net.wars

The Xerox machine in the second season of Mad Men has its own Twitter account, as do many of the show's human characters. Other TV characters have MySpace pages and Facebook groups, and of course they're all, legally or illegally, on YouTube.

Here at the American Film Institute's Digifest in Hollywood - really Hollywood, with the stars on the sidewalks and movie theatres everywhere - the talk is all of "cross-platform". This event allows the AFI's Digital Content Lab to show off some of the projects it's fostered over the last year, and the audience is full of filmmakers, writers, executives, and owners of technology companies, all trying to figure out digital television.

One of the more timely projects is a remix of the venerable PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer. A sort of combination of Snopes, Wikipedia, and any of a number of online comment sites, the goal of The Fact Project is to enable collaboration between the show's journalists and the public. Anyone can post a claim or a bit of rhetoric and bring in supporting or refuting evidence; the show's journalistic staff weigh in at the end with a Truthometer rating and the discussion is closed. Part of the point, said the project's head, Lee Banville, is to expose to the public the many small but nasty claims that are made in obscure but strategic places - flyers left on cars in supermarket parking lots, or radio spots that air maybe twice on a tiny local station.

The DCL's counterpart in Australia showed off some other examples. Areo, for example, takes TV sets and footage and turns them into game settings. More interesting is the First Australians project, which in the six-year process of filming a TV documentary series created more than 200 edited mini-documentaries telling each interviewee's story. Or the TV movie Scorched, which even before release created a prequel and sequel by giving a fictional character her own Web site and YouTube channel. The premise of the film itself was simple but arresting. It was based on one fact, that at one point Sydney had no more than 50 weeks of water left, and one what-if - what if there were bush fires? The project eventually included a number of other sites, including a fake government department.

"We go to islands that are already populated," said the director, "and pull them into our world."

HBO's Digital Lab group, on the other hand, has a simpler goal: to find an audience in the digital world it can experiment on. Last month, it launched a Web-only series called Hooking Up. Made for almost no money (and it looks it), the show is a comedy series about the relationship attempts of college kids. To help draw larger audiences, the show cast existing Web and YouTube celebrities such as LonelyGirl15, KevJumba, and sxePhil. The show has pulled in 46,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Finally, a group from ABC is experimenting with ways to draw people to the network's site via what it calls "viewing parties" so people can chat with each other while watching, "live" (so to speak), hit shows like Grey's Anatomy. The interface the ABC party group showed off was interesting. They wanted, they said, to come up with something "as slick as the iPhone and as easy to use as AIM". They eventually came up with a three-dimensional spatial concept in which messages appear in bubbles that age by shrinking in size. Net old-timers might ask churlishly what's so inadequate about the interface of IRC or other types of chat rooms where messages appear as scrolling text, but from ABC's point of view the show is the centrepiece.

At least it will give people watching shows online something to do during the ads. If you're coming from a US connection, the ABC site lets you watch full episodes of many current shows; the site incorporates limited advertising. Perhaps in recognition that people will simply vanish into another browser window, the ads end with a button to click to continue watching the show and the video remains on pause until you click it.

The point of all these initiatives is simple and the same: to return TV to something people must watch in real-time as it's broadcast. Or, if you like, to figure out how to lure today's 20- and 30-somethings into watching television; Newshour's TV audience is predominantly 50- and 60-somethings.

ABC's viewing party idea is an attempt - as the team openly said - to recreate what the network calls "appointment TV". I've argued here before that as people have more and more choices about when and where to watch their favourite scripted show, sports and breaking news will increasingly rule television because they are the only two things that people overwhelmingly want to see in real time. If you're supported by advertising, that matters, but success will depend on people's willingness to stick with their efforts once the novelty is gone. The question to answer isn't so much whether you can compete with free (cue picture of a bottle of water) but whether you can compete with freedom (cue picture of evil file-sharer watching with his friends whenever he wants).

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's one of the curiosities of being a free speech advocate that you find yourself defending people for saying things you'd never say yourself.

I noticed this last week when a friend, after delivering an impassioned defense of the rights of bloggers to blog about the world around them - say, recounting the Nazi costumes people were wearing to the across-the-street neighbor's party last weekened or detailing the purchases your friend made in the drugstore - and then turned around and said she didn't know why she was defending it because she wouldn't actually put things like that in her blog. (Unless, I suppose, her neighbor was John McCain.)

