Stenography is just another form of encryption, and a weak one at that.
That's not really what this is about. You can encrypt your message with the strongest cipher in the world, then ship it out across an untrusted network. Unless a significant portion of the data on the network is encrypted, it's relatively easy for someone to single out the encrypted messages, and at least focus additional attention on you.
If you encrypt the message with a strong cipher, then hide it inside of another type of message, its significantly less likely that someone'll be able to find it (and even if they do, they still have to break your encryption, so it's irrelevant that steganography is 'weak'.) If your approach to hiding the data is significantly tricky, it can take an enormous number of cycles to find the message.
Figuring out algorithms robust enough to survive Lossy compression is - to an applied mathemitician - nearly trivial.
Yes, and this is relevant to watermarking, which must be able to survive lossy compression. That's a fairly arbitrary requirement, and is probably not required for most purposes of digital communication.
The truth is, it probably isn't possible to invent the perfect 'undetectable' steganographic procedure for non-random information (of course there is a major exception if you're using something like a one-time pad.) But nothing is really perfect (public/private key crypto is certainly not perfect in this way). You simply needs to make detection several orders of magnitude more difficult in order to realize a significant benefit.
Now, how much does the presense of these companies ruin my ability to use the web the way I always did before they arrived? Zero.
If all you want to do is browse a few static HTML pages with Lynx, you're probably right that nothing much has changed.
However, if you're telling me that copyright laws have always prevented the distribution of certain programs over the net even before the DMCA came along, I might beg to differ. If you're telling me copyright laws have always given corporations nearly unlimited power to censor bulletin boards with minimal review, I would be surprised. I would say that the nature of the web experience has changed greatly, and it's only going to get worse.
These industrial strength copyright laws have changed the face of the net. Combine that with other corporate IP spreading across the net, including thousands of silly software patents like one-click, which make it even more difficult to implement new ideas on the web. And of course, there's always Microsoft seeking new ways to limit what 'unauthorized' software can do on their platform. We've got an entirely new net out there, whether you choose to participate or not.
For those who are still confused, Windows Media is a platform play. They don't charge for the software components, but they do get two advantages.
This is arguable on two points. Yes, it does appear to be a platform play for now. But-- generally large record labels and corporations (ie, Napster) cannot use the standard tools MS provides. This necessitates custom-built tools, and possibly a license (why is MS in talks with Napster about free software, anyway?)
Secondly, if MS does make Windows Media Rights Management the de facto standard for DRM, there's nothing to stop them from changing their business model, and requiring content providers to pay for different levels of protection.
This statement is blatently false. Did you even try to do any research? Perhaps you are thinking of Real? Microsoft's player, encoder, and DRM tools are all available for free.
Yes, but if you were a record label or a software company and wanted to use these products in a serious commercial operation, you would get the "professional" tools and pay MS accordingly. MS makes their tools available to users like you and me, so we can all play with them and say things like "hey, MS is cool cause they give away free stuff".
They're certainly not investing millions promoting their system to the record companies in order to give it to them free. They're willing to make things free to end users for a while, in hopes of creating a user base.
You seem to be missing the point. The reason MS is in talks with Napster is that they're trying to sell their "secure" media format to "protect" artists' works. No matter what the format of the original is, your Napster client will always save it as a "secured" wma/mp3 etc. I'm not sure if that will involve transcoding from MP3->WMA, but it probably won't. The client will simply place a Windows Media secure wrapper around the file, guaranteeing that only your copy of WMP will play it.
It will have the ancillary effect of requiring more people to use WMP, but more importantly it will get MS in good with the RIAA people and convince them that WMP is the answer to all of their copy-protection questions (right now they're less than sure of it.)
WMA was their answer, which, granted, provided better sound for the bandwidth cost.
MP3s wasn't really optimized for use as a low-bandwidth format. They sound decent somewhere from 128-256K, and that's about it. Fortuitously, this is exactly the level that most people are interested in. Once you're passing about multi-megabyte files, you're willing to trade some bandwidth for a common, widely implemented standard. The people who were already in the (arguably of passing importance) low-bandwidth space, RealAudio, weren't any better than MS as far as proprietary technology goes, so who really cares if MS shuts them out (well...)
