I'm sort of glad that such an extremist bill came up, because the content providers acknowledge by their support of the bill that there's a fundamental incompatbility between information control and the kind of unfettered development of digital technology we've all benefited from up to now. Once they say, "Stop technological progress or our business models fail," the public can then say, "Time for you to find new business models."
Just to follow through (because CALEA was mentioned in the intro), the FBI wanted CALEA to cover email and other Internet communications, but Congress refused. They exempted the Internet explicitly (I don't have the exact language of the law at hand). I believe that one of the major effects of Ashcroft's Anti-Terrorism Act (now PATRIOT) is to extend CALEA so something like Carnivore can be brought into play.
And Congress has thrown law enforcement behind the copyright holders in an act passed in 1998 after the David LaMacchia case (an MIT student who offered a central repository for the exchange of software). You don't have to upload software personally or benefit in any way from the exchange of software--you go to jail for providing a means of exchange. I don't think I'm giving away any secret here; while the law was probably passed at the behest of the software industry, it must be known to the recording industry too.
It seemed, back at the time of the MCI merger, that WorldCom was interested more in building and controlling backbones than in the less lucrative and more labor-intensive end-user market. Were they always interested in the last mile too, or are they getting interested just now?
Thanks for mentioning us at O'Reilly, but we don't many people near Indiana ourselves. I sent the query on to the authors, anyway.
As others have pointed out, you have to decide whether you want to promote Napster for the community-building (copyright be damned) or point to the "substantial non-infringing uses."
And as for Napster defending itself--I don't know whether the students will care about the detailed legal arguments, but I have to admit I haven't been wildly impressed by the defense arguments in the couple briefs I've seen. Napster can't win while fighting on enemy territory. Fair use does not mean the right to distribute material indiscriminately to strangers all around the globe, as socially valuable as that may be.
Perhaps the participants in the 2600 case should look to the famous recent cases in export controls on encryption. In both cases, the Justice Department tried to suppress software on the basis that it was not a form of speech, but something functional. The courts went back and forth, but have ruled in both cases that the software is speech and is protected by the First Amendment. Can an argument like this be made against the DMCA concerning DeCSS code? It's whachya say, not wachya do.
Divesting the service side of the local phone company from the equipment side has indeed been suggested by many people as a solution to the competition problem. The article was getting so long, I didn't have space to add the divestiture issue. But it's not ideal: we would have to find a way to encourage Division "X" to continue upgrading and repairing the infrastructure. They would seem to have no incentive to improve service, and they would actually have a disincentive to reduce costs. A possible solution to that problem would be municipally-owned telephone companies. Government ownership certainly doesn't guarantee innovation and attention to public needs--but some municipal utilities are quite visionary. For instance, some are building broadband networks.
Freenet is trying out some pretty challenging new ideas in caching material, in high availability of material, and in making it easier to bring together different material that's likely to appeal to the same people. Those innovations are what makes it most fascinating to me. The idea that a content provider doesn't have to buy the space to make material widely available--instead, that people who like the material will automatically distribute it and provide redundant availability--that in itself would make it worth supporting.
And you can be sure lots of companies are trying out similar ideas; probably some of them got the idea from Freenet. The experiments will probably continue and be funded by VCs in other companies, but Freenet has enough interesting properties to deserve support from people who just want to see what new solutions can be found for old Internet problems.
Aside from violating people's privacy, I imagine ShareSniffer Inc. could be dragged into court (and I'd say they deserve it) using that same "vicarious and contributory infringement" language you see on all the other lawsuits for software that copyright holders don't like. I'm not a lawyer, and it would be interesting to see what an IP lawyer would say about this. But ShareSniffer is making it a hundred times easier for people to copy and share files; looks like the same difference to me.
Congressional hearings offer a forum for debate
on
ACLU Takes on ICANN
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· Score: 2
Trust in ICANN is not enough to permit debate within the confines of its own structures. North America and Europe elected strong critics to the ICANN board, and the board stalled on giving them seats; it has taken numerous other steps to perpetuate its nontransparent reign. So the next natural step is back to the U.S. government, which, like it or not, created ICANN and still has oversight. That is the significance of this ACLU initiative. (CPSR, which I support, also signed on.)