Probably most bloggers have struggled at one point or another with the collision these tell-the-world-your-private-thoughts technologies create between freedom of speech and privacy. Usually, though, invading your own privacy is reasonably safe, even if that invasion takes the form of revealing your innermost fantasies. Yes, there's a lot of personal information in them thar hills, and the enterprising data miner could certainly find out a lot about me by going through my 17-year online history via Google searches and intelligent matching. But that's nothing to the situation Newcastle civil servant Darryn Walker finds himself in after allegedly posting a 12-page kidnap, torture, and murder fantasy about the pop group Girls Aloud.

As unwise postings go, this one sounds like a real winner. It was (reports say) on a porn site; it named a real pop group (making it likely to pop up in searches by the group's fans); and identified as the author was a real, findable person - a civil servant, no less. A member of the public reported the story to the Internet Watch Foundation, who reported it to the police, who arrested Walker under the Obscene Publications Act.

The IWF's mission in life is to get illegal content off the Net. To this end, it operates a public hotline to which anyone can report any material they think might be illegal. The IWF's staff sift through the reports - 31,776 in 2006, the last year their Web site shows statistics for - and determines whether the material is "potentially illegal". If it is, the IWF reports it to the police and also recommends to the many ISPs who subscribe to its service that the material be removed from their servers. The IWF so far has focused on clearly illegal material, largely pornographic images, both photographic and composited, of children. Since 2003, less than 1 percent of illegal images involving children is hosted in the UK.
As a cloistered folksinger I had never heard of the very successful group Girls Aloud; apparently they were created like synthetic gemstones in 2002 by the TV show Popstars: the Rivals. According to their Wikipedia entries, they're aged 22 to 26 - hardly children, no matter how unpleasant it is to be the heroines of such a violent fantasy.

So the case poses the question: is posting such a story illegal? That is, in the words of the Obscene Publications Act, is it likely to "deprave and corrupt"? And does it matter that the site to which it was posted is not based in the UK?

It is now several decades since any text work was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, and much longer since any such prosecution succeeded. The last such court case, the 1976 prosecution against the publishers of Inside Linda Lovelace apparently left the Metropolitan Police believing they couldn't win . In 1977, a committee recommended excluding novels from the Act. Novels, not blog postings.

Succeeding in this case would therefore potentially extend the IWF's - and the Obscene Publications Unit's - remit by creating a new and extremely large class of illegal material. The IWF prefers to use the term "child abuse images" rather than "child pornography"; in the case of actual photographs of real incidents this is clearly correct. The argument for outlawing composited or wholly created images as well as photographs of actual children is that pedophiles can use them to "groom" their targets - that is, to encourage their participation in child abuse by convincing them that these are activities that other children have engaged in and showing them how. Outlawing text descriptions of real events could block child abuse victims from publishing their own personal stories; outlawing fiction, however disgusting seems a wholly ineffectual way of preventing child abuse. Bad things happen to good fictional characters all the time.

So, as a human being I have to say that I not only wouldn't write this piece, I don't even want to have to read it. But as a free speech advocate I also have to say that the money spent tracking down and prosecuting its writer would have been more effectively spent on...well, almost anything. The one thing the situation has done is widely publicize a story that otherwise hardly anyone knew existed. Suppressing material just isn't as easy as it used to be when all you had to do was tell the publisher to get it off the shelves.

Of course, for Walker none of this matters. The most likely outcome for him in today's environment is a ruined life.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the things about living in a foreign country is this: every so often the actual England I live in collides unexpectedly with the fictional England I grew up with. Fictional England had small, friendly villages with murders in them. It had lowering, thick fogs and grim, fantastical crimes solvable by observation and thought. It had mathematical puzzles before breakfast in a chess game. The England I live in has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's vehement support for spiritualism, traffic jams, overcrowding, and four million people who read The Sun.

This week, at the GikIII Workshop, in a break between Internet futures, I wandered out onto a quadrangle of grass so brilliantly and perfectly green that it could have been an animated background in a virtual world. Overlooking it were beautiful, stolid, very old buildings. It had a sign: Balliol College. I was standing on the quad where, "One never failed to find Wimsey of Balliol planted in the center of the quad and laying down the law with exquisite insolence to somebody." I know now that many real people came out of Balliol (three kings, three British prime ministers, Aldous Huxley, Robertson Davies, Richard Dawkins, and Graham Greene) and that those old buildings date to 1263. Impressive. But much more startling to be standing in a place I first read about at 12 in a Dorothy Sayers novel. It's as if I spent my teenaged years fighting alongside Angel avatars and then met David Boreanaz.

