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1) Comcast and Time Warner are experimenting with metering Internet usage, on the principle that the Internet is like the water supply system. Problem with this idea is that there is no bits shortage as there is a water shortage. They should be building more pipes rather than maintaining the pipe scarcity and jacking up their prices for the water.

2) The FCC wants to auction off a piece of the spectrum to someone willing to use part of it to build a nation-wide, free, wireless Internet. The catch? This parallel universe will be censored. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Details about how to define what content would be unacceptable for viewing over the free network is still under discussion.”

Neither the FCC nor any other government agency has any business in Internet censorship, as the courts have repeatedly held. (In fact, the FCC has no business in broadcast censorship any more either, but see Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits for that story.) There are so many problems with this idea, it’s hard to know where to begin, but Scott Bradner’s column would be a good start for those wanting to know more and to get some of the background. Fundamentally, the flaw with this proposal rests on another metaphorical failure. See also David Weinberger on this.

That’s the title of a story from the Sunday NYT Business page, on a company called Sense Networks, which aggregates billions of bits of location data to predict future movements. Two applications mentioned are predicting where taxis will be needed and what nightclubs people are likely to head toward.
Where does the location data come from? For the taxi application, it’s easy; just put GPSs on all your taxis and let the data roll in, all nicely timestamped. For the nightclub application, cell phone data. Now cell phone locations are covered by strict privacy laws in this country, so that data is obtained by making a deal with the phones’ owners: Let us track you and we’ll keep you ahead of the curve on nightlife happenings. To monetize the product, Sense doesn’t need to track individuals only aggregate trends, but tracking individuals has extra value. Once enough data has been accumulated about what clubs you go to on rainy Tuesdays, maybe you can be prompted with suggestions of similar clubs, selected just for you.

The company absorbs other publicly available information into its predictive algorithms, for example weather data. Another example of the tons of bits that are out there, some for the taking and some for the asking, from which useful inventions can be created. And how easy it is to get past privacy worries by providing the general public very modest incentives.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that “Sen. Obama is a supporter of legislation that would guarantee ‘network neutrality.'” Sen. McCain reportedly prefers a “market-based” approach, meaning that he opposes neutrality rules. We all love markets, but ask yourself how much a market there is in broadband services where you live. About half the country has zero or one choices, and virtually all the rest at most two, DSL and Cable. Hard for the free market to operate in a monopoly-duopoly world. In the absence of real broadband competition and consumer choice, the service providers have to be regulated to prevent them from using their carrier power to dictate content.

The story reports that Obama has reassembled some of the Clinton telecomm brain trust, including Reed Hundt, who had nice things to say about Blown to Bits. I suppose McCain just asked Cindy? (See the earlier post, McCain and Google.)

As we were completing Blown to Bits, the big news on the copyright war front was the Jammie Thomas trial. (See “Sending a Message” in Chapter 6.) This was the first of the thousands of peer-to-peer lawsuits filed by the RIAA to go all the way to a jury trial. Thomas lost and lost big: The jury not only found the Minnesota woman guilty of sharing 24 songs using Kazaa, but they imposed a fine of $220,000: $9250 per song. This was a huge victory for the record companies, because the demonstrated reality of such high stakes for losing in court is a huge incentive for other targets of RIAA lawsuits to settle.

Now the verdict is being called into question. In May, trial court judge Michael Davis issued a ruling saying that he may have made a legal error in instructing the jury.

Here’s the issue: Thomas, and the other P2P lawsuit targets are accused of infringing copyright by illegally distributing music tracks. What they actually did (allegedly), was to place the music tracks on their computers in a way that made them available over the network. Does ‚Äúmaking available‚Äù count as ‚Äúdistribution‚Äù under the copyright law, or does ‚Äúdistribution‚Äù require the files actually be disseminated? This issue has come up before, and different courts have ruled differently on the issue. Judge Davis instructed the Thomas jury that ‚Äúmaking available‚Äù does in fact count as distribution. Now it appears that there is an appeals Court ruling in the 8^th Circuit going other way: ‚Äúdistribution‚Äù requires actual dissemination of material, not just ‚Äúmaking available‚Äù. Since Minnesota is in the 8^th Circuit, that should be a governing precedent in the Thomas case. Davis will hear arguments on the issue in hardings scheduled for July 1.

These gyrations underscore how uncomfortable the legal system becomes when old notions of copyright confront new digital realities and just how much the copyright balance has been toppled by the world of bits.

