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Sun Jan 24 11:58:27 EST 2010
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Give A Man A Fish... And Make It Illegal To Teach Fishing - We've talked in the past about how intellectual property rules seem to directly conflict with the purpose of educational institutions -- and yet, many of those institutions are now starting to try to enforce those rules. Taking that a step further, in response to Bono's recent confusion over ISP filtering, Russell McOrmond makes a great point in updating the old parable of "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime," to the more modern version of: Give a man a fish, make it illegal to teach fishing. (found via Michael Scott):
There are those who think that making knowledge scarce, including criminalising private citizens owning and controlling their own communications technology, is the only way to make it possible to pay authors/inventors for their important contributions to society. This ignores all the experience and research to the contrary. Whether you believe this or not, you must admit that deliberately making knowledge scarce and thus more expensive greatly harms the interests of the worlds poor.Indeed. It's a scary world when people think that locking up naturally abundant information and knowledge somehow makes sense. All it does is lock away a natural resource that can be used at no cost to make the world a better place.
The repercussions of deliberately making knowledge scarce will be an underlying issue that will show up in many global conflicts in the next decade, whether talking about poverty, western economic recovery or global climate change.
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Parked Car Gets Multiple Speed Camera Tickets - We've seen all sorts of problems with speed cameras -- like the time one clocked a brick wall traveling 58 MPH (watch out!). It seems that they've got a problem with stationary objects. Reader Marshall points us to a story of a guy who parks his car on a road equipped with a speed camera and has received two speeding tickets while his car was parked. Don't you feel safer now?
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'Public' Consultation Over ACTA In Mexico Almost Required NDAs, Blogger Removed For Tweeting - Geraldine Juarez writes in to let us know of her experience attending what was billed as a "public hearing" about the ACTA treaty in Mexico (link in Spanish, Google translation here), which sounded really messed up. First, despite it being a public hearing, originally those putting on the event wanted attendees to sign nondisclosure agreements. After pushing back on this, they finally agreed to remove that requirement, but there was a lot of confusion about it and it may have kept people with serious questions about ACTA from attending. The room, then, was mostly industry people, who were apparently concerned as to why everyday citizens were in attendance, and they even booed a lawyer who questioned the human rights angle. As for Geraldine, she tried twittering the event, and the industry folks demanded she leave (and had a guard escort her out). It's almost like they're trying to make themselves into a caricature of businesses plotting to harm the public. When others asked where the actual ACTA discussions in Mexico would be held, they were told that was "confidential." It appears that the public is certainly not welcome.
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If Data Centers Are Understaffed, What Does That Mean For Security? -
This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com.
Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.
The bigger question is what impact this will have. Chronic understaffing in a data center could lead to serious security issues, increased downtime (decreased reliability) and certainly decreased responsiveness to problems. With many of the survey respondents also claiming they're hoping to decrease headcount even further, this could become a bigger issue going forward.
The report also claims that the survey's creators were "surprised" to find out that mid-market companies were more likely to experiment with new technologies, as compared to the big companies, but I don't find that surprising at all. Big companies are pretty resistant to change (especially if they have some big IT project that is "working.") Still, if those companies are finding their data centers regularly understaffed, it could create more difficulty in getting getting new projects successfully off the ground. So I'm curious how companies are dealing with these issues and trying to avoid problems with understaffed data centers, while still being able to try out new technologies and services.
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Amazon Quietly Lets Publishers Remove DRM (Update: Or Quietly Adds DRM?) - While everyone was focused on the new Kindle app store or the new royalty rates, perhaps a more interesting new thing slipped quietly by: without telling anyone, Amazon is now giving publishers the option to remove DRM from ebooks. It's odd that Amazon wouldn't publicly announce this, but I'm sure it has its own reasons. I doubt many publishers will actually go DRM-free for now, but at least a few can, and I would imagine that will make some Kindle users a lot more comfortable about buying those ebooks. Update: Hmm. In the comments someone points out that another take on this is that it's actually allowing some publishers who didn't use DRM before to use it. That would explain why it wasn't mentioned...