So the movie, etc. you buy on a disk can't be copied to an uncontrolled disk. But what if you receive a broadcast or download some media? Does this "protection" scheme control what you do after the download? I don't see evidence that it does. And it seems to me short-sighted of the copy police to invent a heavy-handed new system that doesn't deal with downloads, where a lot of the new media is likely soon to be.
The earlier HIPAA regulations (some 150 pages worth) contained complicated, waffling rules about when the police could get access to health-related information and when it could be released to a court in a legal case. I would like to see what the new regulations say in these areas.
While real-life communities are based on things everybody automatically shares (schools, crime problems, movie theaters, whatever) I find that virtual communities survive around shared goals. I am on a number of active mailing lists where people passionately care about what they're doing--whether it's documenting free software, protesting unjust laws, or whatever. These communities have lasted for years.
What's more important, I've gotten to know individuals from their caring posts to these lists. Like people on The WELL, we occasionally find a way to get together in real space, which is important. (Too bad it doesn't happen often.) I've formed relationships with these people concerning things that have nothing to do with how we met originally. So I think virtual community works.
But I wouldn't join an online community just for the sake of being in one! Gimme a break.
Sure, there are disruptive people in virtual communities, and there are people who ought to stick around but get disgusted and leave. But there's an upside: in the real world, you lose people from your community just because they got a new job or moved out of town to take care of their sick parent. A person in a virtual community can move from the Netherlands to Australia or from South Africa to Canada and still participate if he or she chooses.
The first option in the Post article was to connect to at least one other IM system. Sounds like an idea thought up by a commission that's used to dealing with physical networks. I wouldn't put it past AOL to find a way to offer a limited connection to some particular service and refuse to make their system open in general. Standards are the way to go.
Anybody remember back to 1966? Cultural commentators said the Beatles had peaked. They were losing their touch with live audiences, and there was a long gap after the Revolver album, so...must be nothing left for them to do.
In retrospect, the commentators had a real point. The subsequent Beatles albums weren't as good as Rubber Soul and Revolver--George Harrison said so himself not too long ago. but the Beatles had a lot left to do, like totally change the consciousness of the Anglo-American world.
I think there are a few things for the Internet left to do too. Expand the opportunities of our educational system, change the role of the arts, facilitate real-time democratic discussion...
The reason (some people would say "the feeble excuse") that the cable companies have been giving for not opening their networks is that they have to sink billions of $$ into upgrading the cable networks and building out new ones. I don't think that's a feeble excuse; they really need incentives to create the damn network in the first place. But given all kinds of financial and technical barriers to DSL, it may be worth taking away some incentive to investment on cable networks; hopefullly they'll build anyway and share the pot of gold.
Promising to open up the Time Warner network--it's the same thing competing phone companies have wanted the incumbents (Bells) to do on phone networks since the 1984 break-up of AT&T. And the history of competition on local phone networks is atrocious. An incumbent has been certified as open to competition in only one state (New York) where the criteria is that the incumbent has to prove competition exists when it wants to offer long distance service. Even in New York, lots of competitors and public interest groups say there's still no true competition.
What's going on after 16 years? The Bells just don't treat competitors' needs and requests as well as they treat the needs and requests of Bell staff. I certainly hope the future of open access on cable networks is better, but there are a lot of details and a lot of devils lurking in them.
If the great contribution of the Internet and the new media is to offer an interactive experience, lots of forms of art could evolve toward gaming. For instance, some musicians have experimented with music where the user changes some parameters as the piece proceeds.
Dave Hughes should also get a tip of the hat
on
Open Networking
·
· Score: 1
For over 10 years, Dave Hughes has been traveling the world, wiring Indian reservations and Russian towns and all sorts of places. He calls his community networking service Old Colorado. And he's been pushing the FCC for years to open up some spectrum. Understands the value of multimedia too.