And things can get even murkier. As Villanova Law Professor Michael Carroll points out (http://carrollogos.blogspot.com/), the RIAA, in arguing for the ‚Äúmaking available‚Äù interpretation of distribution, may want to be careful of what it’s wishing for. US copyright law includes a provision called the first-sale doctrine, which says that once you’ve acquired a copy of something, it’s legal to redistribute it. That’s why used book stores are legal, for example. So if making music tracks available counts as distribution, it ought to be OK under the first-sale doctrine. In that case, the record companies would probably argue that placing music on a P2P network counts as contributory infringement, and the legal merry-go-round rides would continue.

We’ve created an list of edits and errata for the book. For future reference, it is the last link on the “Excerpts” page shown in the menu bar. These changes will all be incorporated into the second printing. Please email us any other problems that need fixing, large or small. Our aim is to get this book perfect and to keep our readers fully informed when it isn’t.

The House passed the revised and extended Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the Senate is sure to follow suit next week. ArsTechnica has a good explanation of how the bill undercuts constitutional assurances that the government will not spy on its citizens. And also of why the guarantees that really, truly the government will play by the rules now are nothing more than was already present in the previous legislation and ignored by the the Bush administration.

Today’s news (see the Washington Post story) is that Obama will vote for this bill, while promising to watch its application if he becomes president.¬†

One of the things Obama stressed in his primary campaigns was that he voted against the war in Iraq, and that Clinton voted for it. Obama cast himself as the cautious one, the one prepared to say that the president’s say-so for going to war was not enough. Certainly, many who voted for the war did so out of fear that they would seem weak if Saddam Hussein really did have WMD’s; Clinton and others erred on the side of not being seen as risking the security of the nation, and Obama roundly criticized them for having done so.

Here Obama is doing the same thing. His reputation in military and defense matters being open to question because of his inexperience, he is trying to establish himself as a strong defender of national security. He apparently doesn’t need to court the civil libertarian voters, believing they have nowhere else to go.

It doesn’t look like this can be an issue for the debates, since McCain is planning to vote the same way. I wonder what Clinton’s plans are.

 

I would not have wanted to be in the position of the telephone company executives who had to decide whether to wiretap American citizens illegally at the request of the government. At least I assume there was some such scenario, someone in the telcos who hesitated a moment about the right and wrong of the decision. Was it presented as something patriotic and, if arguably illegal, something for which the telcos were assured a later get-out-of-jail-free card? Or was it presented as more of a threat, with the government reminding the executives that they were in a highly regulated business, and the FCC and other authorities could make unrelated decisions that hurt the profits of uncooperative carriers in the future?

Probably we’ll never know, because the matter will never come to trial. The companies are being given immunity from private lawsuits by citizens who were illegally wiretapped. The New York Times story seems reasonably fair, and quotes one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawyers.

So a Democratic congress has bailed out a Republican president’s illegal methods of surveillance on American citizens. The re-upped FISA seems to have some “never again” language along with the immunity provisions, but as a way to run the country we seem to have taken a great leap: The executive commands private businesses to do something illegal to private citizens, the corporations cooperate, and after the fact, the legislature bails out the executive branch and protects the profits of the corporations in one fell swoop.

Of the people, by the people, and for the people?

Theory is when you know everything, but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works, but no one knows why.
In this room theory and practice come together …
Nothing works and no one knows why.

In 1992, George H. W. Bush exhibited pleased astonishment when he discovered that supermarkets used barcode readers for the prices of items at the cash register. It should perhaps not have been surprising that he had not recently done any grocery shopping, but it raised the question of whether his familiarity with the way the world actually works had given him the right instincts on policy issues as president.

Last week John McCain said he was using Google (or perhaps “a Google”) to vet his vice presidential candidates. It’s certainly true, as he went on to say, that “What you can find out now on the Internet — it’s remarkable.”¬†The remark seemed a bit off, not that it isn’t true, but because, like Bush’s, it seems to indicate a bit too much surprise for the time it was spoken, and too little sense of the technology’s limitations. (Blown to Bits might be good bedtime reading for him.)

A friend pointed me to a video from earlier in the campaign that may help explain McCain’s comment about Google. McCain acknowledges that he doesn’t use a personal computer at all. “I am an illiterate who has to rely on my wife for all the assistance that I get,” he says. He doesn’t seem proud of it, though, and maybe his more recent “Google” remark shows he is trying to catch up.

The campaign is showing plenty of heat around energy policy. Will technology policy be an issue at all? How well prepared are the candidates to discuss the challenges that lie ahead? What would be some good questions they might be asked during whatever “debates” may occur?

I have a short piece on the InformIT web site on the difficult question of sites such as juicycampus.com, which invite anonymous slander. Anyone attacked on these sites must experience deep pain and feel utterly helpless. Here is an unsolved problem in our legal and social system, how to provide some protection against such viciousness without imperiling the freedom of the Web as an expressive medium.