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MPAA Boss Doesn't Even Make It To The End Of His Contract - Back in October, we reported on rumors that the movie studios were so upset with MPAA boss Dan Glickman that many thought he wouldn't make it to the end of his contract. While he had said all the usual stuff about "evil piracy," apparently the studios were upset that he couldn't stop technological progress with the wave of a magic wand, and wanted someone who would attack file sharing even more aggressively. At that time, the MPAA revamped to focus more on content protection -- which is the exact wrong thing to be focused on. They should be focusing on providing increased scarce value that gets people to buy -- but instead, they wanted to focus on building up artificial scarcity that technology (and much of the market) will ignore.
Of course, right after the rumors, Glickman came out and announced that he would be stepping down at the end of his contract in September of 2010. So it seemed like maybe the studios would let him stick around to the end, since it was clear he wasn't coming back. Apparently even that plan has been thrown out the window, as Glickman has now announced that he's leaving as of April 1 in order to take over Refugees International, which seems like a worthy enough cause.
The real question, though, is who is going to take over, and just how much more of a mess of things will they make. One could hope for more enlightened leadership, that actually focuses on adapting to the modern age, but all signs suggest the studios have no interest in doing that any time soon.
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What The IFPI Report Left Out: Its Own Study Showed That File Sharers Do Buy - We already spent a bunch of time debunking many of the claims in the IFPI's new "Piracy Bad!!!!" report. But the folks over at TorrentFreak have dug up a bit more info. Apparently the research for the report was put together by Forrester, and the underlying research showed that when it comes to the growth in digital music sales, those who partake of unauthorized file sharing are also the best customers of authorized digital music. No, this is not saying that file sharing automatically leads people to buy, or that all file sharers buy. Obviously, that's not the case. But it does suggest that demonizing those people might not be the smartest thing.
But the IFPI report doesn't mention any of that. Instead, it claims that people file share for one reason and one reason alone: because it's free. If that were the case, though, then why would any of those who partake also buy? And why would they be the industry's best customers for digital sales? It seems like the IFPI should be embracing them to see how it can get them to choose to buy more -- but instead, it totally ignores what its own researchers found, insists that it's just because content is free, and then spends most of the report demonizing its best customers and asking governments of the world to kick those people offline.
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Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Over Warrantless Wiretapping, Appeal Planned - This comes as no surprise, but is still somewhat disturbing. A lawsuit the EFF was involved in over the federal government's warrantless wiretapping program has been dismissed by the court because it "was not a 'particularized injury' but instead a 'generalized grievance.'" This same issue has been raised before. If the government illegally spies on people, how can you prove it? You can't go to court unless you prove that you were harmed by the action, but as long as the government keeps it secret then you can't know. That's why the one case where the gov't accidentally revealed some info is so important. But, still, in this other case, the EFF plans to appeal noting the ridiculousness of the situation:
"The alarming upshot of the court's decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston
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Court Reduces Award In Jammie Thomas-Rasset Case From $80,000 Per Song To $2,250 - It looks like the judge who oversaw the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case realized that the original $1.92 million award was just ridiculous -- even if the Justice Department supported it. Instead, the court has reduced the award to $2,250 per song, saying that seems much more reasonable:
The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music. Moreover, although Plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must still bear some relation to actual damagesWhile I question the use of "stealing" here, and still think that $2,250 seems pretty high (even the judge admits that if he weren't reducing the amount from the jury and had been able to set the amount originally, he probably would have gone even lower), this case had all sorts of problems from the start -- with tremendous evidence (well beyond just an IP address) that Jammie was, in fact, doing a fair amount of file sharing. Her defense and attempted reasoning were weak and not at all helpful. This seems like a case where she would be better off paying this off (somehow) and moving on.
It's now in the hands of the record labels if they'll accept this or if they want to have a new trial concerning damages. Again, for them, this might be a situation where they're best off accepting it and moving on. The original $80,000 damages got the labels a ton of bad press, with even the musicians whose music was shared speaking out against the case and other musicians arguing it was a reason to disband the RIAA.
Update: News.com suggests both sides might appeal. The interesting part is from the labels who, like I suggested above, do want to just bury this story and have the case be over with -- but might be worried about setting a precedent allowing a judge to lower a jury award.
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'Pants On The Ground' Guy Lawyers Up, Looks For Money From The Sky - If you've been living under a pop-cultural rock the past couple of weeks, you might have missed the "Pants on the Ground" meme, birthed on American Idol, that's been going around. Basically, there was some Idol contestant, "General" Larry Platt who performed a song he "wrote" himself called "Pants on the Ground." It's awful in that "wow, this is going to be an internet meme" kind of way... and the Idol crew milked it for all it was worth. Not only are lots of people recording their own versions of it, Platt is appearing everywhere. However, this is a "mine, mine, mine" society, and Rose M. Welch alerts us to the news that Platt is complaining that he hasn't received a dime from everyone using the song, and he's lawyering up to try to fix that.