What made MP3 popular is its availability. MP3 proved that as long as one decent codec is a standard and is freely available as code, it will proliferate and become popular. I think MS building an alternative into their OS will not change things too much, especially if it's a restrictive alternative.
Well, I suppose the people who control what gets posted actually have time to read the article, as opposed to the frenzied posters rushing to be the first one in with it.
Yes, it will cost a lot of money, but you know what? That money will actually go stright into the economy, workmen will have jobs to go to for the next decade;
Don't worry-- at the rate they're repaving the West Side Highway, workmen should have jobs well into the next millenium.
Cable is also available here, but... you can't get a static IP.
Well, you're among the lucky few ADSL subscribers to rate that privilege. I had a line from a (non-Verizon) ISP that included a static IP, then they went out of business. Now you have a choice of Verizon (PPP over Ethernet!!) or several ISPs with straight DHCP. There may be some choice out there somewhere, but it's hard to find.
And with a 128k upstream, having a static IP isn't all it's cracked up to be...
If not, why would a manufacturer want to go to all the trouble and added expense?
Simple. The major monitor manufacturers would love to be part of this club. Look at the margins on consumer video equipment these days. They're stretched really thin. Now imagine you could create a semi-exclusive club consisting of a few major companies "authorized" to build MPAA-compliant video equipment. Anyone who isn't part of this club cannot compete.
A new competitor in the market? Can they jump through the flaming hoops the MPAA consortium will put in their path? Can they afford to license the technology? The pricing could be arbitrary, and different for each company. It's a beautiful situation if you happen to be a major hardware manufacturer-- you and the MPAA get to control competition, all in the name of copy-protection. And if some upstart builds monitors that circumvent the protection, they're breaking the law!
Actually, company's really shouldn't try to have a diversified revenue stream. Yeah, it's probably a better thing for the officers in the company, but as an investment, it's better for the company to not diversify itself too much.
A company that goes bankrupt due to a failure in their core (and only) business loses a lot more money than one that stays in business due to their diversification. This has to do with the perceived value of the company, the value of the company's brand, and all of the company's assets. These things are worth money if the company's in business. They're worth a whole lot less if the company fails, or if it is perceived to fail. Diversifying also gives a company something to fall back on when one area of business is a slump, allowing it to stay in business when otherwise it would be looking to file bankruptcy or sell itself cheap.
umm, that's not insightful. watermarking [!=] fingerprinting
It's perfectly insightful. I was going to point this out in the parent to his message, but I figured somebody'd make a point of the fact that SDMI only attacked watermarking, and this technology is fingerprinting-- just like you said. I think this guy's point is simply that if watermarking can be cracked without hurting the signal quality too much, maybe it's similarly possible to crack the fingerprinting. It might not be possible, but that really depends on the technology, none of which is proven.
So fingerprinting is not the end-all-be-all of filtering technology, at least not yet.
A study was recently completed somewhere in England (I don't have the link... it may or may not have been a Slashdot story) where statisticians measured the survival rates of a group of people over a few decades. Turns out that people with higher IQs survived the longest. Now, that's not to say the stupid people didn't have lots and lots of kids... It's just an interesting tidbit.
Then they go to the big court, and in theory something happens... It could all get very complicated if an important member state really refused to comply-- the EU would probably be faced with adopting some sort of Europe-wide enforcement action (blocks on trade, etc.) But I doubt they would go too far against Denmark (as opposed to say, Latvia.)
Here's an article on EU court efforts to enforce environmental directives, the closest thing 2 minutes of Googling would fetch me.
I agree, but I don't think you're going to find the same community spirit willing to purchase the factory space necessary to mass-produce an open-source car.
No, but you might see a group of people combining to create the blueprints for one. Of course, a car is a bad example because it's so manufacture-intensive. Open Source is really able to take off because it is completely information-based. However, as much of the creation of any product revolves purely around information-manipulation (people design products every day without ever visiting the factory), my point is simply that the manufacturing stages may be the cork that holds the genie in the bottle.
Perhaps someday a hard-goods company will appear that takes advantage of Open Source design. I have no idea what it would make, and how it would make its developers happy, but it's not entirely out of the question.
That's really cool. No, I wasn't even thinking of something that sophisticated. I was just referring to the lego-printers that repeatedly print layer-upon-layer of plastic onto a base. But I was only referring to it as a starting point for some much more sophisticated building machines, and what you mention sounds a lot more interesting.
