Congratulations are in order to our friends at Techdirt, who recently raised a round of funding to expand their Insight Community and welcomed Mark Fletcher, founder of Onelist and Bloglines, to their board of directors.
One of the remarkable things about Techdirt is how the Internet has allowed a small number of (exceptionally smart) people to do a lot with a little. According to the article I linked to above, they raised $600,000. That seems like a remarkably small number for a web site that gets more traffic than your average mid-sized newspaper’s website. And of course, Techdirt reached its current level of prominence before raising this round of financing, so I imagine this will allow them to be even more successful in the months ahead.
Over at the EFF blog, Derek Slater makes an excellent point:
Great gadgets for your music collection are all over CES: servers that stream to devices throughout your house, slick portable players and music cell phones, place-shifting software that lets you–and your friends–hear your collection from any computer, and much more. But if you want to do more with your DVD collection, you can basically forget about it.
The reason why is, of course, the DMCA. While anyone can build a device that rips music CDs and make use of your MP3s, no one can build a device that unlocks the DRM on DVDs without getting Hollywood’s permission first. Sure, you can find software online to help you rip your DVDs and put them on your iPod, but you won’t find such features built into consumer products on display here. (Kaleidescape, which offers a high-end multi-thousand dollar DVD server and got sued for it, is the exception that proves the rule.)
This fact is even more striking in light of all the emerging video delivery system here, including Microsoft’s IPTV system, cell phone video services, and movie downloading systems. You don’t have to look hard at CES to find a product that aims to help consumers acquire video on the device of their choice. Yet DVDs remain just as limited as they ever were.
I’ve made this point before. I always get really frustrated when DMCA supporters assert that the DMCA has been on the books for almost a decade and no harm has been done. It’s impossible to predict which specific devices would have been invented without the DMCA. But there’s obviously a Kaleidescape-shaped hole in the consumer electronics market, and I’m having trouble thinking of another explanation.
Via Julian, Christopher Yoo has an interview at Network Performance Daily. Art Brodsky has a rebuttal, and Yoo ripostes.
I have to say I don’t find this argument by Yoo terribly persuasive:
Allowing broadband providers to use different protocols can also expand the number of dimensions along which networks can compete with one another for business. Employing different protocols might permit smaller network players to survive by targeting sub-segments of the larger market, in much the same way that specialty stores do when confronted with competition from a low-cost, mass-market retailer. For example, network diversity might make it possible for three last-mile networks to coexist: one optimized for traditional Internet applications (such as e-mail and website access); a second designed to facilitate time-sensitive applications (such as streaming video and VoIP), and a third incorporating security features to facilitate e-commerce and to guard against viruses, spam, and other undesirable aspects of life on the Internet. By mandating that the entire Internet operate on a single protocol, network neutrality threatens to foreclose this outcome and instead force networks to compete on price and network size-considerations that reinforce the advantages already enjoyed by the largest players.
The whole point of the Internet is that it is (as the name implies) interconnected. An “Internet” service that only connected you to a subset of the world’s computer users would be dramatically less valuable than the current, public Internet.
But for quality of service to work, it would have to work from end to end. Congestion can happen at any point along the network, so it makes little sense to do a lot of work offering performance guarantees for the last mile while the backbone remains a best-effort network. So as far as I can see, any prioritization scheme would have to be adopted by the whole Internet. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to have different ISPs running different protocols.
I’m also not sure I understand the point of the Akamai example, since I don’t believe anyone thinks that Akamai would become illegal under a network neutrality requirement. Obviously, if there’s language that would inadvertently ban Akamai, that would be something everyone would agree needs to be changed, but I haven’t seen an example of language that would make Akamai illegal.
OK, I like Apple as much as the next guy (OK, quite a bit more than the next guy) but it’s a little bit ridiculous that Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone (a product that’s still 6 months away from release) is the top story on Google News. Aren’t there several wars and an economic suicide going on at the moment?
I’m one of those people who has an Apple problem. This year it looks like, as expected, the big announcements are an iPod phone and a set-top box. Both of them look pretty cool to me.
Another interesting tidbit is that Apple reports having sold 1.3 million movies in the first four months. That’s obviously a drop in the bucket compared to total DVD sales, but it’s likely to be a significant fraction of high-definition DVD sales. The Wall Street Journal reports that there are about 700,000 DVD players in homes right now. If we assume that each of those customers have purchased 8 DVDs (which is probably high, since many of those “DVD players” are actually PS3s), then total high-def DVD sales are in the ballpark of six million units, meaning that Apple has sold about 20 percent as many movies as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD put together. And that’s with only one studio’s movies (Disney’s) on offer.
Of course, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD boast higher picture quality, so this isn’t an entirely fair comparison. But Apple (and other online vendors) can more easily ramp up picture quality as higher bandwidth becomes available. So it’s at least possible that the winner of the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray battle will be “none of the above.”
Update: Of course I meant that there are 700,000 high-definition DVD players.
As usual, my co-bloggers are falling down on the job when it comes to tooting their own horns. First, James Gattuso has an interesting article over at The American on AT&T’s concessions in the BellSouth merger:
Even those who favor net neutrality should be upset that this rule was imposed through the backdoor of the FCC, after failing to gain acceptance through Congress’s front door. Backdoor policymaking hurts the public, as the checks and balances of the normal policymaking process are short-circuited. More directly, hijacking merger reviews to alter policy hurts firms and their customers–instead of a fair review on the merits, transactions are held hostage to political whims. Will this become a precedent for future FCC reviews? Perhaps not–this case may be unique. But don’t count on it.
