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Cloud Computing, Music Lockers, and the Supreme Court
An anonymous reader writes "Net speculation has swirled about the DOJ being stacked with media company-friendly attorneys who will throw the consumer under the bus, but in one of the first rulings, the Solicitor General defended network DVRs, mentioned cloud computing and a music locker — which has to be a first for a Supreme Court brief. Michael Robertson chronicles the latest developments and you can read the brief for yourself."
Oh noes! Maybe the situation is more complicated than the average slashdotter thinks!
What a relief to see our government coming out on the side of big businesses (cable TV/Internet service providers). Yes, this bodes well for consumers, but at its heart, this is about enabling big businesses to make tons of money. The MPAA/RIAA is not the only or biggest corporate interest the government is supporting.
Lawyers are known to be friendly to whoever is paying them..
When employeed by the RIAA ofc they are going to be aggressive to earn their keep.
When employed by DoJ they don't care about the RIAA the govenment is paying them so they do what the government wants and if the govenment doesnt care they use their own views.
Logically (most) lawyers don't like to repersent rapists (for example) but they will when paid..
> When I was a kid, we used to catch wasps in tupperwares and release them into the lockers of kids that we didn't like. I wonder what the Solicitor General would think of that!
I remember you. I, and thousands of my tiny friends, are hunting you down.
I will encase you in a clay cylinder and explain my terrible plan in intricate detail while my wasps prepare to sting you.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Gah! Scribd! Here's a plain text link (which also has a link to a PDF).
We just discussed this 2 days ago.
Hey, lookie here! All those RIAA attorneys don't always support their former client.
Meanwhile, one of the largest industries in the US is being nationalized.
What's your point? What has the failure of the automotive industry to respond to customer demand for fuel efficient cars have to do with the RIAA wanting to squeeze it's customers for every penny they can get? The two involve corporate entities, but beyond that, they have little to do with each other. I believe that's what is called a straw man argument.
I think that was a smallville episode.
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
And when these consumers under the bus get squished they all say, "Arrrrrrr!" And their parrots and peg legs go flying.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
suddenoutbreak... seems insufficient now. How about epidemicofcommonsense?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
This is only a brief filed by the Solicitor General.
She is, by the way, brilliant. I know her quite well.
-- AnonymousCoward@law.harvard.edu
It is nice to see them standing up for the rights of people other than the entertainment industry for a change. I wish they would fix the situation where I cannot watch my DVDs on my Linux box though.I know this will never happen. The average American is too stupid to care about the DMCA, and the law was passed by corrupt officials to begin with.
In case anyone else was wondering, a music locker isn't a gym locker that plays music when you open it.
One example may be music lockering services, which permit users to upload files to a remote computer server and stream that music to a personal device over the Internet.
I don't see what this has to do with consumers, as the summary seems to imply. Also, if you RTFA, no one related to the Obama administration "ruled" on anything, rather "President Obama's attorney filed papers with the Supreme Court supporting an earlier court decision that found Cablevision's remote storage DVR to be legal."
New Summary:
The Solicitor General filed a brief supporting a one company over another, after the Supreme Court already ruled that the first company was correct. Both companies were from industries that financed Obama's campaign and have done everything in their power to fuck the consumer, so the ruling is essentially meaningless to you unless you happen to own lots of fiber or lots of IP.
As - I believe it was - NYCL said, the recent exRIAA appointees can't make an input on DoJ rulings like the one mentioned for 2 years.
Let's see what happens in two years time.
Why do people assume that a former RIAA lawyer is not going to vigorously defend the American people? I was going to go off on a rant and explain (for the billionth time) that lawyers have an ethical obligation to zealously advocate for their clients; that professional responsibility demands that lawyers follow the instructions of their clients (up to a carefully defined point); and that lawyers represent murderers and rapists all the time without personally endorsing those pursuits.
But then I thought about all the people employed in the tech industry that have no love for the companies they work for, and are even openly dismissive of the products they once peddled. If I wanted to diagnose the problems associated with a particular code or piece of software, who better to ask then the people who created the software's architecture? The law is exactly the same way.
Moreover, these are exactly the right people to bring the RIAA to justice. They better than anyone else understand the legal strengths and weaknesses of the RIAA's position. Really people, do you think that these people sell their souls to the RIAA for all eternity? They understand the tactics and how to fight them.
Someone might look at my current employment as an energy industry lawyer and say I am unqualified to take a job with the government regulating the energy industry. These people are morons. There are few people qualified to police an amazingly complicated industry than those who were once a part of it. Barring corruption and direct conflict of interest checks (which are mandatory), if I were in charge of regulating an industry I would insist on hiring people with experience. Why is this so hard to understand???
Darn! And just when I was wanting one, too.
Logically (most) lawyers don't like to repersent rapists (for example) but they will when paid..
Uh, you do understand the difference in law between somebody who "everybody knows" has committed rape (or some other crime) and somebody whose criminality has actually been established at trial? This distinction is not academic to a lot of people. And even people who are convicted or confessed criminals have the right to representation when being sentenced.
Lawyers are known to be friendly to whoever is paying them..
And this is not a sign of their moral degeneracy. No ethical professional accepts a job and then undercuts the client's goals by substituting their own. This is particularly important when you're providing legal representation to the client, because not doing your best to advocate their cause not only deprives them of a fundamental right, but undercuts the rule of law.
Right now, I'm reading this biography of one well-known lawyer: Abraham Lincoln. (More or less on the top of my list of great Americans.) The school textbook tagline "Honest Abe" actually reflects the reputation he had for extremely strong ethics — a reputation that he used to devastating effect in jury trials. In particular he was known for turning down lucrative cases when he believed the client had a poor chance of winning.