Combine that with all of the recent innovations in paper printed circuits (there was an article on printed paper cellphones recently), along with what's going on in printed organic LCD displays, and you could produce some neat computing devices. And maybe more, eventually.
Why not create an AntiNapster based site where those artists concerned with theft of songs could enter their names into that database, and have those songs filtered
Well, as Napster's realizing right now, filtering is a whole lot more complicated than it looks. Already Napster's filtering way more than it should, and people can still find the songs they like. The solution might be audio-fingerprinting, but a) it's unproven, b) it's expensive and difficult to implement, c) it requires proprietary software on the client and d) as an artist, it's hard to register your tracks.
I'm pretty sure that this would violate international copyright agreements.
Yes, I believe the EU has implemented something like the DMCA, which was itself based on an international treaty. Of course, the wheels of justice turn slowly in the EU, so even if it is illegal, don't expect the courts to sort it out til say, Christmas... 2007.
But nobody creates a passenger aircraft, or an automobile, or a new, nicer design of personal computer for pure creative self-actualising joy.
Well, not to point out the obvious... But the open source movement seems to be doing exactly that. I think the problem with your argument is simply that it's not generally possible to design aircraft or cars for the joy of it. It's just too specialized, and when you've completed the design, you don't have access to the specialized tools necessary to make it real. It's a situation we've lived with so long that we simply take it for granted that only a corporation could ever produce a useful product.
I would even go so far as to state that open source has a sort of darwinian marketing advantage over corporate products; only products that the market needs will ever survive. Think how many corporate products have, after millions in R&D and thousands of hours of market research, tanked miserably. Companies can't afford to suffer too many failures like that, so consequently they limit their experimentation. Open source has no such restrictions.
But where discoveries require significant investment to bring them to a consumer-ready stage
You have to be careful how you define the 'significant investment' required to get something from concept to market. Certainly it took millions of man-hours to produce something like Linux. If you accept what MS would have you believe, that's multi-millions of development and marketing dollars that only a large software company could ever afford to spend. In reality, it's nothing of the sort-- open source is just a more efficient way to aggregate programmers' spare cycles. The same might be true of a lot of industries, if manufacturing and distribution were ever to become simple and inexpensive.
Something that interests me is these new 3D printers, that overlay sheets of plastic to build things. If technology like that were ever to become cheap and ubiqutous, and were also capable of printing circuitry and LCD displays, then I bet you'd see something similar to open source, with a lot of consumer electronics companies complaining about unfair competition.
A friend of mine is an organizer of a major independent film festival. One of his jobs has always been to create "clips" tapes of present and past films that are sent out to attendees. In the past, they have sent VHS tapes, and obtained their material from videotapes. Now they are trying to send the material as DVDs, and consequently need to rip the clips from the DVDs themselves.
This is one of a million examples where 90% quality is simply not enough. Nothing is being done to violate traditional fair-use in this case, but if the MPAA has its way, this sort of application could very well become impossible.
people would find new ISP's -- one's that maybe "didn't have the resources" to go after every little violation
That's great if you do your sharing over a 56K modem connection (ugh), but it really sucks if you have broadband. I have what's considered a lot of choice of broadband ISPs in my neighborhood, and it basically comes down to 2 cable companies and a rapidly shrinking handful of DSL providers (each of which would charge a large activation fee and take a few weeks to switch.)
The RIAA and MPAA probably aren't going after too many modem users. They don't need to in order to put a crimp in Gnutella usage. They're going after people with high-speed connections, either through their ISP or their college/company. Either way, it has the same effect. Modem-to-modem Gnutella bites, especially if you're interested in sharing movies.
I'd imagine one solution would be to auction 10-year rights to given frequencies.
I can't say that I'm an expert in the way things are currently done, but I was under the impression that this is sort of the way we do it now. Corporations pay a bunch of money, and they get the right to use the spectrum for a while. I'm note sure how long that 'while' is, and whether gov't is prevented from taking them back. But it's basically a good solution. Plus, it has the advantage (if you call it that) of putting some government control on how the frequencies are used. Some would argue that this is a bad thing, but I honestly can't say that our government, which is at very least responsible to voters and the constitution, is going to be any worse than a set of private institutions in this regard.
probably give the hardware people an excuse to make you upgrade every time they had to move to a different frequency
I'm sure this will be less of an issue as hardware gets more advanced. We already have multi-band cellphones selling for a couple of hundred bucks, and a lot of wireless network rely on all sorts of frequency hopping anyway.