Organised jointly by Ian Brown at the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Edinburgh's Script-ed folks, GikIII (prounounced "geeky") is a small, quirky gathering that studies serious issues by approaching them with a screw loose. For example: could we control intelligent agents with the legal structure the Ancient Romans used for slaves (Andrew Katz)? How sentient is a robot sex toy? Should it be legal to marry one? And if my sexbot rapes someone, are we talking lawsuit, deactivation, or prison sentence (Fernando Barrio)? Are RoadRunner cartoons all patent applications for devices thought up by Wile E. Coyote (Caroline Wilson)? Why is The Hound of the Baskervilles a metaphor for cloud computing (Miranda Mowbray)?

It's one of the characteristics of modern life that although questions like these sound as practically irrelevant as "how many angels, infinitely large, can fit on the head of a pin, infinitely small?", which may (or may not) have been debated here seven and a half centuries ago, they matter. Understanding the issues they raise matters in trying to prepare for the net.wars of the future.

In fact, Sherlock Holmes's pursuit of the beast is metaphorical; Mowbray was pointing out the miasma of legal issues for cloud computing. So far, two very different legal directions seem likely as models: the increasingly restrictive EULAs common to the software industry, and the service-level agreements common to network outsourcing. What happens if the cloud computing company you buy from doesn't pay its subcontractors and your data gets locked up in a legal battle between them? The terms and conditions in effect for Salesforce.com warn that the service has 30 days to hand back your data if you terminate, a long time in business. Mowbray suggests that the most likely outcome is EULAs for the masses and SLAs at greater expense for those willing to pay for them.

On social networks, of course, there are only EULAs, and the question is whether interoperability is a good thing or not. If the data people put on social networks ("shouldn't there be a separate disability category for stupid people?" someone asked) can be easily transferred from service to service, won't that make malicious gossip even more global and permanent? A lot of the issues Judith Rauhofer raised in discussing the impact of global gossip are not new to Facebook: we have a generation of 35-year-olds coping with the globally searchable history of their youthful indiscretions on Usenet. (And WELL users saw the newly appointed CEO of a large tech company delete every posting he made in his younger, more drug-addled 1980s.) The most likely solution to that particular problem is time. People arrested as protesters and marijuana smokers in the 1960s can be bank presidents now; in a few years the work force will be full of people with Facebook/MySpace/Bebo misdeeds and no one will care except as something laugh at drunkenly late out in the pub.

But what Lilian Edwards wants to know is this: if we have or can gradually create the technology to make "every ad a wanted ad" - well, why not? Should we stop it? Online marketing is at £2.5 billion a year according to Ofcom, and a quarter of the UK's children spend 22 hours a week playing computer games, where there is no regulation of industry ads and where Web 2.0 is funded entirely by advertising. When TV and the Internet roll together, when in-game is in-TV and your social network merges with megamedia, and MTV is fully immersive, every detail can be personalized product placement. If I grew up five years from now, my fictional Balliol might feature Angel driving across the quad in a Nissan Prairie past a billboard advertising airline tickets.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It took a confluence of several different factors for a six-year-old news story to knock 75 percent off the price of United Airlines shares in under an hour earlier this week. The story said that United Airlines was filing for bankruptcy, and of course was true - in 2002. Several media owners are still squabbling about whose fault it was. Trading was halted after that first hour by the systems put in place after the 1987 crash, but even so the company's shares closed 10 percent down on the day. Long-term it shouldn't matter in this case, but given a little more organization and professionalism that sort of drop provides plenty of opportunities for securities fraud.

The factor the companies involved can't sue: human psychology. Any time you encounter a story online you make a quick assessment of its credibility by considering: 1) the source; 2) its likelihood; 3) how many other outlets are saying the same thing. The paranormal investigator and magician James Randi likes to sum this up by saying that if you claimed you had a horse in your back yard he might want a neighbor's confirmation for proof, but if you said you had a unicorn in your back yard he'd also want video footage, samples of the horn, close-up photographs, and so on. The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the necessary proof. The converse is also true: the less extraordinary the claim and the better the source, the more likely we are to take the story on faith and not bother to check.