No one has yet mentioned that women are still underrepresented in the computer field and lots of other technical fields. The shortage--if there is one--could probably be eased a lot if young girls could be encouraged to look more at technology and if women in the field got equal recognition with men. Discrimination against women, discrimination against the middle-aged, discrimination against foreigners--lots of people in all three groups think all these things exist; how they interact is hard to say.
After years of following DNS issues (long before ICANN was formed) I can't accept the argument that ICANN has a U.S. bias. It has plenty of other problems, but the forces fighting over domain names and IP addresses now are crossing international boundaries. Companies outside the U.S. as well as within it are eager to take control over trademarked words so that no one else can use them. Anybody see the "le-monde.com" dispute? If Le Monde can own a word meaning "the world" in French, it looks like everything is pretty sewn up for the corporations.
It should be noted that the strongest defense of diversity in domain names comes from people who happen to be in the U.S.; they include Auerbach and Simons, who have been heavily supported in their independent runs for the Board.
Thumbs up on amazon comment, thumbs down on ASPs
on
Bob Metcalfe On NPR
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· Score: 1
On the whole I was pleasantly surprised by Metcalfe's comments. For instance, I completely agree with his analysis of the change in the amazon.com privacy policy--they just want to make sure they don't lose customer information if they sell part or all of their business. This is not a wrenching change.
On the other hand, I don't think he had any idea what's new about Application Service Providers. He called amazon.com an ASP because you submit information to them and they run a program to handle your order. By that definition, just about every site with a form and a CGI program would be an ASP.
If your publisher couldn't make enough money to find the resources to continue the project, I wager you'll have the same problem--in fact, you'll have it worse because you have to give up some traditional marketing channels. And in my professional opinion, the topic is a difficult one to find enough readers for that it would pay for itself.
Try one of your creative solutions, sure. But the idea of getting a corporat angel may end up the winning one.
I applaud your goal of keeping creative control over the book in order to maintain quality. However you market it, think about the audience (sorry if this sounds like Tech Writing 101): is this to be a blow-by-blow description of the code, which may appeal to corporations trying to work with it? Or is it a textbook? Or a guide for programmers? Focus is critical to keeping up a document that helps somebody.
While policies are almost designed to be slippery things, my reading of the new Amazon policy is that they'll transfer customer information along with their other assets to a company that buys them. Otherwise, the company would have just a domain name and a big warehouse full of books (and of course, a bunch of dubious patents!)--valuable assets, but not so valuable without the years of customer information that was built up.
Compare that to Toysmart, as described in a techweb.com article:
In May, toysmart.com asked permission from the
Federal Trade Commission to sell off its customer list to
a third party, arguing that selling its directory was similar
to a company acquiring the information in an acquisition.
Kogut countered that it was not an acquisition, or even
a sale of 100 percent of the company's assets. Instead,
only a portion of its assets was involved.
But everybody's fears are well-founded. We can't control changes in company privacy policies in the U.S., and we'll have a damn hard time enforcing those policies if they're broken.
I was the editor of the book for both editions (after I found it on the Linux Doc Project; originally Olaf wrote the first edition on his own for the LDP) and decided along with the authors to add just a little bit extra with the second edition so that we'd have a project of manageable size. In other words, some of the choices timothy noted were historical. (By the way, I don't think Apache existed when the first NAG came out; people were using the NCSA server. Samba was probably around but very little known.)
It would make sense to cover Samba--if NFS, why not Samba? Apache is a bigger topic, but if Running Linux can have a chapter on Apache and a couple sections on Samba, I suppose the NAG in the future might too. As for the choice of mailers, we just felt that Exim was more visible in the Linux community, partly because it's the Debian default.
Anyway, the wrong way to create a book is to think of every possible useful tool and try to throw it in. Substantial coverage takes a long time (and maybe more expertise than any one author can have); books that cover too much usually end up being superficial.
Accept this posting is as just a lilttle peek through the window into the complicated decisions an author and editor have to make; decisions based on their current knowledge, their judgement of readers' needs, the amount of time they have, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sort of glad that such an extremist bill came up, because the content providers acknowledge by their support of the bill that there's a fundamental incompatbility between information control and the kind of unfettered development of digital technology we've all benefited from up to now. Once they say, "Stop technological progress or our business models fail," the public can then say, "Time for you to find new business models."
