Articles by Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.


Paying Customers are the Enemy

by on October 8, 2007 · 0 comments

Ars Technica reports on the latest DRM PR disaster:

bd_plus.jpg

BD+ is being rushed out to titles only shortly after the spec was finalized, partly in response to hackers cracking the protection on AACS earlier this year. This wouldn’t be the first time that extra layers of copy protection have harmed legitimate consumers: earlier this year Sony had to recall 20 DVD titles protected with ARccOS that caused problems on some DVD players.

When Paramount recently announced that they were switching to HD DVD releases, one of the reasons a spokesperson gave Ars was that the Blu-ray spec was not “market-ready.” Perhaps this is the sort of thing he meant.

Fox’s position is that the problem is entirely the fault of the player manufacturers. Steve Feldstein, Fox senior VP of marketing communications, told Video Business that “consumers should lobby their hardware manufacturers to release firmware upgrades post haste” and that “the title was well-reviewed and playing well on updated players.”

Isn’t that charming? It’s worth keeping in mind that only the legitimate customers have to jump through these kinds of hoops. If you’re stupid enough to follow the rules and pay hard-earned cash for your movies, Hollywood rewards you by making you spend a relaxing evening learning how to update your movie player’s firmware. People who break the law and get their movies via a P2P network don’t have to worry about these sorts of headaches, as those files tend to come pre-cracked and in an open format playable on any device.

SHARE: 0 comments

More Blades

by on October 8, 2007 · 0 comments

You thought the center of high tech was the computer industry. Think again:

I ask him about why five blades were better than one or four, and he clicks on a short animated film that shows that the key area in close and comfortable shaving was the elasticity of our skin. If one accepts that two blades in a razor are better than one – another film shows that after the first blade, the hair tries to retract back into the skin, but the second blade catches it before it does – then the critical factor is skin bulge between the blades. Five blades will give you a closer shave (ie cut deeper and deeper into the skin), but only if the cutting surfaces have precisely the correct spacing between them. And after spacing, there is the tricky issue of clogging. ‘Some of my friends and family do really think that I came to work one day and just added a blade,’ Powell says. ‘But walk around and I challenge you to find the Department of More Blades. It’s just not here.’

Of course, like every important development, The Onion was there first.

SHARE: 0 comments

Music Wants to Be Free

by on October 5, 2007 · 14 comments

Over at Techcrunch, Mike Arrington reaches the conclusion I advocated a couple of years ago: in the long run, the market price of most music is going to be zero. I think Arrington actually focuses too much on piracy. Yes, in the short run peer-to-peer networks are an important source of price pressure. But the far more important factor is the sheer number of people who want to be rock stars. Now that the bottleneck of CD production and distribution has been removed, any musician can reach an infinite number of fans at zero cost. As a result, more and more musicians will find it in their self-interest to voluntarily give music away for free as a means of building up their fan base. Over time, consumers will get used to music being free, and at some point music will be just like news and punditry are today: the vast majority will be free and ad-supported, with a small minority continuing to try to charge money.

However, I do think Arrington gets this backwards:

The price of music will likely not fall in the near term to absolutely zero. Charging any price at all requires the use of credit cards and their minimum fees of $0.20 or more per transaction, for example. And services like iTunes and Amazon can continue to charge something for quality of service. With P2P networks you don’t really know what you are getting until you download it. It could, for example, be a virus. Or a poor quality copy. Many users will be willing to pay to avoid those hassles. But as long as BitTorrent exists, or simple music search engines like Skreemrallow users to find and download virtually any song in seconds, they won’t be able to charge much.

On the contrary, the transaction costs of charging small amounts of money is the reason I think the price will drop from its current price of around a dollar to zero. In the absence of those transaction costs, it’s possible to imagine the price gradually falling over time, perhaps reaching 25 cents in 5 years and a nickel in 10 years. But the problem is that the costs of processing a 10 cent payment is on the order of 10 cents, (and as Clay Shirky has convincingly argued, this isn’t likely to change) so it makes more sense to just give the song away and find other ways to monetize those eardrums.

SHARE: 14 comments

Lessig and Corruption at the FCC

by on October 4, 2007 · 4 comments

Larry Lessig links to news that FCC insiders leaked details of forthcoming decisions to industry insiders in violation of the rules. He is justifiably outraged at the way the FCC has apparently abused the public trust for the benefit of the deep-pocketed interests that wield the most clout in telecom regulation. Administrators who break the law should be fired, and perhaps prosecuted in particularly egregious cases. I think it’s great that Lessig is highlighting these sorts of problems, and I’m looking forward to seeing his proposals for reducing this kind of corruption.

But I also think it’s worth keeping in mind that the odds are very long. This is not a new problem. Government regulators have been doing the bidding of industry incumbents for almost as long as they’ve been in existence. Reformers have been trying to clean up corrupt regulatory agencies for decades, and so far the only reliable way they’ve discovered to clean up a regulatory agency is to abolish it completely.