Like a lot of other people, I saw the United story on Google News on Monday. There's nothing particularly shocking these days about an airline filing for bankruptcy protection, so the reaction was limited to "What? Again? I thought they were doing better now" and a glance underneath the headline to check the source. Bloomberg. Must be true. Back to reading about the final in prospect between Andy Murray and Roger Federer at the US Open.

That was a perfectly fine approach in the days when all content was screened by humans and media were slow to publish. Even then there were mistakes, like the famous 1993 incident when a shift worker at Sky News saw an internal rehearsal for the Queen Mother's death on a monitor and mentioned it on the phone to his mother in Australia, who in turn passed it on to the media, which took it up and ran with it.

But now in the time that thought process takes daytraders have clicked in and out of positions and automated media systems have begun republishing the story. It was the interaction of several independently owned automated systems made what ought to have been a small mistake into one that hit a real company's real financial standing - with that effect, too, compounded by automated systems. Logically, we should expect to see many more such incidents, because all over the Web 2.0 we are building systems that talk to each other without human intervention or oversight.

A lot of the Net's display choices are based on automated popularity contests: on-the-fly generated lists of the current top ten most viewed stories, Amazon book rankings, Google's page rank algorithm that bumps to the top sites with the most inbound links for a given set of search terms. That's no different from other media: Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana were beloved of magazine covers for the most obvious sale-boosting reasons. What's different is that on the Net these measurements are made and acted upon instantaneously, and sometimes from very small samples, which is why in a very slow news hour on a small site a single click on a 2002 story seems to have bumped it up to the top, where Google spotted it and automatically inserted it into its feed.

The big issue, really - leaving aside the squabble between the Tribune and Google over whether Google should have been crawling its site at all - is the lack of reliable dates. It's always a wonder to me how many Web sites fail to anchor their information in time: the date a story is posted or a page is last updated should always be present. (I long, in fact, for a browser feature that would display at the top of a page the last date a page's main content was modified.)

Because there's another phenomenon that's insufficiently remarked upon: on the Internet, nothing ever fully dies. Every hour someone discovers an old piece of information for the first time and thinks it's new. Most of the time, it doesn't matter: Dave Barry's exploding whale is hilariously entertaining no matter how many times you've read it or seen the TV clip. But Web 2.0 will make new money for endless recycling part of our infrastructure rather than a rare occurrence.

In 1998 I wrote that crude hacker defacement of Web sites was nothing to worry about compared to the prospect of the subtle poisoning of the world's information supply that might become possible as hackers became more sophisticated. This danger is still with us, and the only remedy is to do what journalists used to be paid to do: check your facts. Twice. How do we automate that?

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was quiet, too quiet. For so long it's just been Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape, Internet Explorer, and sometimes Opera that it seemed like that was how it was always going to be. In fact, things were so quiet that it seemed vaguely surprising that Firefox had released a major update and even long-stagnant Internet Explorer has version 8 out in beta. So along comes Chrome to shake things up.

The last time there were as many as four browsers to choose among, road-testing a Web browser didn't require much technical knowledge. You loaded the thing up, pointed it at some pages, and if you liked the interface and nothing seemed hideously broken, that was it.

This time round, things are rather different. To really review Chrome you need to know your AJAX from your JavaScript. You need to be able to test for security holes, and then discover more security vulnerabilities. And the consequences when these things are wrong are so much greater now.

For various reasons, Chrome probably isn't for me, quite aside from its copy-and-paste EULA oops. Yes, it's blazingly fast and I appreciate that because it separates each tab or window into its own process it crashes more gracefully than its competitors. But the switching cost lies less in those characteristics than in the amount of mental retraining it takes to adapt your way of working to new quirks. And, admittedly based on very short acquaintance, Chrome isn't worth it now that I've reformatted Firefox 3's address bar into a semblance of the one in Firefox 2. Perhaps when Chrome is a little older and has replaced a few more of Firefox's most useful add-ons (or when I eventually discover that Chrome's design means it doesn't need them).

Chrome does not do for browsers what Google did for search engines. In 1998, Google's ultra-clean, quick-loading front page and search results quickly saw off competing, ultra-cluttered, wait-for-it portals like Altavista because it was such a vast improvement. (Ironically, Google now has all those features and more, but it's smart enough to keep them off the front page.)

Chrome does some cool things, of course, as anything coming out of Google always has. But its biggest innovation seems to be more completely merging local and global search, a direction in which Firefox 3 is also moving, although with fewer unfortunate consequences. And, as against that, despite the "incognito" mode (similar to IE8) there is the issue of what data goes back to Google for its coffers.

