By Lawrence Lessig
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A17
As the American economy struggles to get out of recession, an important part of the recovery will be the revival of the country's technology sector.
Not long ago, in a speech at a summit on Internet development, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell gave the nation a glimpse of his vision of what might kindle such a revival. At least part of that vision was refreshingly new.
The key is "broadband." Broadband is the next generation of Internet service, and it could fuel the next great wave of Internet innovation. Broadband access is fast, and always on. It could deliver music or video content as well as applications that have not yet been imagined. It could offer innovators and creators a whole new platform on which to build.
Surprisingly, however, consumers in the United States have been slow to adopt broadband. South Koreans are four times more likely to have broadband Internet access than Americans, Canadians twice as likely. After five years of push, the market has failed to pull Americans along.
Why? That's a hard question to answer fully. Both the Korean and Canadian governments have played a significant role in pushing broadband access; our government has been much more laissez-faire. If that is the reason for the difference in deployment, then the future here promises to be much like the past. Powell signaled in his speech that laissez faire was his policy too.
But the chairman did identify a kind of regulation that may well explain the slow adoption of broadband technologies by consumers in the United States: copyright. Consumers are slow to adopt broadband because, while there may be an infinite number of channels, there is still nothing on. "Broadband-intensive content," the chairman said, "is in the hands of major copyright holders." These copyright holders have been hesitant to free their content to the net. Their slowness, in turn, has slowed broadband technologies in general.
In part, the reason for this slowness has to do with fear of piracy. Under existing technologies, digital content is easily copied; given technologies such as Napster, it is also easily shared. So copyright holders rightly fear that until they can protect themselves against piracy, their profits will slip through the net.
But piracy is not the most important reason copyright holders have been slow to embrace the net. A bigger reason is the threat the Internet presents to their relatively comfortable ways of doing business. "Major copyright holders" have enjoyed the benefits of a relatively concentrated industry. The Internet threatens this comfortable existence. The low cost of digital production and distribution could mean much greater competition in the production of content.
Online music is the best example of this potential. Five years ago the market saw online music as the next great Internet application. A dozen companies competed to find new and innovative ways to deliver and produce music using the technologies of the Internet. Napster was the most famous of these companies, but it was not the only or even the most important example. A company called MP3.COM, for example, had not only developed new ways to deliver content but had also enabled new artists to develop and distribute their content outside the control of the existing labels.
These experiments in innovation are now over. They have been stopped by lawyers working for the recording industry. Every form of innovation that they disapproved of they sued. And every suit they brought, they won. Innovation outside the control of the "majors" has stopped.
Whether or not these courts were right as a matter of substantive copyright law, what is important is the consequence of this regulation: innovation and growth in broadband have been stifled as courts have given control over the future to the creators of the past. The only architecture for distribution that these creators will allow is one that preserves their power within a highly concentrated market.
The answer to this problem is the same one that Congress has given to similar changes in the past. When a new technology radically changes the opportunity for creation and distribution of content, Congress has legislated to ensure that old technologies don't veto the new.
For example, when the player piano made it possible for "recordings" of music to be made without payment to sheet music publishers, Congress changed the law to require that subsequent recordings compensate the original artist. Likewise, when cable TV started "stealing" over-the-air broadcasts, Congress passed a law to require that cable companies pay for the content they used.
But in both cases, the law Congress passed was importantly balanced. Copyright owners had a right to compensation, but innovators also had a right to get access to content. In both cases, Congress established what lawyers call a "compulsory license," to ensure that the right to compensation did not become the power to control innovation.
The same sort of change could unleash extraordinary innovation in the context of broadband service now, as Chairman Powell expressly suggested. "Stimulating content creation might involve a re-examination of the copyright laws," Powell argued. For as we've learned from the past, innovation is often the enemy of the old, and the old will do what they can to ensure that innovation doesn't innovate away their power.
