March 2005 Archives
Chris Anderson (Wired's editor-in-chief) has a great editorial on the potential terrible impact that a finding for the entertainment industry in the Grokster case might have.
The main flaw in the case against Grokster is that the action attempts to criminalize a technology rather than a specific use. It also fails to distinguish between commercial content and noncommercial content. Restricting these powerful new distribution tools to fight piracy would hobble the new emerging creative class too. The potential collateral damage to legitimate users is much higher than in the Betamax case.
A nice editorial from Cory in The University of Edinburgh's SCRIPT-ed online journal. This excerpt will give you a flavor, but go read the whole thing.
Time was companies shipped products that sat at the intersection of the limits of engineering and what the public could be convinced to buy: jukeboxes, cable TV, radio, VCRs, MP3 players, you name it, if it was dodgy, cool and likely to freak out an entertainment exec, someone out there would offer it for sale.
Time was that copyright changed whenever some entrepreneur invented something cool and infringing and compelling and the courts or lawmakers legalized it with reforms to copyright.
Times have changed. Today, businesses shrink away from offering general-purpose technology whose suite of uses includes ones that fall outside the confines of today's copyright -- like automatic commercial-skipping in PVRs. They run screaming from businesses that are clearly infringing by today's standards -- like DVD-ripping movie jukeboxes.
And why not? After all, the penalties for guessing wrong about what the courts will find non-infringing are substantial. Shoplifting a CD might get you a slap on the wrist, but uploading one track off that disc to the Net will earn you a $150,000 penalty under the USA's No Electronic Theft Act (NET Act). With stakes that high, who can blame a company for being a little gunshy?
Of course, that's exactly why the penalties are as high as they are: to discourage risk-taking. That's a raw deal for the public, but so long as all the companies are equally risk-averse, it's not so bad for the sell-side. It's one thing to be a conservative company offering copy-restricted digital music players in a world of open MP3 players (you'd get clobbered), but it's another entirely to inhabit a market where every firm is part of a gentlecompany's agreement not to roll out any really disruptive, novel, dangerous features.
via Geoff Arnold - the test for which classic movie you are.
wow - check me out:
Xeni Jardin interviews David Byrne (from the Talking Heads) on the debut of his new Internet radio station (also in iTunes radio section under Radio David Byrne).
XJ: How do you feel about the fact that some of your fans are downloading your music for free?
David Byrne: It's a mixed bag. Sure, I would love to have compensation for that. But the argument of record companies standing up for artists rights is such a load of hooey. Most artists see nothing from record sales -- it's not an evil conspiracy, it's just the way the accounting works. That's the way major record labels are set up, from a purely pragmatic point of view. So as far as the artist goes -- who cares? I don't see much money from record sales anway, so I don't really care how people are getting it.
Anybody who has Gilberto Gil, Miles Davis, and Moby Grape in the same playlist is going to gain my ear!
Timothy Armstrong, an attorney who is studying at Harvard Law, attended today's Grokster case arguments at the Supreme Court and has published his notes here.
I would say the argument went a little better for Grokster than I would have expected it to. Not to the point where I’d actually predict victory for them, but to my mind at least, the questions Grokster got were not as difficult as those MGM got.
The big issue that the Justices were wrestling with, it seemed to me, is what the standard ought to be for deciding whether services like Grokster can be secondarily liable for their users’ copyright infringement. The Justices did not sound especially satisfied with either MGM’s or the government’s answers to this question.
Today is the day that the Supreme Court will hear the Grokster case, where the massed forces of the entertainment industry attempt to prove that companies that offer online file-sharing systems are responsible for acts of copyright infringement committed by the people that use those systems.
There's a good article about the issues in the Economist. There was an incredibly lame editorial about the case in yesterday's New York Times, which Ernie Miller debunks thoroughly here.
One of the possible outcomes of this case is the overturning of the 1984 Betamax decision, where the Court held that companies are not liable of contributory infringement if the technology has substantial non-infringing uses. That was the landmark case that made VCRs legal for purchase in the US.
The EFF has been running a series on their website called Countdown to Grokster, where they feature devices that could've been illegal if the Betamax case had gone the other way - the list includes the Xerox machine, the CD burner, TCP/IP, Photoshop, and others.
There are lots of good resources about the case on the EFF site, including the all of the amicus briefs filed on behalf of both sides. Two of our UW faculty have signed on briefs on behalf of the respondent (the file sharing companies). Those two are Tom Anderson in Computer Science and Jane Winn in the Law School.
Given the current tenor of the political climate and makeup of the Court, I don't hold out a lot of hope for intellectual depth and enlightenment during this process...let's hope I'm wrong.
Almost two years ago I noted that I thought song downloads should be priced somewhere between a nickel and a quarter each. That was based on my own entirely objective questioning of my download jones back in the days of the original Napster, asking myself at what price would I continue to download everything I was interested in on demand - my answer was a nickel.
Now Neeru Paharia reports on a panel at the SXSW Music Festival called the Shape of Things to Come:
The panel somehow converged around the idea of a 5 cent download, and how it would be a better model both economically, and socially. I wonder if anyone has drawn the demand curves to see where there's more money. If marginal cost is close to zero, then you could have 1 million people buying songs for 1 dollar, versus 25 million people buying songs for 5 cents - maybe the lower price wins?
Well, duh. I hope it happens - now that would sell some 60 GB iPod photos!
John Conyers (D, Michigan) is one of those guys who just gets it - a rare commodity amongst our elected officials these days.
Bloggers should be classified as journalists and given First Amendment protections based on the function they perform, not the form of their transmissions. Properly understood, the First Amendment applies to all those who report with journalistic integrity--offline or online.
Tim Bray points out this very cool abstract animation set to Coltrane's Giant Steps. It's by Michael Levy, a young Israeli designer who is also a saxophonist.
Tim says Watching it, I feel like someone installed a window in the side of Coltrane’s head and I’m looking in.
I'm not sure I agree with that, (I always think of Giant Steps as one of a a number of challenges Coltrane set up for himself and the rest of jazz - to try to find meaningful pathways through very tenuously related sets of chord changes, which he succeeds at brilliantly of course - I myself have never managed to do more than just get through it), but it is very worth watching.
I'm still only beginning to catch up from having been gone for two weeks and sick for an additional one, but I thought this was an interesting look behind the scenes at Pixar, paying particular attention to the physical design of the work space. Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out.
As it was explained to me later, Steve Jobs originally proposed a building with one bathroom, something that would drive foot traffic to a central area all day long. Obviously, they’ve got more than one bathroom in the building, but just standing there and watching as everyone arrived to start their day, it was obvious that Jobs had managed the feat.
Got back last weekend from the Vietnam trip. It was a fascinating journey, and I'll have some commentary on it at some point - one of the interesting things we found was that there is Internet connectivity in almost every small town we visited (and in Vietnam the population is overhwelmingly rural), and the Internet cafes are full day and night with all sorts of people, doing primarily instant messaging and game playing.
Yahoo! seems to be the clear favorite over there for email and IM uses, which I thought was interesting.
After travelling for two weeks with no ill effects, I managed to come down with the crud at the end of the weekend, so posting may be light for the next few days.
