner Bros. is doing the same thing you find with the movie download services; recording permitted only onto DVD for backup, and the DVD can only be played on the original computer. The motion picture industry needs to move in the direction of the recording industry, which licenses services that permit the downloading of songs and the transfer of those songs onto other devices, including CDs.
I wonder if Ross realizes that the ease with which consumers can transfer their music between devices is primarily the result of the fact that the CD was invented before the advent of DRM technology. The recording industry did their best to outlaw the MP3 player, but that effort failed because without DRM on CDs, the DMCA didn’t apply. Once consumers got used to being able to play their music on the device of their choice, Steve Jobs realized that he had to provide similar functionality in order to get consumers to buy music online. The music industry didn’t give consumers that freedom on purpose, they were dragged kicking and screaming into doing so.
How would history been different if the industry had prevailed in
Diamond? Although the recording industry would have eventually gotten around to licensing MP3 players, I think it’s hard to deny that the pace of innovation would have been hampered. The increasingly balkanized video marketplace gives us a hint of how the music marketplace would have evolved had the RIAA won. Hollywood is so terrified of piracy that they’ve failed to license any video-download services that actually give consumers what they want: an affordable, hassle-free way to watch content on their TVs. Hollywood will come to its senses eventually, but consumers will suffer from a depressed pace of innovation in the meantime.
Personally, I don’t think Ross should have to get anyone’s permission to watch he’s purchased on his TV. He should be able to download a conversion tool that would allow him to burn the movies onto a DVD for watching with any DVD player. Not only would that be extremely convenient for Ross and others like him, but it would also likely make the home video device market more innovative, as consumer electronics firms would have the freedom to build devices that use video content in new ways, just as the first MP3 players did to audio content in the late 1990s. Sadly, such devices are illegal under the DMCA, so we’ll probably never know what we’re missing.
Last week was the Cato debate between Cato scholars Roger Pilon and Bob Levy on the NSA surveillance issue. Like Ricahrd Epstein and Mark Moller, my sympathies were with Bob Levy, who argued that the president can’t simply ignore FISA when he decides it interferes with his conduct of the war on terrorism.
I’m not really qualified to get into the constitutional questions, which Levy handled ably, but I did want to comment on Pilon’s substantive argument about why the program was necessary. He quoted two people to make his case. First, he quoted the following from a
Wall Street Journal article by Judge Posner:
Continue reading →
Solveig Singleton has posted about an error she spotted in my Cato paper: Linspire does in fact sell a licensed DVD player. So it looks like I was wrong when I said that there are no software DVD players available for the Linux operating system.
I’m unhappy that I missed this. I spent several hours researching available DVD players, and I asked a friend of mine who administers Linux computers for a living, and while I found extensive informaiton about several players that required the (probably illegal) libdvdcss library, I didn’t find any information about Linspire’s player. My apologies for not researching the issue more thoroughly.
I have some thoughts about how the existence of Linspire affects my argument, and I want to comment on her analysis of the CSS issue, but I’m going to wait for her to post part two of her analysis before I do so. Singleton also says that I’m guilty of “breaches of professional ettiquette,” so I’m anxious to learn more about that.
I’ve got a new article on the deceptive campaign to regulate the Internet over at Brainwash:
Last month, Rep. Ed Markey warned that “We’re about to break with the entire history of the Internet.” He’s right, but not in the way he intends. The Internet has evolved without significant government oversight for over a decade, and it has never had the kind of comprehensive bureaucratic control envisioned by network neutrality advocates. That has left questions about Internet architecture and evolution in the hands of engineers and entrepreneurs, not lawyers, lobbyists and bureacrats. Network neutrality regulations would change all that, placing decisions about the Internet’s architecture under the control of bureaucrats at the FCC.
Of course, a “Put Bureaucrats in Charge of the Internet” campaign would be unlikely to catch the popular imagination. So instead of making a serious case for their proposal, advocates of new regulations are pretending that it’s opposite day: those who want to maintain the status quo are pushing “radical” laws, a coalition led by Microsoft and Yahoo is a “rag tag band,” and one tiny ISP’s attempt to block Internet voice services is a looming threat to the Internet’s future. There might be good arguments for government regulation of the Internet, but if we’re going to have a meaningful discussion of the idea, we need to start by calling a spade a spade.
Danny O’Brien of EFF gives us another reason we should just say no to a new telecom bill:
the broadcast flags, both video and audio, have been wandering the halls of Congress, looking to smuggle themselves into law, like tramps looking for an empty boxcar. For nearly a year, neither the MPAA and RIAA have been able to find them a ride. The MPAA failed to introduce the broadcast flag language into an appropriations bill, or the reconciliation bill, nor could they sneak it into last year’s urgent digital television transition bills. The RIAA’s audio flag has been rebuffed at every turn.
But early this week, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) introduced a long awaited 125-page draft reform of the Communications Act to the Senate Commerce Committee last week, and both flags found their lift. With telecom reform likely, it’s critical that you take action now to stop these dangerous proposals from coming along for the ride.
The flags are stuck in a crowded carriage with a handful of other controversial causes: net neutrality, universal service, municipal broadband. The bill is already a product of much behind-the-scenes wrangling, and there will be jostling and bargaining before a vote takes place. Though supposedly bi-partisan, Senator Inouye gave it the most unenthusiastic endorsement a sponsor could give.
Many members of Congress still don’t understand the danger to innovation and fair use posed by these government technology mandates. Experts agree that neither flag mandate will prevent continued leakage of music and TV onto the Internet, but it will give FCC bureaucrats, acting in the interests of the entertainment industry, the power to meddle in what you do with bits in your own home.