This administration has been keen to warn of the harm that overregulation imposes on innovation and growth. It is a refreshing and promising development to see the chairman of the FCC include the regulation of copyright within that concern. Copyright laws should of course give artists and creators an adequate return for their creativity; but they should not become a tool for dinosaurs to protect themselves against evolution. Broadband will come when content can roam more freely. Congress should act now to ensure that it can.
The writer is a law professor at Stanford and author of "The Future of Ideas."
People may still think "The Godfather" is great (and I quite agree), but it is not automatically better than, say, "Memento" simply because it was released years before.
To say that would be ignorant.
I'll base my opinions on what I view as the merits of these works of art, and will look to the IMDB's all-time list as a gauge of how the general public, no, the IMDB voters, feel.
It really means very little.
I trust the parent poster feels more or less the same way, and I'm not trying to flame, just to reflect a bit.
Re:Memento was a much better film then LOTR.
on
LotR Cleans Up at AFI
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It really depends how you think of it: Memento was incredibly well-written and very, very, very thoughtfully put-together. Lord of the Rings was your typical huge, beautiful, grandoise masterpiece kind of thing. Personally, I feel Memento deserves a nod as the best picture of the year, yeah, but I think Joe Movie Nerd responds a bit better to the kind of epic visual adventure that LoTR brings.
That is simply my opinion, though, for your reflection.
One of the big challenges was finding a way of fitting a display into an astronaut's helmet.
"Using new technology, which is referred to as the microdisplay, we were able to fit a small active matrix liquid crystal display around an area where eye glasses would normally be worn," said Mr Schwartz.
This gives me hope that someday I'll be able to walk to the fridge and grab a coke without having to stop reading/.
You can't tell me this isn't a good idea. I wish I'd thought of patenting this. (Sure, I'd have to implement it...)
Oh, and if I had, it would be unavailable to the public.:) No DRM for anyone!!!
This raises some frightening questions
on
Battlefield Lasers
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What's to stop them from using these things on people? They have amazingly accurate targeting systems and they're cheap to fire (article says 25 cents (maybe dollars, I forget...) per shot.
So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare?
Would that be cruel and unusual?
Here's a question: is there a "right of the people" to keep and bear these? The idea doesn't sound assuring, I must say: what kind of signature would it leave. Bullets can be tracked, but this -- would there even be a body left?
I'm not trying to complain or predict horrors, because I'm all about the advance of tech. I just want to know a little more about this kind of thing.
Also: it's eerie that the article only mentions uses of these for defense, and not for attack, covert (which I think is a promising potential use for this technology) or otherwise. Just considering it's a time of "war" and all.
I'm currently living in fear of again becoming "addicted" to Counter-strike, because it's caused many of my grades to plummet in past semesters.
It still appears fun. Hell, it's still a whole hell of a goddamn lot of fun.
But once you start fragging, it's hard to stop.
Also, the same could be said for these message boards. I spend AT LEAST an hour looking at Slashdot every day. I missed a class today because I followed a chain of several links to interesting pages.
It's still not an addiction. It's a distraction.
It's a series of bad decisions to continue playing, just as in an addiction. But gaming doesn't present a physical addiction (until your posture starts to get bad enough that it hurts to stand up:))
And there's only mental anguish when I stop playing as there is when I stop doing anything that's fun. (This, however, requires so little effort that I can continue playing pretty much indefinitely, so it's easy to do a lot.)
I saw the Potter movie last night as well -- it had a great psuedo-trailer for Monsters, Inc., in which Mike and Sully (John Goodman and Billy Crystal) are playing charades. It's rather cute, and at the end, the screen displays:
Hell, I'll buy Transmeta. Sure, I'll have to go without food for...say...twenty minutes or so, but...
=^)
Take the book for what it is
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This book sounds to me like a whole bunch of amusing psedoscience. Sure, perhaps it's meant to be taken seriously, or to make you question science, or something like that, and if that's true, well, then, to hell with it (I'm a proud scientist, thank you very much!). But it looks amusing. I'm interested. It sounds funny.