It would be nice to think that Chrome might herald a new round of browser innovation and that we might start seeing browsers that answer different needs than are currently catered for. For example: as a researcher I'd like a browser to pay better attention to archiving issues: a button to push to store pages with meaningful metadata as well as date and time, the URL the material was retrieved from, whether it's been updated since and if so how, and so on. There are a few offline browsers that sort of do this kind of thing, but patchily.

The other big question hovering over Chrome is standards: Chrome is possible because the World Wide Web Consortium has done its work well. Standards and the existence of several competing browsers with significant market share has prevented any one company from seizing control and turning the Web into the kind of proprietary system Tim Berners-Lee resisted from the beginning. Chrome will be judged on how well it renders third-party Web pages, but Google can certainly tailor its many free services to work best with Chrome - not so different a proposition from the way Microsoft has controlled the desktop.

Because: the big thing Chrome does is bring Google out of the shadows as a competitor to Microsoft. In 1995, Business Week ran a cover story predicting that Java (write once, run on anything) and the Web (a unified interface) could "rewrite the rules of the software industry". Most of the predictions in that article have not really come true - yet - in the 13 years since it was published; or if they have it's only in modest ways. Windows is still the dominant operating system, and Larry Ellison's thin clients never made a dent in the market. The other big half of the challenge to Microsoft, GNU/Linux and the open-source movement, was still too small and unfinished.

Google is now in a position to deliver on those ideas. Not only are the enabling technologies in place but it's now a big enough company with reliable enough servers to make software as a Net service dependable. You can collaboratively process your words using Google Docs, coordinate your schedules with Google Calendar, and phone across the Net with Google Talk. I don't for one minute think this is the death of Microsoft or that desktop computing is going to vanish from the Earth. For one thing, despite the best-laid cables and best-deployed radios of telcos and men, we are still a long way off of continuous online connectivity. But the battle between the two different paradigms of computing - desktop and cloud - is now very clearly ready for prime time.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site hasn extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, a US federal appeals court reversed a lower court ruling that might have invalidated open-source licenses. The case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, began more than two years ago with a patent claim.

Open-source software developer Robert Jacobsen manages the collective effort that produced Java Model Railroad Interface, which allows enthusiasts to reprogram the controller chips in their trains. JMRI is distributed under the Kamind, aka KAM Industriesviolating the conditions "does not create liability for copyright infringement where it would not otherwise exist". It is this decision that has been reversed.

This win for Jacobsen doesn't get him anything much yet: the case is simply remanded back to the California District Court for further consideration. But it gets the rest of the open-source movement quite a lot. The judgement affirms Richard Stallman's original insight that created the General Public License in the first place, that copyright could be used to set works free as well as to close them down.

The decision hinges on the question of whether the licensing terms are conditions or covenants, a distinctions that's clear as glass to a copyright lawyer and clear as mud to everyone else. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's helpful explanation (and they have lots of copyright lawyers to explain this sort of thing), it's the difference between contract law and copyright law. Violating conditions means you don't have a copyright license; violating covenants means you've broken the contact but you still have a license. In the US, it's also the difference between federal and state law. When you violate the license's conditions, therefore, as Lawrence Lessig explains , what you have is a copyright infringement.

It's hard to understand how the district court could have taken the view it did. It is very clear from both the licenses themselves and from the copious documentation of the thinking that went into their creation that their very purpose was to ensure that work created collectively and intended to be free for use, modification, and redistribution could not be turned into a closed commercial product that benefited only the company or individual that sells it. To be sure, it's not what the creators of copyright - intended as a way to give authors control over publishers - originally had in mind.

But once you grant the idea of a limited monopoly and say that creators should have the right to control how their work is used, it makes no sense to honor that right only if it's used restrictively. Either creators have the legal right to determine licensing conditions or they have not. (The practical right is of course a different story; economics and the size of publishing businesses give them sufficient clout to impose terms on creators that those creators wouldn't choose.). Seems to me that a creator could specify as a licensing condition that the work could only be published on the side of a cow, and any publisher fool enough to agree to that would be bound by it or be guilty of infringement.

But therein lies the dark side of copyright licensing conditions. The Jacobsen decision might also give commercial software publishers Ideas about the breadth of conditions they can attach to their end-user license agreements. As if these weren't already filled with screeds of impenetable legalese, much of which could be charitably described as unreasonable. EFF points this out and provides a prime example: the licensing terms imposed by World of Warcraft owner Blizzard Entertainment have been upheld in court.