Just to follow through (because CALEA was mentioned in the intro), the FBI wanted CALEA to cover email and other Internet communications, but Congress refused. They exempted the Internet explicitly (I don't have the exact language of the law at hand). I believe that one of the major effects of Ashcroft's Anti-Terrorism Act (now PATRIOT) is to extend CALEA so something like Carnivore can be brought into play.
And Congress has thrown law enforcement behind the copyright holders in an act passed in 1998 after the David LaMacchia case (an MIT student who offered a central repository for the exchange of software). You don't have to upload software personally or benefit in any way from the exchange of software--you go to jail for providing a means of exchange. I don't think I'm giving away any secret here; while the law was probably passed at the behest of the software industry, it must be known to the recording industry too.
It seemed, back at the time of the MCI merger, that WorldCom was interested more in building and controlling backbones than in the less lucrative and more labor-intensive end-user market. Were they always interested in the last mile too, or are they getting interested just now?
As others have pointed out, you have to decide whether you want to promote Napster for the community-building (copyright be damned) or point to the "substantial non-infringing uses."
And as for Napster defending itself--I don't know whether the students will care about the detailed legal arguments, but I have to admit I haven't been wildly impressed by the defense arguments in the couple briefs I've seen. Napster can't win while fighting on enemy territory. Fair use does not mean the right to distribute material indiscriminately to strangers all around the globe, as socially valuable as that may be.
Perhaps the participants in the 2600 case should look to the famous recent cases in export controls on encryption. In both cases, the Justice Department tried to suppress software on the basis that it was not a form of speech, but something functional. The courts went back and forth, but have ruled in both cases that the software is speech and is protected by the First Amendment. Can an argument like this be made against the DMCA concerning DeCSS code? It's whachya say, not wachya do.
Divesting the service side of the local phone company from the equipment side has indeed been suggested by many people as a solution to the competition problem. The article was getting so long, I didn't have space to add the divestiture issue. But it's not ideal: we would have to find a way to encourage Division "X" to continue upgrading and repairing the infrastructure. They would seem to have no incentive to improve service, and they would actually have a disincentive to reduce costs. A possible solution to that problem would be municipally-owned telephone companies. Government ownership certainly doesn't guarantee innovation and attention to public needs--but some municipal utilities are quite visionary. For instance, some are building broadband networks.
And you can be sure lots of companies are trying out similar ideas; probably some of them got the idea from Freenet. The experiments will probably continue and be funded by VCs in other companies, but Freenet has enough interesting properties to deserve support from people who just want to see what new solutions can be found for old Internet problems.
Aside from violating people's privacy, I imagine ShareSniffer Inc. could be dragged into court (and I'd say they deserve it) using that same "vicarious and contributory infringement" language you see on all the other lawsuits for software that copyright holders don't like. I'm not a lawyer, and it would be interesting to see what an IP lawyer would say about this. But ShareSniffer is making it a hundred times easier for people to copy and share files; looks like the same difference to me.
Trust in ICANN is not enough to permit debate within the confines of its own structures. North America and Europe elected strong critics to the ICANN board, and the board stalled on giving them seats; it has taken numerous other steps to perpetuate its nontransparent reign. So the next natural step is back to the U.S. government, which, like it or not, created ICANN and still has oversight. That is the significance of this ACLU initiative. (CPSR, which I support, also signed on.)
So the movie, etc. you buy on a disk can't be copied to an uncontrolled disk. But what if you receive a broadcast or download some media? Does this "protection" scheme control what you do after the download? I don't see evidence that it does. And it seems to me short-sighted of the copy police to invent a heavy-handed new system that doesn't deal with downloads, where a lot of the new media is likely soon to be.
The earlier HIPAA regulations (some 150 pages worth) contained complicated, waffling rules about when the police could get access to health-related information and when it could be released to a court in a legal case. I would like to see what the new regulations say in these areas.