And to all the people lamenting Scott Adams' apparent lack of originality or creativity, this is sure gosh-darned creative.
I plan to give it a read, just because it sounds like a nice distraction.
1) The short, "For The Birds" ( i think ). I thought it was absolutely adorable, and practically everyone in the theater was giggling at it. ( I think you can watch it at Pixar's website
2) The trailers: I didn't get to see LOTR, but Episode II, while simply a bunch of wide shots strung together, is enough to get me salivating, and Harry Potter looks so amazingly like I imagined while reading the books, that it'll probably be my biggest letdown of the year ( this won't, of course, prevent me from seeing it: I have to find out... )
3) The movie itself. Particularly, I enjoyed the very, very cute little kid, Boo, and the Abominable snowman, voiced by John Ratzenberger (complaining about being labeled abominable -- "I'm a nice guy...!")
My complaint is that the villain wasn't amusing at all, but that's hardly a requirement. I just kind of expected it from Steve Buscemi.
Slashdot is so predictable. The second I, and many other people who enjoy knowledge over ignorance, read the Infoworld benchmarks... I knew that Slashdot would post these, and ONLY these, and ignore the many other benchmarks that show WinXP performs as good if not better than 2k.
Would it really be news? "Windows XP works as it should..."
Slashdot Mirror
Who's Holding Back Broadband?
By Lawrence Lessig
Tuesday, January 8, 2002; Page A17
As the American economy struggles to get out of recession, an important part of the recovery will be the revival of the country's technology sector.
Not long ago, in a speech at a summit on Internet development, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell gave the nation a glimpse of his vision of what might kindle such a revival. At least part of that vision was refreshingly new.The key is "broadband." Broadband is the next generation of Internet service, and it could fuel the next great wave of Internet innovation. Broadband access is fast, and always on. It could deliver music or video content as well as applications that have not yet been imagined. It could offer innovators and creators a whole new platform on which to build.
Surprisingly, however, consumers in the United States have been slow to adopt broadband. South Koreans are four times more likely to have broadband Internet access than Americans, Canadians twice as likely. After five years of push, the market has failed to pull Americans along.
Why? That's a hard question to answer fully. Both the Korean and Canadian governments have played a significant role in pushing broadband access; our government has been much more laissez-faire. If that is the reason for the difference in deployment, then the future here promises to be much like the past. Powell signaled in his speech that laissez faire was his policy too.
But the chairman did identify a kind of regulation that may well explain the slow adoption of broadband technologies by consumers in the United States: copyright. Consumers are slow to adopt broadband because, while there may be an infinite number of channels, there is still nothing on. "Broadband-intensive content," the chairman said, "is in the hands of major copyright holders." These copyright holders have been hesitant to free their content to the net. Their slowness, in turn, has slowed broadband technologies in general.
In part, the reason for this slowness has to do with fear of piracy. Under existing technologies, digital content is easily copied; given technologies such as Napster, it is also easily shared. So copyright holders rightly fear that until they can protect themselves against piracy, their profits will slip through the net.
But piracy is not the most important reason copyright holders have been slow to embrace the net. A bigger reason is the threat the Internet presents to their relatively comfortable ways of doing business. "Major copyright holders" have enjoyed the benefits of a relatively concentrated industry. The Internet threatens this comfortable existence. The low cost of digital production and distribution could mean much greater competition in the production of content.
Online music is the best example of this potential. Five years ago the market saw online music as the next great Internet application. A dozen companies competed to find new and innovative ways to deliver and produce music using the technologies of the Internet. Napster was the most famous of these companies, but it was not the only or even the most important example. A company called MP3.COM, for example, had not only developed new ways to deliver content but had also enabled new artists to develop and distribute their content outside the control of the existing labels.
These experiments in innovation are now over. They have been stopped by lawyers working for the recording industry. Every form of innovation that they disapproved of they sued. And every suit they brought, they won. Innovation outside the control of the "majors" has stopped.