Which isn’t to say that we should stop trying. On the margins, it is possible to make government more transparent and accountable, and I expect Lessig will use his considerable intellect to come up with some innovative ways of doing that. But in the meantime, we should keep in mind that government agencies don’t work the way they’re described in high school civics classes. They are, in fact, dominated by industry incumbents who are experts at twisting the rules to their advantage, to the detriment of both competitors and consumers. And as long as that’s true, we should be wary of giving it more power over anything, especially over a disruptive technology like the Internet.

SHARE: 4 comments

$222,000

by on October 4, 2007 · 0 comments

As predicted, Ms. Thomas lost her file-sharing case and was ordered to pay more than $200 grand to the recording industry. As much as I dislike a lot of what the RIAA does, I can’t work up too much sympathy for the woman.

One thing that is worth mentioning is that $222,000 seems like an excessive amount of money to fine someone for sharing 24 songs. It’s a basic principle of law that damage awards should have some reasonable relationship to the harm caused by the defendant, and it seems highly implausible that making a single song available online could have caused the recording industry anywhere close to $9,250 in lost revenue. Of course, under copyright law, the jury could have fined her 15 times that amount, which would have been completely absurd.

Update: I can’t find details for Minnesota, but just for purposes of comparison, shoplifting less than $500 of merchandise in New Jersey will get you a $10,000 fine. In Massachusetts it’s $1000, and the same is true of Connecticut. Of course, you can also get jail time for shoplifting even small amounts, but I believe that would require a criminal trial and a higher burden of proof. Most of the seem to have a ceiling around $150,000 in fines for stealing merchandise in the tens of thousands of dollars.

SHARE: 0 comments

She Did It

by on October 3, 2007 · 18 comments

Ars Technica’s Eric Bangeman has been doing some great on-the-spot reporting on the first file-sharing trial in my home state of Minnesota. Assuming his summary of the evidence is accurate, it’s awfully hard to believe her claims to innocence:

After establishing that she has accounts with Match.com, MySpace, plays games online, and has an Internet account at home, Gabriel then asked her if she posted to the “anti-RIAA blog” Recording Industry vs. The People under the username “tereastarr.” After answering in the affirmative, questioning then turned to whether there was another PC in her home the night Media Sentry discovered the tereastarr@KaZaA account. She said that there was not.

On a number of occasions during her testimony, Gabriel asked Thomas to refer to her depositions, reminding her that she was under oath when she gave the depositions and was under oath on the stand. Gabriel then proceeded to show the jury the ubiquity of the tereastarr username in Thomas’ online persona. The jurors saw screenshots of her pogo.com and match.com profiles and the Start menu from her Compaq Presario PC, all of which had the tereastarr username…

Gabriel then turned to her eclectic music collection, comparing some of the bands seen in the KaZaA share to found in her My Music folder upon forensic examination of her hard drive. He rattled off bands such as Lacuna Coil, Cold, Evanescence, Howard Shore, Green Day, Black Sabbath, Creed, Belinda Carlisle, A.F.I., Dream Theater, Sheryl Crow, and Enya, concluding by asking, “Does it surprise you to learn there are more than 60 artists you listen to in the shared folder?”

…Under cross-examination by her attorney, Thomas explained the date discrepancies. She originally had said that she bought the PC from Best Buy in 2003 and that the hard drive was replaced in January or February of 2004. After her forensic expert inspected the hard drive and found that it wasn’t manufactured until January 2005, she then said that she bought the PC in 2004 and that the hard drive was replaced in March 2005. “I was a year off on everything in my deposition,” she said. He also said that the “jury could do the math” on whether it was possible for her to rip 2,000 or so tracks over a two-day period given the demonstration earlier in the day.

Either that’s an incredible series of coincidences, or the woman is guilty as charged. Whether you agree with the law or not, it sure looks like she broke it. Which makes me wonder what she thinks she’s accomplishing. All she’s likely to accomplish is to give the RIAA its first scalp.

SHARE: 18 comments

Robinson to Princeton

by on October 3, 2007 · 0 comments

Congratulations are in order to David Robinson, who has left his previous gig at the American Enterprise Institute to take a position in Ed Felten’s new IT Policy Center. David’s a smart guy, and he joins a group that has done some of the most innovative work in tech policy, so expect big things from them in the future. Today he’s got a post up at Freedom to Tinker comparing today’s network neutrality debate to the Western Union telegraph monopoly. Here’s a quote from Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media:

[W]ithin the United States, Western Union continued to dominate the telegraph industry after its triumph in 1866 but faced two constraints that limited its ability to exploit its market power. First, the postal telegraph movement created a political environment that was, to some extent, a functional substitute for government regulation. Britain’s nationalization of the telegraph was widely discussed in America. Worried that the US government might follow suit, Western Union’s leaders at various times extended service or held rates in check to keep public opposition within manageable levels. (Concern about the postal telegraph movement also led the company to provide members of Congress with free telegraph service — in effect, making the private telegraph a post office for officeholders.) Public opinion was critical in confining Western Union to its core business. In 1866 and again in 1881, the company was on the verge of trying to muscle the Associated Press aside and take over the wire service business itself when it drew back, apparently out of concern that it could lose the battle over nationalization by alienating the most influential newspapers in the country. Western Union did, however, move into the distribution of commercial news and in 1871 acquired majority control of Gold and Stock, a pioneering financial information company that developed the stock ticker.