OR do you think that eventually the entire spectrum will be binary data, and cheap Radio-over-IP devices will level the playing field for everyone?
Yes, this is essentially what I see for the future, but there are of course limits to how much can be broadcast over the set of frequencies suitable for the purpose. Also, you have to be careful about whose playing field is actually being leveled-- these systems could provide open access to lots of content, but the people who operate them could very well be the equivalent of Ma Bell (and charge accordingly), if the governments of the world are willing to let them. But aside from that, I'm willing to bet that with cheap, readily-available IP access, we won't be so concerned with which radio or TV station happens to be broadcasting in our area. In any case, assumptions we or the FCC have about how the spectrum will be used are bound to be obsolete in a few years time, so I think it's nuts to give away the farm now.
Well, if it's an auction, SOMEONE's got to be the high bidder, right?
You know those auctions where the police sell off cars and property seized from drug dealers? The ones where, if you're lucky, you might be able to pick up a car for pennies on the dollar? Auctions are not necessarily a great way to get the best price; really, auction pricing is entirely dependent on who else is participating, and what they're willing to pay. Not necessarily on what the property is worth.
Now that's all well and good if we're talking about a few cars with bullet holes in them. But in this case, we're talking about granting permanent, inheritable rights to entire areas of spectrum. There's only so much useful spectrum, and as the population and technology increases, the value of that spectrum is going to increase beyond anything we can imagine. Not only are we creating the world's largest property speculator's market, we're also handing out property at a price guaranteed to be a tiny fraction of what the spectrum will be worth. There isn't a corporation in the world rich enough to pay what a few choice Mhz will be worth in thirty years, if technology continues at even a shadow of its current pace. Worst of all, this is property that we the people might want to use someday, that we won't be able to touch because Rupert Murdoch's grandson owns it.
What also worries me is that with the sale of spectrum, we're creating an entirely new type of property out of whole cloth. Think about what it means to own airwaves. They're nothing tangible that you can point to and say "I own this." Essentially, when buying spectrum, you're making a contract with the government whereby only you can ever broadcast on those frequencies-- for the rest of human history (or as long as law and society as we know it holds together.) This means that the government will use our tax money to fund the FCC's policing of the airwaves, long after the money from these auctions is used up. It will certainly mean that the use of the airwaves is no longer based any assignment of need, and instead we'll probably see even more of the leasing we see today. Only, the people receiving the profits will be the lucky corporations who happened to exist and have adequate resources to get in on the biggest, most exclusive auction in history. If you're unlucky enough to be born after these transactions take place, or if you don't happen to own a multi-billion dollar corporation, you're really screwed. People will look back and wonder what sort of shortsighted government handed over control of all the broadcast frequencies in the United States to a bunch of random corporations back in the eary 21st century.
In the past, large corporations were given coal and mineral rights for literally a tiny fraction of what they were worth over the long haul. Governments made quite a few of these decisions based entirely on personal connections and lobbying, guaranteeing that taxpayers didn't even have a chance to get a fair shake.
The truth is, nobody could realistically afford to purchase the airwaves today if the purchase price took into account the future revenues they will generate (even over a limited timespan, like 100 years.) The fact that these corporations think that they have a chance to buy the spectrum implies that they certainly aren't going to pay a fair price for it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not really what this is about. You can encrypt your message with the strongest cipher in the world, then ship it out across an untrusted network. Unless a significant portion of the data on the network is encrypted, it's relatively easy for someone to single out the encrypted messages, and at least focus additional attention on you.
If you encrypt the message with a strong cipher, then hide it inside of another type of message, its significantly less likely that someone'll be able to find it (and even if they do, they still have to break your encryption, so it's irrelevant that steganography is 'weak'.) If your approach to hiding the data is significantly tricky, it can take an enormous number of cycles to find the message.
Figuring out algorithms robust enough to survive Lossy compression is - to an applied mathemitician - nearly trivial.
