Tim Lee has published a Cato TechKnowledge piece discussing the growing problem of “orphan works” – copyrighted material the owner of which can’t be found. He highlights the work of our own Jerry Brito.
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Via tenacious-Google-needler Scott Cleland, Vint Cerf apparently mused at a Personal Democracy Forum panel this week about whether the Internet should be nationalized. Erick Schoenfeld of TechCrunch who heard and reported the comment first-hand is not shy with his criticisms:
[N]ationalizing the Internet is bad idea. (I can’t believe I even have to say this). It would set a horrible precedent, would undermine confidence in the American economy, and would be difficult to pull off.
There are more reasons than that, and they include: slowing down decision-making about technical issues by subjecting them to regulatory processes; giving power over the Internet’s functioning to well-heeled interests most experienced and skilled at lobbying; giving power over Internet content to self-interested politicians; and much, much more.
An interesting thing about politics and public policy is that people who are expert in a subject matter are often deemed therefore to be experts in the public policies related to that subject matter. They’re not.
A fine technologist who has made great contributions, Vint Cerf has little awareness of the profound error it would be to make the Internet a public utility. Yet he’s one of the leaders put forward to promote Google’s ‘Internet for Everyone‘ campaign.
Some surprising news from the folks at Broadcasting and Cable magazine: Barack Obama is now against restoring the Fairness Doctrine. In an email Wednesday to B&C, press secretary Michael Ortiz wrote: “Sen. Obama does not support re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters.” With John McCain already firmly in the anti-fairness regulation camp, that means that both major presidential candidates are now on record against reinstituting the former FCC policy.
So is it time for fans of the First Amendment to break open the bubbly? Well, not quite. While welcome, the Obama statement was hardly a vigorous denunciation of the doctrine, or its chilling effect on speech. In fact, it doesn’t seem the senator actually opposes the rule, as opposed to not supporting its return. (Notably, he hasn’t yet signed onto the “Broadcaster Freedom Act,” which would ban its re-imposition). According to Ortiz, the reason for the senator’s non-support is that he “considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible.”
Not because it is a violation of free speech principles, or because it is insidious government censorship, not even because it is counter-productive, but because it’s a “distraction.”
Mike Masick over on Techdirt yesterday decried the “amount of misinformation flying around” on the retention marketing issue. Unfortunately, however, his attempt to clear things up actually added to the airborne debris.
Specifically, Mike claims that I erred the other day in writing that the question at hand was whether Verizon can contact customers who have agreed to switch telephone service providers, and ask them not to switch. That, he says, is incorrect. Saying that “no one” is saying that telcos can’t try to convince customers not to switch, he claims the issue is instead whether Verizon can delay making the change while it trys to take them out of it:
What the FCC has said is that Verizon cannot abuse its position to block the switch while it tries to convince customers not to switch. That’s what Verizon is doing. When it gets the request from the cable companies to switch, it basically goes into procrastinate mode, even though it’s required to process the switch. It codes the switch request as a “conflict” which gives it extra time to resolve the “conflict” before obeying the switch request.
Masick is simply wrong. The FCC’s order, released Monday, explains clearly that a conflict code is entered only after Verizon is successful at convincing a customer not to change carriers. There’s no claim that, or even a reference to, Verizon improperly delaying any pending switch requests (although the cable industry is certainly pushing for telcos to be required to make switches more quickly).
What the FCC did say was that the information contained in the switch request (i.e., that the customer wants to change), is “proprietary,” and that — to quote Commissioner McDowell: “marketing efforts [based on that information] cannot take place during the window of time when a customer’s phone number is being switched”.
Bottom line: I stand by my original post.
Larry Lessig is so respectful to his ideological opponents:
The press conference brought together some unlikely allies. “This is the first time in our history that we have tried to build fundamental infrastructure on the basis of a Neanderthal philosophy,” announced Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, “which is that we don’t need government to do it.” Seated next to Lessig was David All, founder of the Republican fundraising site Slatecard—and normally a proponent of that “Neanderthal” philosophy. All later argued for wider broadband access as a means of fostering the next generation of tech entrepreneurs.