This is, of course, the position Felten has staked out in the network neutrality debate: that actually passing regulations is likely to have negative consequences, but that Congress and the FCC can use the threat of regulation to prevent the telcos from mis-behaving too egregiously. I’m personally not entirely comfortable with this approach because I think we should be wary of letting government officials to govern by threat rather than explicit regulation. But so far, that’s the strategy we’ve been following by default, and it appears to be working pretty well.

SHARE: 0 comments

Me around the Web

by on October 2, 2007 · 0 comments

I’ve been busy posting a lot of stuff elsewhere in the last week; here are some pointers to some of what I’ve been writing at Techdirt and Cato@Liberty lately:

  • I offer some lessons from the Romney campaign’s commercial mash-up contest.
  • I note that Wall Street analysts are starting to criticize the recording industry’s lawyer-happy strategy.
  • I criticize the goofy idea of government subsidies for declining newspapers.
  • I critique Thomas Hazlet’s column on the iPhone
  • I point out that selling laptops to foreign governments in batches of a million isn’t likely to produce an innovative product.

    I plan to continue posting a significant amount of stuff here on TLF, but if you’re interested in tech policy and libertarianism, you really should be subscribed to Techdirt and Cato@Liberty as well.

    SHARE: 0 comments

    • INSURGENCY FTW!!

    by on October 1, 2007 · 6 comments

    Tom puzzles out the Petraeus Report’s recommendation for a more active military presence in cyberspace:

    I first heard this on the radio, and it seemed a little weird to me. Not because I doubt the existence of insurgent-run websites filled with flash video of roadside bombs, LOLcatted stills from A Mighty Heart and comment threads filled with “INSURGENCY FTW!!”, “ANBAR SUX0Rz” and unflattering analogizing of Sunni Islam to the Playstation 3. I’m sure those sites are out there. I can even believe that they serve a significant recruiting function for people who do genuinely bad, genuinely non-virtual things.

    But it was a bit odd to hear a military commander say that, in addition to the attention we’re paying to people getting shot and blown up, we also need to spend more time dicking around on the internet, presumably countering the nasty internet trouble made by our enemies. For one thing, suppressing online content does not have a particularly storied history. Given that, it seems like the intelligence value of these sites would probably outweigh the utility to be gained by shutting them down. DMCAing the Mahdi Army’s MySpace page would just shut down a marginal source of propaganda. Why bother? It’d be far better to just quietly keep an eye on their top 8 (who is this shady “CamGirl69” character, anyway?).

    In a follow-up post, he answers his own question:

    In response to my last post a much-better-informed little birdy sent me a transcript of a Homeland Security Committee hearing about online Islamic extremism. It was an interesting read, and I may say something else about it later. But for now, here’s the part that was most immediately striking:

    “In an effort to raise its visibility and recruit new members… an Iraqi insurgent group held a website design contest open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. And what was the prize given to the winner of that contest? The opportunity to launch a rocket attack against American forces in Iraq with just the click of the mouse from the winner’s computer.”

    It’s inhuman and morally outrageous, yes. But man, that’s a pretty good idea for an online contest. If you could just tone down the evil you might really have something there.

    SHARE: 6 comments

    Happy Birthday Slashdot!

    by on October 1, 2007 · 2 comments

    It’s hard to believe that Slashdot is turning 10 this month. Slashdot has been a fixture of the tech blogosphere since I started reading tech news online in 1998. I just barely missed getting a 4-digit Slashdot ID, and I wasted enough time reading Slashdot during college that I was one of the approximately 400 people selected to be a moderator during the site’s first experiment with mass comment moderation.

    The site is now far larger and more influential in absolute terms, but I feel like it’s grown steadily less influential in relative terms, as the rest of the tech blogosphere has grown even faster. I also think it’s aged quite well, probably because Rob Malda has been at the helm since the beginning. (You’ve got to be a pretty devoted to a website to propose to your girlfriend on it.) Probably the biggest improvement to the site was when they stopped running Jon Katz’s clueless long-winded screeds. Since he left, Slashdot seems to have realized that political commentary isn’t really their strong suit and stuck to their core competence of tech news.

    I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Slashdot was the first tech news blog, which makes this the 10-year anniversary of the tech blogosphere.

    SHARE: 2 comments

    ← Previous Entries

    Next Entries →