How ridiculous is this? The guy just got a ton of publicity and has made his name and his song known around the world. You don't cash in by going back and demanding cash -- you cash in by doing something new for money. He shouldn't be hiring a lawyer, but a business manager. If people had to pay for every use of his song originally, no one would even know who he is.
Separately, the link above claims that "Platt never copyrighted the song," but that's not right. Platt automatically gets a copyright on the song once it's been set in fixed form in some manner. So if he wrote it down somewhere or recorded it or something, he has the copyright. What they probably mean is that he didn't register the copyright, which would limit his ability to do anything about it. Plus, I would imagine that the lawyers at Fox and American Idol made sure he signed over all sorts of rights before performing that song on the air....
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Obama Quietly Issues Ruling Saying It's Legal For The FBI To Break The Law On Accessing Phone Records - Following the report earlier this week that the FBI regularly broke the ECPA law, in obtaining information from telcos without going through the proper process (and, in some cases using just a post it note!), some interesting details from the full report have come to light. The two key ones? First, "the Obama administration issued a secret rule almost two weeks ago saying it was legal for the FBI to have skirted federal privacy protections." And, second, the original idea to use these bogus "exigent letters" didn't come from the FBI, but from an AT&T employee. We noted in the original report that no one seemed to be placing any blame on the telcos for allowing this, and why they're clearly abusing the law, in giving out such info without the proper rules being followed, seems like a big question:
The telecom employees were supposed to be responding to National Security Letters, which are essentially FBI-issued subpoenas. But those Patriot Act powers say the target must be part of an open investigation and that a supervisor has to approve it. While they require some paperwork, FBI agents have been issuing about 40,000 such NSLs a year.No wonder the telcos were so adamant about getting immunity on the warrantless wiretapping. It appears that the issue of telcos ignoring the rules when it came to your privacy goes pretty deep.
But an AT&T employee provided the unit with a way around some of those requirements. The employee introduced them to so-called 'exigent letters.' Those letters, first used immediately following 9/11, asked for information by saying that the request was an emergency and that prosecutors were preparing a grand jury subpoena. The letter falsely promised that the subpoena, which gives the telecoms legal immunity, would be delivered later, the report said.
What's more, the report noted that the cozy relationship between the bureau and the telecoms made it hard to differentiate between the FBI and the nation's phone companies.
"The FBI's use of exigent letters became so casual, routine and unsupervised that employees of all three communication service providers told us that they -- the company employees-- sometimes generated the exigent letters for CAU personnel to sign and return," the inspector general reported.
In fact, one AT&T employee even created a short cut on his desktop to a form letter that he could print out for a requesting FBI agent to sign.
Even that became too much. Agents would request "sneak peeks," where they'd ask if it was worth their time to file a request on a given phone number, the inspector general noted. The telecom agents complied. Soon it graduated to numbers on Post-it notes, in e-mails or just oral requests.
As for Obama issuing a rule saying that breaking the law is legal... how does that work? The president doesn't get to just declare something legal, especially when it clearly violates both the letter and intent of the law.
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German Court Finds Mother Liable For Kid's File Sharing, Despite Her Ban On The Practice - One of the issues we've had with the use of IP addresses as "proof" of file sharing, is that there can be many users and many computers coming from a single IP address -- and lots of times we've seen parents sued for actions of their kids or even their kids' friends. Now, under any common sense approach to the world, you would think that this would be seen as a problem. Occasionally, we've heard entertainment industry execs say that it doesn't matter, and it should be the responsibility of whoever pays for the connection to make sure it's not misused. For the most part, though, our judicial system realizes that you don't blame the wrong party.
Apparently, over in Germany they feel differently. A woman, whose son apparently used file sharing programs despite the mother's explicit ban on such things, has been held responsible for the son's file sharing. The court said that simply banning her children from file sharing was not enough -- she should have actively monitored the connection. That seems like an incredible stretch -- and even makes you wonder if the judge has children.