Whether or not these courts were right as a matter of substantive copyright law, what is important is the consequence of this regulation: innovation and growth in broadband have been stifled as courts have given control over the future to the creators of the past. The only architecture for distribution that these creators will allow is one that preserves their power within a highly concentrated market.
The answer to this problem is the same one that Congress has given to similar changes in the past. When a new technology radically changes the opportunity for creation and distribution of content, Congress has legislated to ensure that old technologies don't veto the new.
For example, when the player piano made it possible for "recordings" of music to be made without payment to sheet music publishers, Congress changed the law to require that subsequent recordings compensate the original artist. Likewise, when cable TV started "stealing" over-the-air broadcasts, Congress passed a law to require that cable companies pay for the content they used.
But in both cases, the law Congress passed was importantly balanced. Copyright owners had a right to compensation, but innovators also had a right to get access to content. In both cases, Congress established what lawyers call a "compulsory license," to ensure that the right to compensation did not become the power to control innovation.
The same sort of change could unleash extraordinary innovation in the context of broadband service now, as Chairman Powell expressly suggested. "Stimulating content creation might involve a re-examination of the copyright laws," Powell argued. For as we've learned from the past, innovation is often the enemy of the old, and the old will do what they can to ensure that innovation doesn't innovate away their power.
This administration has been keen to warn of the harm that overregulation imposes on innovation and growth. It is a refreshing and promising development to see the chairman of the FCC include the regulation of copyright within that concern. Copyright laws should of course give artists and creators an adequate return for their creativity; but they should not become a tool for dinosaurs to protect themselves against evolution. Broadband will come when content can roam more freely. Congress should act now to ensure that it can.
The writer is a law professor at Stanford and author of "The Future of Ideas."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
http://www.aikidofaq.com/
Interesting.
People may still think "The Godfather" is great (and I quite agree), but it is not automatically better than, say, "Memento" simply because it was released years before.
To say that would be ignorant.
I'll base my opinions on what I view as the merits of these works of art, and will look to the IMDB's all-time list as a gauge of how the general public, no, the IMDB voters, feel.
It really means very little.
I trust the parent poster feels more or less the same way, and I'm not trying to flame, just to reflect a bit.
It really depends how you think of it: Memento was incredibly well-written and very, very, very thoughtfully put-together. Lord of the Rings was your typical huge, beautiful, grandoise masterpiece kind of thing. Personally, I feel Memento deserves a nod as the best picture of the year, yeah, but I think Joe Movie Nerd responds a bit better to the kind of epic visual adventure that LoTR brings.
That is simply my opinion, though, for your reflection.
On 9/11, right after the attacks, cnn.com was virtually unreachable. Some people probably didn't understand why.
"The law targets illegal uses of technologies, not the technologies - at least where there is a legitimate and legal use of that technology."
Does anybody in any position of authority know this?!?!?
(posterity / analysis)
It could record vitals and environmental info for posterity, no?
One of the big challenges was finding a way of fitting a display into an astronaut's helmet.
/.
"Using new technology, which is referred to as the microdisplay, we were able to fit a small active matrix liquid crystal display around an area where eye glasses would normally be worn," said Mr Schwartz.
This gives me hope that someday I'll be able to walk to the fridge and grab a coke without having to stop reading
Very fancy.
And these are the people who are supposed to be our future computer experts and are more knowledgable than the common joes. God help us all.
No, these are the people who will end up resetting passwords for a living. I hope don't end up as one of them...
Flame at will, gents. =)
I'm sure the idea for this patent came to them when Bill entered a google search for "antitrust exemptions." :)
hehe
You can't tell me this isn't a good idea. I wish I'd thought of patenting this. (Sure, I'd have to implement it...)
:) No DRM for anyone!!!
Oh, and if I had, it would be unavailable to the public.