Obviously Lincoln was a lot more ethical than most 21st century attorneys. But even so, he had no qualms about which legal rights he was willing to defend. He was even known to offer his services to both sides in some big cases!
This even extended to an institution that he opposed from an early age, and that he's best known for bringing to an end: slavery. At the time, Illinois had a lot of commerce with neighboring slave states. Slavery was illegal in Illinois, and any slaveholder who brought a slave into the state effectively freed them. But this did not apply to slaves "in transit", which led to some skirting of the law by bringing in slaves for temporary work. Naturally this led to litigation over the freedom of these slaves, and Lincoln represented clients on both sides of the issue, despite his own well-known opposition to slavery-friendly laws.
I'm sorry, I TIVO'd the previous discussion and just now got around to playing it back.
In other words, it means the same thing as "file server" except that it's usually remote (most people think of a file server as being closer/faster, i.e. on their LAN) and possibly crippled to only store one type of file (music).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
In this particular litigation, the plaintiffs and defendants made various stipulations. Notably the plaintiffs agreed to sue over primary copyright infringement but not on contributory (secondary) infringement. Defendants, on the other hand, agreed not to raise the various fair-use defenses that were available to them. In at least part of their brief the DOJ asserted that because of these waivers, this was not a useful test case for the Supreme Court because it wouldn't examine all of the arguments that could be made for each side. The DOJ didn't particularly come out in favour of IT rights; they just felt this wasn't the best case to settle them.
I don't really see how this is a win (or even a loss, for that matter) for the consumer. Who owns the content that I paid for? The argument was whether it was owned by the cable company or the network, and it came up for the cable company. Who cares? It's still not me.
Being a computer scientist means you tell people how computers should work, not that you know how they actually work.
The failure of Detroit is not a "failure of the automotive industry to respond to customer demand for fuel efficient cars". Detroit sold cars that the market
wanted. You might want something better, but you should not confuse what you (and possibly your peers with similar opinions) want with what the market wants.
Detroit was destroyed by years of management that "kicked the can down the road" when it came to union contracts, a union that didn't understand what they
were doing to the big 3 WRT retiree obligations and healthcare costs that rose much faster than inflation, a poor Supreme Court decision that created an antagonistic relationship between mgmt and labor, and succession of cowardly Congresses that preferred a "someone else pays for it" solution in CAFE vs. a more economically sound gas tax.
All of this created a perfect storm wherein the Big 3 had to figure out how to extract large sums of money from buyers for vehicles that didn't cost too much to make.
SUVs were perfect because they shared R&D and parts with trucks that Detroit was going to build anyways and they didn't require Detroit to sink vast sums of money into schemes that cheat the laws of thermodynamics. It was just an awesome hack that Detroit figured out how to get car-based platforms (like minivans and the PT Cruiser) classified as "light trucks" for the purposes of CAFE such that they could spend even less money on efficiency.
Actually, if Congress would not have specified the "two fleet" rule in CAFE, I daresay that SUVs would never have become the cash-cow for Detroit and much of the trouble we're currently in could have been avoided.
It wasn't until there was a sudden spike in gas prices that the average consumer "demanded" fuel efficient automobiles. Prior to that, the demand was higher for big trucks and SUVs and that's what the American auto industry was tooled up for. Sure, there was some demand for fuel efficiency, but the majority of the demand was in other areas. R&D takes a long time in the real world. It's not something you decide to do one day then wake up the next and start banging out code until you have something that kinda-sorta works a week later.
Life has many choices. Eternity has two. What's yours?
I could be wrong, but I think the combined economic value of the Cable TV/ISP companies is higher than the value of the MPAA/RIAA companies.
If that were true, then perhaps Comcast (cable TV/ISP) might have succeeded in its February 2004 attempted hostile takeover of The Walt Disney Company (MPAA). And compare Time Warner (MPAA; market cap: 29.43 billion USD) to the former subsidiary Time Warner Cable (cable TV/ISP; market cap: 10.94 billion USD) that it just spun out three months ago.
Long time reader 2nd time poster. I may be wearing a tinfoil hat. While these thoughts are not my own...Techdirt I believe. Anyhow I tend to think the same way. This judgment has the earmarks of being for fair use and on the side of the consumer, I with the above disagree. It's staging for the future. With this ruling its legal for the cable company's to store your DVR'd shows and movies on their networks. That's fine and dandy. This "service" will be a convenience for most people that don't want another bulky set-top box in the living room or have to worry about it breaking, or being green whatever. In fact I bet it becomes so convenient and user friendly that you have to be a retarded monkey not to figure it out. In the meantime this will catch on, this FREE convenient service, till most people elect not to have the physical DVR device in the home or the cable company's just wont offer it as part of service anymore. Few years down the road, we begin to see storage shortages (Yes storage is dirt cheap and getting cheaper) caps, quotas. Bandwidth shortages to stream your Free service ect. See where this is going.. Then the monthly charge. Overage charges. Maintenance charges for everyday your account is over the limit.. Use your imagination. I see more over priced bullshit.
Hmm, I wonder how all the OTHER companies managed to stay in business? Was it because they *gasp* had the foresight to see that gas prices were obviously going to spike eventually (since supply is finite) or perhaps notice that the rest of the world already had efficiency regulations, making it very probable that America would adopt them eventually too? American companies build big cars, fail, get bought out by foreigners for cheap, end of story. And to tie it back, have you noticed how Jamendo has become one of the top sites on the web for music? Could it be that a bit looser regulation of content is being demanded by consumers? Hmm...
And Tivo, or any other set-top box is apparently A-OK. ;)