Yes, and this is relevant to watermarking, which must be able to survive lossy compression. That's a fairly arbitrary requirement, and is probably not required for most purposes of digital communication.
The truth is, it probably isn't possible to invent the perfect 'undetectable' steganographic procedure for non-random information (of course there is a major exception if you're using something like a one-time pad.) But nothing is really perfect (public/private key crypto is certainly not perfect in this way). You simply needs to make detection several orders of magnitude more difficult in order to realize a significant benefit.
If all you want to do is browse a few static HTML pages with Lynx, you're probably right that nothing much has changed.
However, if you're telling me that copyright laws have always prevented the distribution of certain programs over the net even before the DMCA came along, I might beg to differ. If you're telling me copyright laws have always given corporations nearly unlimited power to censor bulletin boards with minimal review, I would be surprised. I would say that the nature of the web experience has changed greatly, and it's only going to get worse.
These industrial strength copyright laws have changed the face of the net. Combine that with other corporate IP spreading across the net, including thousands of silly software patents like one-click, which make it even more difficult to implement new ideas on the web. And of course, there's always Microsoft seeking new ways to limit what 'unauthorized' software can do on their platform. We've got an entirely new net out there, whether you choose to participate or not.
Does repackaging something with a silly name a product make?
This is arguable on two points. Yes, it does appear to be a platform play for now. But-- generally large record labels and corporations (ie, Napster) cannot use the standard tools MS provides. This necessitates custom-built tools, and possibly a license (why is MS in talks with Napster about free software, anyway?)
Secondly, if MS does make Windows Media Rights Management the de facto standard for DRM, there's nothing to stop them from changing their business model, and requiring content providers to pay for different levels of protection.
Yes, but if you were a record label or a software company and wanted to use these products in a serious commercial operation, you would get the "professional" tools and pay MS accordingly. MS makes their tools available to users like you and me, so we can all play with them and say things like "hey, MS is cool cause they give away free stuff".
They're certainly not investing millions promoting their system to the record companies in order to give it to them free. They're willing to make things free to end users for a while, in hopes of creating a user base.
It will have the ancillary effect of requiring more people to use WMP, but more importantly it will get MS in good with the RIAA people and convince them that WMP is the answer to all of their copy-protection questions (right now they're less than sure of it.)
MP3s wasn't really optimized for use as a low-bandwidth format. They sound decent somewhere from 128-256K, and that's about it. Fortuitously, this is exactly the level that most people are interested in. Once you're passing about multi-megabyte files, you're willing to trade some bandwidth for a common, widely implemented standard. The people who were already in the (arguably of passing importance) low-bandwidth space, RealAudio, weren't any better than MS as far as proprietary technology goes, so who really cares if MS shuts them out (well...)
What made MP3 popular is its availability. MP3 proved that as long as one decent codec is a standard and is freely available as code, it will proliferate and become popular. I think MS building an alternative into their OS will not change things too much, especially if it's a restrictive alternative.
Well, I suppose the people who control what gets posted actually have time to read the article, as opposed to the frenzied posters rushing to be the first one in with it.
Don't worry-- at the rate they're repaving the West Side Highway, workmen should have jobs well into the next millenium.
Well, you're among the lucky few ADSL subscribers to rate that privilege. I had a line from a (non-Verizon) ISP that included a static IP, then they went out of business. Now you have a choice of Verizon (PPP over Ethernet!!) or several ISPs with straight DHCP. There may be some choice out there somewhere, but it's hard to find.
And with a 128k upstream, having a static IP isn't all it's cracked up to be...
Simple. The major monitor manufacturers would love to be part of this club. Look at the margins on consumer video equipment these days. They're stretched really thin. Now imagine you could create a semi-exclusive club consisting of a few major companies "authorized" to build MPAA-compliant video equipment. Anyone who isn't part of this club cannot compete.
A new competitor in the market? Can they jump through the flaming hoops the MPAA consortium will put in their path? Can they afford to license the technology? The pricing could be arbitrary, and different for each company. It's a beautiful situation if you happen to be a major hardware manufacturer-- you and the MPAA get to control competition, all in the name of copy-protection. And if some upstart builds monitors that circumvent the protection, they're breaking the law!