What's more important, I've gotten to know individuals from their caring posts to these lists. Like people on The WELL, we occasionally find a way to get together in real space, which is important. (Too bad it doesn't happen often.) I've formed relationships with these people concerning things that have nothing to do with how we met originally. So I think virtual community works.
But I wouldn't join an online community just for the sake of being in one! Gimme a break.
Sure, there are disruptive people in virtual communities, and there are people who ought to stick around but get disgusted and leave. But there's an upside: in the real world, you lose people from your community just because they got a new job or moved out of town to take care of their sick parent. A person in a virtual community can move from the Netherlands to Australia or from South Africa to Canada and still participate if he or she chooses.
The first option in the Post article was to connect to at least one other IM system. Sounds like an idea thought up by a commission that's used to dealing with physical networks. I wouldn't put it past AOL to find a way to offer a limited connection to some particular service and refuse to make their system open in general. Standards are the way to go.
In retrospect, the commentators had a real point. The subsequent Beatles albums weren't as good as Rubber Soul and Revolver--George Harrison said so himself not too long ago. but the Beatles had a lot left to do, like totally change the consciousness of the Anglo-American world.
I think there are a few things for the Internet left to do too. Expand the opportunities of our educational system, change the role of the arts, facilitate real-time democratic discussion...
The reason (some people would say "the feeble excuse") that the cable companies have been giving for not opening their networks is that they have to sink billions of $$ into upgrading the cable networks and building out new ones. I don't think that's a feeble excuse; they really need incentives to create the damn network in the first place. But given all kinds of financial and technical barriers to DSL, it may be worth taking away some incentive to investment on cable networks; hopefullly they'll build anyway and share the pot of gold.
What's going on after 16 years? The Bells just don't treat competitors' needs and requests as well as they treat the needs and requests of Bell staff. I certainly hope the future of open access on cable networks is better, but there are a lot of details and a lot of devils lurking in them.
If the great contribution of the Internet and the new media is to offer an interactive experience, lots of forms of art could evolve toward gaming. For instance, some musicians have experimented with music where the user changes some parameters as the piece proceeds.
For over 10 years, Dave Hughes has been traveling the world, wiring Indian reservations and Russian towns and all sorts of places. He calls his community networking service Old Colorado. And he's been pushing the FCC for years to open up some spectrum. Understands the value of multimedia too.
No one has yet mentioned that women are still underrepresented in the computer field and lots of other technical fields. The shortage--if there is one--could probably be eased a lot if young girls could be encouraged to look more at technology and if women in the field got equal recognition with men. Discrimination against women, discrimination against the middle-aged, discrimination against foreigners--lots of people in all three groups think all these things exist; how they interact is hard to say.
It should be noted that the strongest defense of diversity in domain names comes from people who happen to be in the U.S.; they include Auerbach and Simons, who have been heavily supported in their independent runs for the Board.
On the other hand, I don't think he had any idea what's new about Application Service Providers. He called amazon.com an ASP because you submit information to them and they run a program to handle your order. By that definition, just about every site with a form and a CGI program would be an ASP.
Try one of your creative solutions, sure. But the idea of getting a corporat angel may end up the winning one.
I applaud your goal of keeping creative control over the book in order to maintain quality. However you market it, think about the audience (sorry if this sounds like Tech Writing 101): is this to be a blow-by-blow description of the code, which may appeal to corporations trying to work with it? Or is it a textbook? Or a guide for programmers? Focus is critical to keeping up a document that helps somebody.
It would make sense to cover Samba--if NFS, why not Samba? Apache is a bigger topic, but if Running Linux can have a chapter on Apache and a couple sections on Samba, I suppose the NAG in the future might too. As for the choice of mailers, we just felt that Exim was more visible in the Linux community, partly because it's the Debian default.
Anyway, the wrong way to create a book is to think of every possible useful tool and try to throw it in. Substantial coverage takes a long time (and maybe more expertise than any one author can have); books that cover too much usually end up being superficial.
Accept this posting is as just a lilttle peek through the window into the complicated decisions an author and editor have to make; decisions based on their current knowledge, their judgement of readers' needs, the amount of time they have, etc.