While I’m perusing Henley’s blog, I see his co-blogger Thoreau touched on one of my pet issues:
Yesterday I flew from Maryland to Milwaukee, where my wife and I are visiting family for the week. I was surprised to discover that I now have to pass through two machines (the air blower as well as the metal detector), not just one, and that my belt buckle now sets off metal detectors. I don’t have one of those giant ornamental belt buckles beloved of Texans, just a normal belt buckle. Yet now I have to take my belt off, along with my shoes. It wasn’t always this way, so I assume they’ve upped the sensitivity of the metal detectors.
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Jim Henley helps the NYT out by revising their story on Tim O’Reilly’s slightly silly proposal for a blogging code of conduct.
Another sharp insight from Lefsetz:
When you’re a wannabe, when you’re starting out, you give your music away for free. Forget the fact that you want to be paid. The problem is, nobody knows who you are to buy your music. Your free campaign is a way to get traction. Revenue is down the pike!
Kind of like Google. There was no revenue at first. Just the truly great search engine. They got eyeballs, and then they came up with their advertising model. There’s already a business model in music, live, merch and the recorded music sales you can garner, but it pays to look at Google. Google is constantly releasing new products, that are free to use. Google News. Google Earth. Google Video, Blogs and a whole host of other features. You see they want you hooked, they want you to be a member of the club. They’ll figure out how to make money off you later. Funny, but this strategy not only decimated Yahoo, it put a huge dent in Microsoft’s online strategy.
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Via Chris Anderson, Bob Lefsetz provides a reality check to those who think that music distribution needs a “business model”:
I’m positively stunned at the blowback from business regulars about that chap giving his music away for free. Oldsters can’t understand the economics!
I’ll clue you in, THERE ARE NONE!
This is your worst nightmare. People who can follow their dream on sweat equity. Who with their computer and the money from their day job or mommy and daddy can compete with you. It’s like the North Vietnamese, all our military might couldn’t defeat individuals who would fight to the death. Same deal in Iraq.
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Julian has some more smart things to say about network neutrality and the Pizza Hut analogy:
Suppose an ISP wants to build out infrastructure to support 100mbps service in an area that doesn’t currently have it. Problem: There are customers who might like that higher speed access for a few purposes, like streaming movies, but not enough who are prepared to pay the premium to upgrade their whole connection, so it’s not cost effective for the ISP to make the investment. One solution might be metering: You let customers pay for the bandwidth they use, paying a bit more for bursts of higher speed needed to access specific sites with a lower flat rate for the majority of the time, when they’re just reading news and checking email. The problem is that consumers seem to have largely rejected metering: People want to pay one rate for their access, and not have to think about their usage level on a day-to-day basis.
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My friend Tim Carney points out the absurdity of the NAB’s lobbying campaign against the XM-Sirius merger:
The National Association of Broadcasters has paid top dollar for the Carmel Group to produce a paper arguing that XM and Sirius satellite radio should not be allowed to merge, the NY Post is reporting (and Drudge is linking). The crux of their argument is that a joint XM-Sirius will not face competition. This implies that digital radio and terrestrial radio generally do not compete with satellite radio. If the don’t compete, then why is NAB spending so much to block the merger?
Frankly, the fact that NAB is so opposed is the strongest argument I can think of for allowing it.
Also, check out Tim’s excellent article in the Examiner on the NAB’s lobbying campaign.
Mark Blafkin concedes I’m right that the GPL respects the freedom of users to choose whether to use proprietary software alongside free software. But he insists I’m missing the big picture:
This brings us to one fact that Tim got blatantly wrong. Stallman HAS attacked the OpenOffice team for relying on proprietary code in the past. This article from NewsForge chronicles the dispute over OpenOffice’s reliance on Java code and the FSF’s plans to rewrite the code to remove any of those dependencies.
Despite what Tim asserts, Stallman is not content with promoting his goals merely through persuasion and cooperation. The GPL comes complete with the copyright equivalent of land use restrictions that limit what you (and now your customers) can do with that software. It essentially says that if you build a new barn on top of your land (aka GPL Software), you need to share your designs with the entire world. Does that REALLY jive with traditional libertarian beliefs? The GPL is designed to force anyone who uses that software to accept the ideology of the FSF either for moral or pragmatic reasons.
If you look closely, what I said was that Stallman has never “criticized efforts by the Open Office team to allow free software users to use Microsoft Word documents.” Stallman’s criticism of OpenOffice for building atop a proprietary platform makes perfect sense in light of his focus on users’ freedom. Free software built upon proprietary software is going to be subject to any restrictions that apply to the underlying proprietary software. Since Stallman’s focus is on preserving users’ freedom to use software as they choose, this makes perfect sense to me. Stallman objects to integrating free and proprietary software, because it runs the risk of undermining users’ freedoms. But he’s never objected to interoperability between free and proprietary software.
But let’s talk about the big picture. As I’ve said before, libertarianism is not “marketarianism”:
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There’s been a big to-do the last few days over Craig Newmark’s article analogizing network neutrality to your ability to call the pizza joint of your choice without interference by your phone company. Cory, Julian, Ezra, and Tom all weighed in. Julian thinks that this scenario isn’t so problematic because companies can already buy extra phone lines to help their customers get through faster. Ezra insists that companies should be competing on the basis of pizza quality and delivery time, not their ability to shop for telecommunications services.
The thing I find frustrating about this discussion is that the usefulness of an analogy depends crucially on its similarity to the real world. And in this case, the pro-regulatory side has been so vague about what the real-world fear is that we can’t even begin evaluating whose analogy is more apt. Tom begins to get at this when he encourages us to differentiate between changes designed to make the network work better and changes that are simply designed to extort more money out of application service providers. An even better reaction is this post by son1:
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It’s true: EMI’s entire music catalog will be available DRM-free next month:
Apple® today announced that EMI Music’s entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase DRM-free (without digital rights management) from the iTunes® Store (www.itunes.com) worldwide in May. DRM-free tracks from EMI will be offered at higher quality 256 kbps AAC encoding, resulting in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording, for just $1.29 per song. In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of all previously purchased EMI content to the higher quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song. iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside DRM-free higher quality versions when available.
Some details:
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Over at Ars, I give a qualified endorsement to the Holt e-voting reform bill:
Serious concerns were raised regarding the flaws with the printers used to produce paper audit trails. Norris cited a Las Vegas survey in which fewer than 40 percent of voters actually checked the paper record of their vote before leaving the polling place. An election official in North Carolina reported that there were hundreds of printer failures in that state during the 2006 election. He cited a Georgia study about the logistical challenges of storing, tracking, and manually counting thousands of votes recorded on unwieldy rolls of paper tape.
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