A company that goes bankrupt due to a failure in their core (and only) business loses a lot more money than one that stays in business due to their diversification. This has to do with the perceived value of the company, the value of the company's brand, and all of the company's assets. These things are worth money if the company's in business. They're worth a whole lot less if the company fails, or if it is perceived to fail. Diversifying also gives a company something to fall back on when one area of business is a slump, allowing it to stay in business when otherwise it would be looking to file bankruptcy or sell itself cheap.
It's perfectly insightful. I was going to point this out in the parent to his message, but I figured somebody'd make a point of the fact that SDMI only attacked watermarking, and this technology is fingerprinting-- just like you said. I think this guy's point is simply that if watermarking can be cracked without hurting the signal quality too much, maybe it's similarly possible to crack the fingerprinting. It might not be possible, but that really depends on the technology, none of which is proven.
So fingerprinting is not the end-all-be-all of filtering technology, at least not yet.
A study was recently completed somewhere in England (I don't have the link... it may or may not have been a Slashdot story) where statisticians measured the survival rates of a group of people over a few decades. Turns out that people with higher IQs survived the longest. Now, that's not to say the stupid people didn't have lots and lots of kids... It's just an interesting tidbit.
Here's an article on EU court efforts to enforce environmental directives, the closest thing 2 minutes of Googling would fetch me.
No, but you might see a group of people combining to create the blueprints for one. Of course, a car is a bad example because it's so manufacture-intensive. Open Source is really able to take off because it is completely information-based. However, as much of the creation of any product revolves purely around information-manipulation (people design products every day without ever visiting the factory), my point is simply that the manufacturing stages may be the cork that holds the genie in the bottle.
Perhaps someday a hard-goods company will appear that takes advantage of Open Source design. I have no idea what it would make, and how it would make its developers happy, but it's not entirely out of the question.
Combine that with all of the recent innovations in paper printed circuits (there was an article on printed paper cellphones recently), along with what's going on in printed organic LCD displays, and you could produce some neat computing devices. And maybe more, eventually.
Well, as Napster's realizing right now, filtering is a whole lot more complicated than it looks. Already Napster's filtering way more than it should, and people can still find the songs they like. The solution might be audio-fingerprinting, but a) it's unproven, b) it's expensive and difficult to implement, c) it requires proprietary software on the client and d) as an artist, it's hard to register your tracks.
Yes, I believe the EU has implemented something like the DMCA, which was itself based on an international treaty. Of course, the wheels of justice turn slowly in the EU, so even if it is illegal, don't expect the courts to sort it out til say, Christmas... 2007.
Well, not to point out the obvious... But the open source movement seems to be doing exactly that. I think the problem with your argument is simply that it's not generally possible to design aircraft or cars for the joy of it. It's just too specialized, and when you've completed the design, you don't have access to the specialized tools necessary to make it real. It's a situation we've lived with so long that we simply take it for granted that only a corporation could ever produce a useful product.
I would even go so far as to state that open source has a sort of darwinian marketing advantage over corporate products; only products that the market needs will ever survive. Think how many corporate products have, after millions in R&D and thousands of hours of market research, tanked miserably. Companies can't afford to suffer too many failures like that, so consequently they limit their experimentation. Open source has no such restrictions.
But where discoveries require significant investment to bring them to a consumer-ready stage
You have to be careful how you define the 'significant investment' required to get something from concept to market. Certainly it took millions of man-hours to produce something like Linux. If you accept what MS would have you believe, that's multi-millions of development and marketing dollars that only a large software company could ever afford to spend. In reality, it's nothing of the sort-- open source is just a more efficient way to aggregate programmers' spare cycles. The same might be true of a lot of industries, if manufacturing and distribution were ever to become simple and inexpensive.
Something that interests me is these new 3D printers, that overlay sheets of plastic to build things. If technology like that were ever to become cheap and ubiqutous, and were also capable of printing circuitry and LCD displays, then I bet you'd see something similar to open source, with a lot of consumer electronics companies complaining about unfair competition.
This is one of a million examples where 90% quality is simply not enough. Nothing is being done to violate traditional fair-use in this case, but if the MPAA has its way, this sort of application could very well become impossible.