Whatever your views on DRM more generally, I think it’s clearly bad policy for Congress to mandate the use of a particular DRM technology or to give the FCC the power to set DRM standards. There are a handful of good things Congress could do with a new telecom bill, but as the sausage-making process grinds on, it’s becoming more and more clear that the best we can hope for is for Congress to leave well enough alone.
Personally, I’m not sure I believe children will be scarred for life if they see a virtual bare breast before the age of 17. But, some parents apparently disagree, and I’m glad to see that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board is doing a good job of keeping such parents abreast (so to speak) of what’s in the latest video games. When it was discovered that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion could be modified to remove the female players’ tops, it was quickly yanked from the shelves for re-labeling:
When game publishers submit upcoming releases to the ESRB, they also must include videos of a game’s most intense sexual or violent content. Because games like Oblivion can be played for dozens of hours without players seeing everything in them, the organization depends on publishers to send them the most potentially objectionable content.
The company said that it did not hide anything from the ratings group and that its pre-release submission on Oblivion was “full, accurate and comprehensive.”
Bethesda blamed the partial nudity of some characters on tampering by third parties who have modified the game’s art files and said it appeared in only Oblivion’s PC version. The company said it did not “create a game with nudity and does not intend that nudity appear in Oblivion” and added that it was taking steps to protect the game’s art archive from tampering.
Local game designer Brian Reynolds, head of Big Huge Games Inc. in Timonium, Md., said, “It would be a disaster for us” if the ESRB re-designated one of his titles after its release.
“That’s something you never want to see, games getting pulled off shelves,” he said.
Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said pulling games and re-stickering them is an expensive process.
“Many people see the ESRB as a tool of the industry–but, in fact, developers fear it,” he said. “They are tough as nails.”
Tough as nails? Don’t tell that to Hillary Clinton. It might get in the way of her grandstanding.
Intel has asked the judge to throw out AMD’s antitrust case against it. I find it hard to understand how a case like this is supposed to benefit anyone but antitrust lawyers. After all, the point of the law is to alter incentives so that people won’t do bad things. Yet that doesn’t seem to have happened in recent high-tech antitrust cases. Microsoft, for example, has adopted the strategy of ignoring the antitrust process entirely, and it’s worked pretty well for them. By the time all the appeals in its browser-tying case had been exhausted, the IE-Netscape battle was ancient history, and the courts had no appetite for aggressive punitive actions. Sure, it costs Microsoft some money in fines and legal fees, but that’s far preferable to neutering themselves by refusing to enter any new market where they might be branded monopolists. Likewise, the EU has levied some big fines against Microsoft, but they haven’t figured out any way to reverse Microsoft’s alllegedly anti-competitive behavior. Microsoft would likely be in much worse shape had they stayed out of the media player market out of fear of anti-trust prosecution.
This AMD-Intel dispute seems to have similar dynamics. The lawsuit concerns conduct by Intel that occurred in the first half of this decade, yet the trial won’t start until 2008 and likely won’t be resolved until a year or two later. Given how murky the law is concerning what is and isn’t legitimate conduct, the logical thing for Intel to do is to ignore the antitrust process completely. They should focus on competing in the marketplace and let the legal department do damage control after the fact.
Which calls into question what the point is in the first place. If companies are going to do what they would have done anyway, what are we getting for those millions of dollars in legal fees?
Tim Berners-Lee has a good article on the importance of network neutrality. He does a good job of explaining why it’s an important principle, and how it was crucial to his creation of the World Wide Web. But his conclusion is frustrating:
To actually design legislation which allows creative interconnections between different service providers, but ensures neutrality of the Net as a whole may be a difficult task. It is a very important one. The US should do it now, and, if it turns out to be the only way, be as draconian as to require financial isolation between IP providers and businesses in other layers.
Policy is about trade-offs. To endorse a legislative end without giving serious thought to the means is a recipe for disaster. The details of the legislative approach matter a lot: it’s likely that any attempt to regulate network neutrality will have some unintended consequences, and so we need to look at a specific piece of legislation and figure out what those unintended consequences might be. Yet a lot of people supporting the concept don’t seem very interested in any of those messy details. They figure that once we’ve convinced people that network neutrality is a good thing, we can let the telecom nerds work out how to enact that moral conviction into law. If they get their way, I bet a lot of them will be surprised to discover that the real-world results of their crusade aren’t anything like what they had envisioned.
I’m pleased to see that my erstwhile employer, the Cato Institute, has a new blog. Not a lot of tech coverage so far, but for those of you who are interested in the libertarian take on other issues, there’s probably no better place to turn.
It seems that Steve Jobs has once again won his battle with the music industry:
Record labels have for months been calling on Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL – news – people ) Chief Executive Steve Jobs to reform the pricing of songs on his online music store iTunes. In particular, they want the billionaire to jack up the price of newer hits from the regular flat rate of 99 cents. But alas, it all seems to have been to no avail. On Tuesday, we learned that after finally renewing its contract with Warner Music Group, EMI, Bertelsmann and Sony joint venture Sony BMG, and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Apple Computer has had the final say on pricing–and it’s staying at 99 cents.
I wonder if it’s beginning to dawn on the music industry that they created a monster when they insisted that Apple develop a DRM scheme. As more and more music fans become locked into Apple’s proprietary platform, Steve Jobs will be able to dictate terms to the labels, and may be able to cut them out of the loop entirely by dealing with artists directly.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.