Blizzard's terms ban automated playing software such as Glider, whose developer, Michael Donnelly, was the target of the suit. EFF isn't arguing that Blizzard doesn't have the right to ban bots from its servers; EFF just doesn't think accusing Glider users of copyright infringement for doing is a good legal precedent. Public Knowledge has a fuller explanation of the implications of this case, which it filed as an amicus brief. Briefly, PK argues that upholding these terms as copyright conditions could open the way for software publishers to block software that interoperates with theirs. (Interestingly, Blizzard's argument seems to rely on the notion that software copied into RAM is a copyright infringement, an approach I recall Europe rejecting a few years ago).

You'd think no company would want to sue its own customers. But keeping the traditional balance copyright law was created to achieve between providing incentives for artists and creators and public access to ideas continues to require more than relying on common sense.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a certain irony in the International Olympic Committee's choice of YouTube as its broadcast platform for the Beijing Olympics, which started last night or this morning depending on your time zone. The plan is that the IOC's official channel will bring clips of Olympic coverage to the 77 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East where it hasn't sold TV rights. This is the first time the Olympics will have official Internet coverage.

The IOC said eight years ago that it would not allow Internet broadcasting until technology was in place to control geographical distribution reliably. Four years ago, major broadcasters like the BBC did their first Webcasts of the Games to subscribers in the right geographical areas who had broadband. And now YouTube: the Olympics are starting to do their own TV production.

The irony lies in a couple of things. First of all, of course, are all those suits YouTube is currently experiencing. There's the Viacom suit, the one in which the judge has ordered YouTube to turn over "anonymized" user data. There's the €500 million suit brought by Mediaset, Italy's largest commercial broadcaster, owned by prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, which has said it will also claim compensation for lost advertising revenues. Music publishers. Football leagues. And so on. It's a surprise that the IOC is partnering with YouTube rather than suing Google.

Second of all is that even though YouTube (which, as it was only founded in February 2005, didn't actually exist at the time of the last summer Olympics) seems to be capable of blocking viewers from the wrong sort of IP address from the official channel the odds are pretty good that in a very short time the amount of unrestricted "unofficial" Olympic coverage on the site will dwarf the official stuff. It remains to be seen what kind of policing effort the IOC mounts to prevent that.

But the third irony is of course that there are plenty of ways to see the Olympics that bypass local broadcasters. And plenty of motives for doing so: US viewers, for example, have for years been frustrated by NBC's insistence on saving the biggest events for prime-time evening viewing, even if that means showing them on tape delay many hours after they actually took place. Got a friend with broadband and a VPN in another country that shows events live? VPN into friend's network and access their local broadcaster's stream via their network. British friends ought to be especially in demand for this kind of thing, since the BBC's coverage is...actually, comprehensive isn't really a big enough word for it.

If you're friendless and don't care about real-time viewing, you'll probably find the sport of your choice popping up pretty quickly via the usual torrent sites. True, that, too, will be time-delayed, but you will still get it sooner than those poor NBC-afflicted saps.

If you're friendless and do care about real-time viewing, your best bet is to download one of the many Chinese P2P TV players such as TVU Player (desktop and mobile phone versions), Sopcast (desktop and Web versions), or PPLive, or head over to Channelsurfing.net. These things tap into the open streams from broadcasters all over the world. Not ideal: the output is in a small, low-res screen on your computer, but as against that there's the benefit of having the commentary in a (usually) incomprehensible language. It's hard to get so annoyed with commentators you don't understand. (TVU Player showed the Olympic opening ceremony over what seemed to be an Italian channel.) Channelsurfing.net publishes a schedule you can click on. With the other players the schedule is always a little bit of a mystery, although AsiaPlate seems to be helpful with respect to the Olympic streaming schedule. (Its tennis page, however, hasn't been updated since February.)

By 2012, it would be a logical progression for the IOC to offer streaming video from its own site, particularly for the smaller niche sports that don't get much coverage even in the best-endowed countries. NBC is boasting as much as 3,600 hours of coverage if you include TV and broadband services, standard and high-def; NBC has said 2,900 hours of it will be live. The difficulty for the IOC is that according to its own figures (PDF) 50 percent of its revenues - $2.57 billion - come from broadcast rights (and much of that from NBC). Sponsorship is 40 percent, ticketing 8 percent, and licensing and other sources only 2 percent. It's hard to imagine the Net being able to replace that kind of revenue any time soon. What's more likely is pressure on broadcasters to encrypt those open streams.