That's great if you do your sharing over a 56K modem connection (ugh), but it really sucks if you have broadband. I have what's considered a lot of choice of broadband ISPs in my neighborhood, and it basically comes down to 2 cable companies and a rapidly shrinking handful of DSL providers (each of which would charge a large activation fee and take a few weeks to switch.)
The RIAA and MPAA probably aren't going after too many modem users. They don't need to in order to put a crimp in Gnutella usage. They're going after people with high-speed connections, either through their ISP or their college/company. Either way, it has the same effect. Modem-to-modem Gnutella bites, especially if you're interested in sharing movies.
I can't say that I'm an expert in the way things are currently done, but I was under the impression that this is sort of the way we do it now. Corporations pay a bunch of money, and they get the right to use the spectrum for a while. I'm note sure how long that 'while' is, and whether gov't is prevented from taking them back. But it's basically a good solution. Plus, it has the advantage (if you call it that) of putting some government control on how the frequencies are used. Some would argue that this is a bad thing, but I honestly can't say that our government, which is at very least responsible to voters and the constitution, is going to be any worse than a set of private institutions in this regard.
probably give the hardware people an excuse to make you upgrade every time they had to move to a different frequency
I'm sure this will be less of an issue as hardware gets more advanced. We already have multi-band cellphones selling for a couple of hundred bucks, and a lot of wireless network rely on all sorts of frequency hopping anyway.
OR do you think that eventually the entire spectrum will be binary data, and cheap Radio-over-IP devices will level the playing field for everyone?
Yes, this is essentially what I see for the future, but there are of course limits to how much can be broadcast over the set of frequencies suitable for the purpose. Also, you have to be careful about whose playing field is actually being leveled-- these systems could provide open access to lots of content, but the people who operate them could very well be the equivalent of Ma Bell (and charge accordingly), if the governments of the world are willing to let them. But aside from that, I'm willing to bet that with cheap, readily-available IP access, we won't be so concerned with which radio or TV station happens to be broadcasting in our area. In any case, assumptions we or the FCC have about how the spectrum will be used are bound to be obsolete in a few years time, so I think it's nuts to give away the farm now.
You know those auctions where the police sell off cars and property seized from drug dealers? The ones where, if you're lucky, you might be able to pick up a car for pennies on the dollar? Auctions are not necessarily a great way to get the best price; really, auction pricing is entirely dependent on who else is participating, and what they're willing to pay. Not necessarily on what the property is worth.
Now that's all well and good if we're talking about a few cars with bullet holes in them. But in this case, we're talking about granting permanent, inheritable rights to entire areas of spectrum. There's only so much useful spectrum, and as the population and technology increases, the value of that spectrum is going to increase beyond anything we can imagine. Not only are we creating the world's largest property speculator's market, we're also handing out property at a price guaranteed to be a tiny fraction of what the spectrum will be worth. There isn't a corporation in the world rich enough to pay what a few choice Mhz will be worth in thirty years, if technology continues at even a shadow of its current pace. Worst of all, this is property that we the people might want to use someday, that we won't be able to touch because Rupert Murdoch's grandson owns it.
What also worries me is that with the sale of spectrum, we're creating an entirely new type of property out of whole cloth. Think about what it means to own airwaves. They're nothing tangible that you can point to and say "I own this." Essentially, when buying spectrum, you're making a contract with the government whereby only you can ever broadcast on those frequencies-- for the rest of human history (or as long as law and society as we know it holds together.) This means that the government will use our tax money to fund the FCC's policing of the airwaves, long after the money from these auctions is used up. It will certainly mean that the use of the airwaves is no longer based any assignment of need, and instead we'll probably see even more of the leasing we see today. Only, the people receiving the profits will be the lucky corporations who happened to exist and have adequate resources to get in on the biggest, most exclusive auction in history. If you're unlucky enough to be born after these transactions take place, or if you don't happen to own a multi-billion dollar corporation, you're really screwed. People will look back and wonder what sort of shortsighted government handed over control of all the broadcast frequencies in the United States to a bunch of random corporations back in the eary 21st century.
The truth is, nobody could realistically afford to purchase the airwaves today if the purchase price took into account the future revenues they will generate (even over a limited timespan, like 100 years.) The fact that these corporations think that they have a chance to buy the spectrum implies that they certainly aren't going to pay a fair price for it.