Either way, I can see no reasonable argument for blaming a third party for someone else's actions, and it's even worse when that third party specifically told the others not to take part in the activity.
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Director Of The Hitler Downfall Movie Likes The Hundreds Of Parody Clips - Perhaps if you've been living under a pop culture rock for the past few years, you were unaware of the popular hobby of creating subtitled videos of an angry Hitler reacting to something going on in the world today, using a clip from the German movie Downfall. For example, here is Hitler responding to NBC's snafu with late night television programming with Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien:
"Someone sends me the links every time there's a new one," says the director, on the phone from Vienna. "I think I've seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I'm laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn't get a better compliment as a director." Some of Hirschbiegel's favorites are the one where Hitler hears of Michael Jackson's death, and one in which the Fuhrer can't get Billy Elliot ticketsOf course, as director, and not producer, he probably does not hold the copyright and has no say in whether or not the clips are allowed -- but it is worth noting that he seems to quite enjoy them.
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Rescuecom Wants It Both Ways Over Keyword Ads; Involved In Two Lawsuits... But On Opposite Sides - There have been a bunch of silly lawsuits over the use of competitors' trademarked terms being used in ads on Google AdWords. There are a bunch of different legal issues related to those lawsuits, including whether or not Google should be liable for actions of advertisers, whether it's trademark infringement to mention a competitor in an ad, and whether it's trademark infringement just to have an ad triggered on a competitor's trademarked phrase. There's a company called Rescuecom that has been particularly aggressive in these lawsuits, suing Google for a competitor having ads triggered on their trademarks. While a district court rejected that claim, last year an appeals court sent it back to the lower court to try again. And yet... at the same time, it appears that Rescuecom is involved in a lawsuit on the other side with Best Buy. Best Buy claims that Rescuecom is infringing on the "Geek Squad" trademark, and Rescuecom claims that it has a fair use defense... yes for the very same thing it's accusing others of doing. You have to imagine that's going to be pointed out in both of those lawsuits. Some have suggested that Rescuecom doesn't really care either way, and it believes that these lawsuits are a good PR campaign -- which could explain its different view in each lawsuit. If that's the case, it seems like a rather big abuse of the legal system.
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Yet Another Study Shows Txting Improves Kids' Spelling - While it still seems like the common belief is that "txt spk" and other sorts of abbreviated elements of the English language harm kids' ability to write properly, we've seen study after study after study after study after study after study has found exactly the opposite. They've found that most kids can tell the difference, and do understand what's proper and what's not. On top of that, heavy texters tend to be better spellers, because they're much more used to writing -- even if they tend to abbreviate the language when communicating via technology.
So it almost seems superfluous to mention that yet another one of these studies has come out and it, too, has found that those who regularly use txt spk have very strong literacy skills. But what's annoying is that both the researchers and the BBC act as if this was a "surprise." It's as if no one bothered to check to see if similar research had been done before, and found the many, many, many studies all saying the same exact thing.
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Nina Paley vs. Jaron Lanier - Okay, so we had said that we were just going to do one post debunking Jaron Lanier's new hatred for everything about "open culture," but WNYC recently had a nice little debate between Nina Paley and Jaron Lanier -- and the thing that amazed me is how unprepared to debate these topics Lanier appears to be. Admittedly, some of it is just that Lanier loses his train of thought a few times, but that's really not what stands out. He rarely seems to have an actual point. You can pretty much sum up his position as "but, artists need to make money and after 10 years, they haven't been able to online, so it's a failure." But that's it. Nothing in what he says explains how to change things. It's just pining for the way things used to be. And whenever he's confronted on specific points, he either falls back to saying "well, I made up that argument originally, but now I know it's wrong" without ever explaining why it's wrong, or saying "well, I'm not an absolutist, so I could maybe see how free could be helpful." His discussion about the length of copyright and whether copyright should go to kids and grandkids is quite telling. He doesn't seem to understand the issues at play, doesn't have a clear train of thought, and goes back and forth and makes totally arbitrary claims, such as, "well, I don't know, I think it's okay to pass it on to your kids, but if it's for your grand kids, okay, I guess I can see that that's starting to be too much." Why? Not clear.