Tell us what you really think, Prof. Lessig.
Ars reports on an important case down in Florida:
The defense against the obscenity charges will focus, in part, on the suggestion that interest in group sex fails the community standards test. Google search trends will be used to demonstrate that, except for brief periods near Thanksgiving, searches for “orgy” consistently outrank attempts to find information about “apple pie” in Florida . The rest of the year, orgy searches are closer in frequency to what might be expected to be a common activity in Florida, “surfing.” An astute reader at Slashdot also recognized that, among Floridian Internet users, “boobs” has built and then expanded a lead over surfing during the past three years.
Personally, I find the legal concept of “obscenity,” and the notion that obscenity rules could pass First Amendment muster, to be baffling. I can’t imagine what “compelling state interest” could trump the plain language of the First Amendment to allow the censorship of sexually explicit content consumed by adults in the privacy of the home.
The Wikipedia entry on the 1992 Copyright Renewal Act is pathetic, and needs to be improved. I don’t know enough about it to add very much content, but I bet there are a few copyright nerds reading TLF who could help out!
A month ago, I wrote here and in a Cato TechKnowledge article about the telling imagery that a company called L-1 Identity Solutions had used in some promotional materials. The cover of their REAL ID brochure featured an attractive woman’s face with her driver license data superimposed over it, along with her name, address, height, eye color, place of birth, political affiliation, and her race. This is where the national ID system advanced by the REAL ID Act leads.
Here’s another example. A group called Family Security Matters has reprinted on its site a blog post supporting the $80 million in grant money that the Department of Homeland Security recently announced, seeking to prop up the REAL ID Act. (I’ve written about it here and here.)
What’s interesting is not that a small advocacy group should support REAL ID, but the image they chose to illustrate their thinking: a man holding his “National Identity Card,” his fingerprint and iris images printed on it, and presumably programmed into it.
Were there ever any doubt that REAL ID was a national identity system and a step toward cradle-to-grave, government-mandated biometric tracking, Family Security Matters has helped clear that up.
We’re now learning the meaning of a new policy that Americans can’t “willfully” refuse to show ID at airports. The Consumerist has a write-up of one man’s experience with IDless travel. It turns out they do a background check on you using, among other things, your political affiliation.
That’s a nice window onto what identity-based security is all about: giving the government deep access into all of our personal lives. Of course, this type of security is easy to evade, and the 9/11 plot was structured to evade it. Checking ID cannot catch someone who has no history of wrongdoing.
Identity checks at airports require law-abiding American citizens to give up their privacy, including their political affiliations, with essentially no security benefit.
Ars has an interesting interview with the head of Sandvine, the company at the heart of the Comcast Kerfuffle:
What Caputo seems to think he’s doing with Sandvine is enabling “all-you-can-eat” models at reasonable prices. People who argue for network neutrality are “painting the service providers into a corner,” he says in the interview. “If all packets are created equal then it’s equal utility and we should be charging on a per-packet basis, and I don’t think anybody wants to go there.”
Without traffic management, especially of P2P, the idea is that prices would either go up or congestion might reach truly terrible new heights, and Caputo believes that most users would rather just throttle P2P; let it work, but slowly and in the background, so that ISPs don’t need to make expensive infrastructure improvements and everyone can continue eating at the buffet for $30 or $40 a month. We might also see tiers emerge that allow P2P users free rein for, say $70 a month, while non-P2P users could keep paying lower prices. Caputo insists, “it’s going to be laughable in the next two or three years that people used to say all packets should be treated equally.”
This strikes me as seriously misguided. The obvious problem is the issue of evasion. For example, I’ve written before about BitTorrent header encryption, a technique that helps BitTorrent users evade deep packet inspection. No doubt Sandvine is working on finding new ways to detect encrypted BitTorrent packets. And if they do, the BitTorrent hordes will start looking for better evasion strategies. An arms race, and one that Sandvine is unlikely to win.
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