What's to stop them from using these things on people? They have amazingly accurate targeting systems and they're cheap to fire (article says 25 cents (maybe dollars, I forget...) per shot.
So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare?
Would that be cruel and unusual?
Here's a question: is there a "right of the people" to keep and bear these? The idea doesn't sound assuring, I must say: what kind of signature would it leave. Bullets can be tracked, but this -- would there even be a body left?
I'm not trying to complain or predict horrors, because I'm all about the advance of tech. I just want to know a little more about this kind of thing.
Also: it's eerie that the article only mentions uses of these for defense, and not for attack, covert (which I think is a promising potential use for this technology) or otherwise. Just considering it's a time of "war" and all.
Respectfully;
:))
I'm currently living in fear of again becoming "addicted" to Counter-strike, because it's caused many of my grades to plummet in past semesters.
It still appears fun. Hell, it's still a whole hell of a goddamn lot of fun.
But once you start fragging, it's hard to stop.
Also, the same could be said for these message boards. I spend AT LEAST an hour looking at Slashdot every day. I missed a class today because I followed a chain of several links to interesting pages.
It's still not an addiction. It's a distraction.
It's a series of bad decisions to continue playing, just as in an addiction. But gaming doesn't present a physical addiction (until your posture starts to get bad enough that it hurts to stand up
And there's only mental anguish when I stop playing as there is when I stop doing anything that's fun. (This, however, requires so little effort that I can continue playing pretty much indefinitely, so it's easy to do a lot.)
Er, so I don't think it's an addiction...
I saw the Potter movie last night as well -- it had a great psuedo-trailer for Monsters, Inc., in which Mike and Sully (John Goodman and Billy Crystal) are playing charades. It's rather cute, and at the end, the screen displays:
"Monsters Inc."
"Now playing in a theater near you."
"REALLY near you."
"Maybe, like, right next door."
How much are you getting paid for this?
nuff said.
Hell, I'll buy Transmeta. Sure, I'll have to go without food for...say...twenty minutes or so, but... =^)
This book sounds to me like a whole bunch of amusing psedoscience. Sure, perhaps it's meant to be taken seriously, or to make you question science, or something like that, and if that's true, well, then, to hell with it (I'm a proud scientist, thank you very much!). But it looks amusing. I'm interested. It sounds funny.
And to all the people lamenting Scott Adams' apparent lack of originality or creativity, this is sure gosh-darned creative.
I plan to give it a read, just because it sounds like a nice distraction.
Peace.
I've as yet been unable to capture an image of the back of my webcam, and this is broundbreaking on that front... :)
But they haven't announced that they're planning to strip search people ... yet.
Cross your fingers!
1) The short, "For The Birds" ( i think ). I thought it was absolutely adorable, and practically everyone in the theater was giggling at it. ( I think you can watch it at Pixar's website
2) The trailers: I didn't get to see LOTR, but Episode II, while simply a bunch of wide shots strung together, is enough to get me salivating, and Harry Potter looks so amazingly like I imagined while reading the books, that it'll probably be my biggest letdown of the year ( this won't, of course, prevent me from seeing it: I have to find out... )
3) The movie itself. Particularly, I enjoyed the very, very cute little kid, Boo, and the Abominable snowman, voiced by John Ratzenberger (complaining about being labeled abominable -- "I'm a nice guy...!")
My complaint is that the villain wasn't amusing at all, but that's hardly a requirement. I just kind of expected it from Steve Buscemi.
Definitely worth my eight bucks.
Slashdot is so predictable. The second I, and many other people who enjoy knowledge over ignorance, read the Infoworld benchmarks... I knew that Slashdot would post these, and ONLY these, and ignore the many other benchmarks that show WinXP performs as good if not better than 2k.
Would it really be news? "Windows XP works as it should..."
I've been using 2k for over a year, and it has *NEVER* crashed. Hence, I'm rather pleased with it.
This is why I still have my typewriter: you don't even have to tell it to print, it's so damn fast.