The one point that really does need to be refuted is that he seems to believe that artificial scarcity somehow makes people pay. He talks about the importance of a "social contract" to have people "pay for others' brains." He says "people need to be secure that they're earning their dignity and don't need to sing for their supper every night." But that confuses a few different issues. Having the government step in and ramp up copyright laws doesn't earn anyone their dignity. Providing products that people actually want to pay for does. And that's the point that Lanier seems to miss. He tries to support the importance of "artificial scarcity" by using money as an example, saying that money only works because it's artificially scarce. But that's a total misunderstanding of money. Money works because it's a proxy for value, so it isn't actually artificially scarce at all. It's legitimately scarce, because if you print more money, the value of the money already in the system goes down (inflation) meaning that you have to pay more to get the same thing. It works because it's a proxy for that scarce value. It's not an artificial scarcity at all. He later agrees with Nina when she talks about the importance of real scarcity, but fails to recognize that real scarcity makes sense, whereas artificial scarcity is actually economically limiting.
Lanier also makes an odd claim that the old studio/label system allowed for a "middle class" of content creators. But that's really not true. For most who go through that system it's totally hit or miss, with most missing. But with new business models, we're seeing more and more people who are able to make a perfect middle class living by not having to wait for the gatekeepers. More people are making money due to their music today than ever before, and it's because they have all sorts of different ways to make money.
Nina, not surprisingly, does an excellent job responding to each of Lanier's points. He brings up the inevitable claim that "but people could take your film and do stuff with it!" and she points out that she wants that, and knows that her fans are smart enough to know the difference between her original and what others do with her film.
All in all it's a fun debate to listen to, but I have to admit that I would have found it a lot more interesting if Lanier actually sounded like he understood the topic at hand beyond the superficial level.
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Remember The MATRIX? Former Drug Smuggler In Charge Of It Is Building More Databases... - Remember the MATRIX? No, not the movie, but the highly controversial gov't database that was to store and access all sorts of information on people, and kick out any individual's "terrorist quotient," if necessary. After a lot of negative publicity... and someone hacking into the database, the project was shut down in 2005. But, apparently the guy behind it is back with another attempt at a massive database. Michael Scott points us to a profile of the guy who ran the MATRIX (turns out he's a former drug smuggler, so that should make you more comfortable), who since then has started another operation that is also trying to build up another big database of private info, and is using the always popular method of positioning it as something useful "to protect the children."
Apparently, he's set up the database to help find missing children and track down those who abduct them. This is absolutely a worthy cause -- but there are some serious questions about the method here. He's letting law enforcement use the technology he's developing for free, but in exchange many believe he's trying to get access to government databases to add more data to his own collection. Certainly, some government officials are happily using his technology, but others were turned off by some of the meetings, where they felt that the guy was asking for way too much -- including financial records and even movie rental history.
It's no secret that there are a bunch of big database companies out there creating huge profiles of pretty much everyone... but it does seem a bit sketchy when a guy who has tried to do similar things in the past (and had them shut down) shows up again trying to gain access to private government databases to include in his own system, in exchange for giving the police free access to that system.
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Recording Industry May Go After OiNK Admin Again - We were as surprised as anyone that a UK court correctly realized that OiNK itself didn't violate copyright law, and thus admin Alan Ellis hadn't done anything illegal. But rather than understand the difference between infringing copyrights and hosting a tracker, the recording industry is now flipping out and insisting that Ellis must be punished somehow, and it may file a civil suit against him because apparently punishing people is more important than actually coming up with business models that work.
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Should IT Be Run As A Business? -
This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com.
Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.
The argument made in the article, and it makes sense, is that IT really needs to be much more tightly integrated with the overall business, to really understand how to help. When it's viewed as a separate silo or even "business," then the solutions that come out of IT really aren't as helpful as can be. Separately, it also increases the likelihood of outsourcing the IT function, since it can be easily "separated." But by more closely integrating the IT function into actual business processes, not only does IT make itself more indispensable, it can focus on creating actual process improvements and solutions, rather than just taking a list from someone of what they think they need (perhaps without understanding what the technology enables) and delivering it to spec.
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UK Gov't Tells MPs They Can't See ACTA Details - While there have been more and more calls for transparency on ACTA negotiations, it seems that even government officials are being stymied. Some UK Parliament Members have asked for the details and are being told they cannot see the document because mysterious, nameless "others" require it to be kept secret. Of course, if you're an industry lobbyist, it's not hard to see the document. But, if your job is to represent the people? Get in line. You'll see it once it's been signed, sealed and delivered.
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