And on Cato’s website, here’s an MP3 of Jim Harper discussing his recent paper on data mining and government surveillance. If you haven’t had time to read the paper, here’s a chance to get a 5-minute summary in podcast format.
Dave Weigel points out MyDeathSpace, a site that provides links to the MySpace pages of people who have recently died. Dave is counting the hours until Congress bans the site. I’m not so sure, though. There’s no doubt that the idea is tasteless, and I certainly wonder about anyone who visits the site regularly. But it’s hard to think of a good rationale to make the site illegal. I mean, you can’t just make it illegal to link to web sites created by dead people, and the site isn’t really hurting anyone. Of course, that doesn’t mean Congress won’t think of some way to score political points by shutting the site down, but maybe, like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, the site will continue to be tacky but not illegal.
Ars has a good write-up of a recent report on problems with the 2006 elections:
The report puts to rest the commonly held belief that screen calibration problems could account for all of the reported instances of vote flipping. Some of the offending machines were not touchscreen models–voters used a selection wheel to make their choices. In other cases, the voters would make a touchscreen selection for one slate of candidates, only to have the summary screen (and in some cases the paper tape) report that half or more of the selections had been flipped.
Notably, there were reports of vote-flipping in the hotly contested FL-13 race in Sarasota County, FL. Most recently in the legal contest over that disputed race, a federal judge has declined the Jennings camp’s demands to see the source code to the voting machines used. (In effect, the judge has declared that America’s citizens are not allowed to see how the votes were counted in this very close race, because to reveal that information would violate the voting machine company’s “trade secrets.”)
Other problems described in the report included difficulties with printing the voter verified paper trails (VVPATs) that are required by law in a few states, and that may soon be required by federal law in all states. In some cases, the VVPATs didn’t match voter choices, but the most common problem was that they were simply unavailable, typically due to printing problems.
This is why it’s critical that the paper be the official record for the election result. If I were going to steal a DRE election, the first thing I would do is cause a “malfunction” with the machines’ printer–something that’s rather easy to simulate in software. Therefore, the paper trail is absolutely useless if voters are allowed to continue using machines that are unable to produce paper records. Only if pollworkers know that the paper ballot is what will actually get counted will they ensure that every voter’s vote is properly recorded on paper.
An excellent point from Joe at Techdirt:
We’ve argued, along with many others, that it’s a clear benefit to the overall economy and the tech industry in particular to have skilled and educated immigrant workers come over from abroad. Still, it’s always nice to have some data to back this assertion up, just to ward off accusations of being a wild idealist. A new study published by Duke University finds that a full quarter of all tech startups between the years 1995-2005 had a immigrant either as a founder or key executive. These companies, it’s estimated, employed a total of 450,000 workers, and had revenues of $52 billion. The mistake made by those who oppose immigration for economic reasons is that they think of the overall economic picture as being fixed. In other words, they look, say, at the number of jobs in existence today, and simply assume that if more people compete for them, then domestic workers will increasingly go unemployed, while overall wages will be depressed. But as studies like this show, there’s nothing fixed about the economy. There’s always room for new startups, while existing companies will hire more people, assuming that they’re talented and can add value. As the researchers note, the process of immigration is inherently ambitious, and going through it is a sign of one’s inclination to take risks. As more data like this becomes available, it’s going to be an increasingly difficult argument to make that an intelligent and skilled immigrant workers somehow drag down the economy.
I think it’s just nuts that we place so many restrictions on immigration by highly-skilled workers. One can make a plausible argument (one I don’t agree with, but plausible) that current limits on immigration of low-skilled workers are necessary to avoid placing undue burdens on taxpayers, given that low-skiled immigrants might collect more in social services than they pay in taxes. But this argument simply doesn’t apply to a guy with 20 years of experience as a computer programmer or a master’s degree in economics. Such workers are all but guaranteed to have well-paying jobs and contribute to the tax base in the short run. And in the long run, some of them will go on to create successful businesses that will employ Americans and create new wealth.
So I don’t know why we don’t let every single person who has an advanced degree or can demonstrate significant technical skills into the country. It’s good for the immigrants, it’s good for the companies that employ them, and in the long run it’s good for everyone.
Matt Yglesias points out that the most important thing we need to do to address the problem of the classics becoming inaccessible involves fixing copyright law:
All the ‘sphere’s a twitter about some libraries dumping little-read classics in favor of more high-demand contemporary bestsellers. Julian’s post on this, however, inspired me to remark that far and away the most important thing for the preservation of the classics has nothing to do with library policies and everything to do with intellectual property policy.
In a world where classic works enter the public domain, people will get them one way or another. They’ll be available for free download on the internet. E-book technology will improve. Print copies will cheaply available to people who want to buy them. Whether or not these things are in local libraries sort of won’t be a huge deal one way or another. Now, traditionally, copyrights have had limited durations and “classic” books, being old by definition, tend to be in the public domain and hence widely available. In a digital era, they’ll be super-available. But the emerging trend of the digital era is for retroactive extensions of copyright terms meaning that nothing new will ever enter the public domain. Ever.
Quite so. The vast majority of books from the 20s, 30s, 40s, and so on are currently sitting on dusty library shelves, hardly ever looked at by anyone. We now have the technology to digitize all those books and turn them into a veritable treasure trove of easily-searchable information about decades gone by. Yet in order to ensure that Disney continues to turn a profit on Mickey Mouse, making those hundreds of thousands of commercially worthless works available to the general public is effectively illegal. In effect, 80 years of 20th century culture is in danger of being locked up so that a small number of copyright holders can profit from the miniscule fraction of works from the 1920s that still have commercial value. It’s really quite a shame.
And don’t get me started on the way that copyright law is hampering film preservation.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.