Archives for November 2005
New study: 81% of TV watchers worry about the kinds of programs their children could be exposed to, and 91% of parents said more parental involvement is the best way to keep kids from seeing what they shouldn’t see.
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WSJ: FCC will soon reissue its review of cable industry “á la carte” pricing with a wholly different conclusion.
“While the original report concluded that consumers would pay more for individual channels, the new one concludes they could pay less.”Vaidhyanathan on Google Print
NYU prof Siva Vaidhyanathan has been one of my favorite commentators on the Google Print debate because of his pragmatism. Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education he has his first non-blog analysis of the case.His main concern is that Google has bet not just the company, but the whole internet on this case. If it loses, it could take Kelly v. Arriba Soft with it, and that would affect the very legality of search engines as well as all sorts of future innovation. But this is a fight we were going to have sooner or later, so why not now? After all, as he points out, this case is a clash between web norms (free copying with opt-out) and real world law (copying by permission only). It has to be settled eventually.
Vaidhyanathan understands that this case is nothing near a slam dunk for Google as so many seem to portray it. He points out that Kelly may be Gospel in the Ninth Circuit, but this case has been filed in the Southern District of New York, home of Univesal v. MP3.com and NYT v. Tasini. Pragmatically, he notes that the former court is next to Silicon Valley, while the latter’s neighbors are the big publishing houses. Kelly was rightly decided, but, if so inclined, another court won’t find it difficult to distinguish this case from it.
As a library scholar, Vaidhyanathan’s other concern is that creating a universal searchable book index should be the business of libraries, not multi-billion dollar corporations, and he feels that librarians are abdicating their responsibility. Libraries are institutions meant to last ages while companies come and go, he says, so the former are the ones who should be entrusted with our collective knowledge and cultural heritage. But as a pragmatist, he recognizes: “This hardly seems like the right time or country to call for a massive public commitment of resources to benefit the public good, however.”
This is an understandable concern. What bothers me is that he seems critical of privatization and outsourcing generally. Precisely because “a massive public commitment of resources” isn’t going to materialize anytime soon should we embrace private solutions. As he smartly notes here, and has noted elsewhere before, the participating libraries get to keep a copy of the scanned books. That should help allay his fears about the permanence of the index. (I also think this ’second copy’ will cut against Google in the final fair use analysis.)
It’s also not as if Google won’t face competition. Yahoo! and Microsoft have announced their participation in the Open Content Alliance, a sort of open source scanning project that only plans to copy public domain books. My guess is that Yahoo! is playing wait-and-see and letting Google fight this fight. If Google wins, I suspect it wouldn’t be too long before it adds copyrighted books to its index. Not only will competition help address the permanency issue, it will also address another of Vaidhyanathan’s concerns: privacy. After all, given a choice, you won’t want to patronize a service that unquestioningly hands over your “library” records over the FBI.
Cross-posted at TLF. You can leave and read comments there. →
Siva Vaidhyanathan in Chronicle of Higher Ed on Google Print
I’ve been waiting for this article from one of the more pragmatic commentators on Google Print. He’s skeptical of the privatization of the library, and he notes that a wrong decision in this case could destroy the net.I’m not surprised
Executed man may have been innocent: Witness, co-defendant tell newspaper man wasn’t guilty.Users have sued Match.com alleging company employees responded to customers’ ads with bogus romantic e-mails and even went on sham dates with subscribers as a marketing ploy.
In a separate suit, Yahoo Inc.’s personals service is accused of posting profiles of fictitious potential dating partners on its Web site to make it look as though many more singles subscribe to the service than actually do.Lessig: “If fair use is lost just because you can imagine a market, then there is no fair, or free use, in a digital age.”
Last time I checked, “potential market” is still in §107, so it is part of the analysis, whether you like it or not. Take comfort that it’s only one factor. Link.FIRE is challenging unconstitutional policies at George Mason University
Earlier this fall, such policies led to the arrest of a GMU student who was protesting military recruiters on its Northern Virginia campus.Sopranos vs. Desperate Housewives for Sunday Night
Somebody explain to this NYT reporter that cable’s customers are viewers, while broadcast customers are advertisers. Ratings matter to the latter, and the former can concentrate on making good TV.Paul Krugman Fades Away
More evidence that putting up a pay-wall will cost a publication its relevanceThe debate over Google Print tomorrow (featuring Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson, the AAP’s lobbyist, and others) will be webcast
This saves me a trip to NY.Ay, Cuba
The following is from Ay, Cuba!, which is turning out to be much better than I expected:In the materially poor universe I grew up in [Romania], Wal-Mart would have been our utopia’s fulfillment. What Karl Marx described as “communism” was Wal-Mart. What I wanted to do was tow the whole store to Cuba. Then I would set up shop at some intersection in Havana and distribute everything. I bet the throng would be bigger than the one for Fidel’s biggest (and longest) speech. The irony, of course, was that the starved Cubans would find Wal-Mart heaven, while bored Americans are constantly in search of spiritual nourishment. The problem with communism is that it started at the wrong end: instead of promising people material fulfillment at the end of the journey, it should have stuffed them at the beginning.
Flickr: Photos tagged with miami
Type in the name of any other city into Flickr and you’ll get beautiful scenery and nice architecture. Type in Miami, and what you get is T&A as far as the eye can see.The Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography
List of selected works about Google Print that are freely available on the Internet. It has a special focus on the legal issues associated with this project.Tim Lee and I debate Google Print at TLF
Me: “GP will–hopefully and rightly–push out the bounds of fair use to take into account new technology (i.e. the network), but fighting this fight within the existing parameters might be a losing proposition.”NYT: The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries
According to the Pew survey, 57 percent of all teenagers active online create digital content, from building Web pages to sharing original artwork, photos and stories to remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. Some 20 percent publish their own blogs.Tom Hazlett presentation
Today Tom Hazlett presented his new paper, “Barbed Wireless” and the Vertical Structure of Property Rights, to the Levy Fellows at GMU Law. Here are some notes I took.
- Proponents of the commons idea conflate flexible use spectrum licenses (that are analogous with property rights) with specific use licenses.
- Proponents of a commons point to the success of Wi-Fi and claim that this is the success of and unlicensed (unowned) paradigm. But if you think about it, every Wi-Fi device is connected to cable, DSL, or some other private network. So in effect it is the success of a private property rights regime that created the valuable giant networks. Wi-Fi extends that value at the margin.
- You won’t get high value wireless applications such as mobile telephony ($100 billion a year industry) in unlicensed bands. He asks, “Why haven’t we seen someone deploy a mobile phone network in the unlicensed band?”
- Commons access to spectrum (like a park) may well be underprovisioned and you might well want the government to come in and fix this market failure. But, you want to them to do it within the context of property rights so that they can make an informed cost-benefit decision. They can create a commons through purchase, takings or whatever, but they then do it with information.
- The most intense sharing of spectrum does not take place int he unlicensed bands, but in exclusive use spectrum for mobile phones.
Judge Alito and Copyright
Patry: “Copyright lawyers should cheer the appointment of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.”-
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This is the personal site of Jerry Brito, a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. He’s an academic researcher and the creator of Unclutterer and several other blogs. More »
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