Sports, particularly the biggest events, seem likely to continue to increase in value to broadcasters: they are one of the few things that a mass of people really care about seeing live. Which is the fourth irony: both the IOC's own official YouTube channel and an important portion (a little over 20 percent) of the official channels of its biggest broadcaster, NBC, are both tape-delayed.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"CIX will change your life," someone said to me in 1991 when I got a commission to review a bunch of online systems and got my first modem. At the time, I was spending most or all of every day sitting alone in my house putting words in a row for money.

The Net, Louis Rossetto predicted in 1993, when he founded Wired, would change everybody's lives. He compared it to a Bengali typhoon. And that was modest compared to others of the day, who compared it favorably to the discovery of fire.

Today, I spend most or all of every day sitting alone in my house putting words in a row for money.

But yes: my profession is under threat, on the one hand from shrinkage of the revenues necessary to support newspapers and magazines - which is indeed partly fuelled by competition from the Internet - and on the other hand from megacorporate publishers who routinely demand ownership of the copyrights freelances used to resell for additional income - a practice that the Internet was likely to largely kill off anyway. Few have ever gotten rich from journalism, but freelance rates haven't budged in years; staff journalists get very modest raises and for those they are required to work more hours a week and produce more words.

That embarrassingly solipsistic view aside, more broadly, we're seeing the Internet begin to reshape the entertainment, telecommunications, retail, and software industries. We're seeing it provide new ways for people to organize politically and challenge the control of information. And we're seeing it and natural laziness kill off our history: writers and students alike rely on online resources at the expense of offline archives.

Wired was, of course, founded to chronicle the grandly capitalized Digital Revolution, and this month, 15 years on, Rossetto looked back to assess the magazine's successes and failures.

Rossetto listed three failures and three successes. The three failures: history has not ended; Old Media are not dead (yet); and governments and politics still thrive. The three successful predictions: the long boom; the One Machine, a man/machine planetary consciousness; that technology would change the way we relate to each other and cause us to reinvent social institutions.

I had expected to see the long boom in the list of failures, and not just because it was so widely laughed at when it was published. Rossetto is fair to say that the original 1997 feature was not invalidated by the 2000 stock market bust. It wasn't about that (although one couldn't resist snickering about it as the NASDAQ tanked). Instead, what the piece predicted was a global economic boom covering the period 1980 to 2020.

Wrote Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, "We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. And we'll do it without blowing the lid off the environment."

Rossetto, assessing it now, says, " There's a lot of noise in the media about how the world is going to hell. Remember, the truth is out there, and it's not necessarily what the politicians, priests, or pundits are telling you."

I think: 1) the time to assess the accuracy of an article outlining the future to 2020 is probably around 2050; 2) the writers themselves called it a scenario that might guide people through traumatic upheavals to a genuinely better world rather than a prediction; 3) that nonetheless, it's clear that the US economy, which they saw as leading the way has suffered badly in the 2000s with the spiralling deficit and rising consumer debt; 4) that media alarm about the environment, consumer debt, government deficits, and poverty is hardly a conspiracy to tell us lies; and 5) that they signally underestimated the extent to which existing institutions would adapt to cyberspace (the underlying flaw in Rossetto's assumption that governments would be disbanding by now).

For example, while timing technologies is about as futile as timing the stock market, it's worth noting that they expected electronic cash to gain acceptance in 1998 and to be the key technology to enable electronic commerce, which they guessed would hit $10 billion by 2000. Last year it was close to $200 billion. Writing around the same time, I predicted (here) that ecommerce would plateau at about 10 percent of retail; I assumed this was wrong, but it seems that it hasn't even reached 4 perecent yet, though it's obvious that, particularly in the copyright industries, the influence of online commerce is punching well above its statistical weight.

No one ever writes modestly about the future. What sells - and gets people talking - are extravagant predictions, whether optimistic or pessimistic. Fifteen years is a tiny portion even of human history, itself a blip on the planet. Tom Standage, writing in his 1998 book The Victorian Internet, noted that the telegraph was a far more radically profound change for the society of its day than the Internet is for ours. A century from now, the Internet may be just as obsolete. Rossetto, like the rest of us, will have to wait until he's dead to find out if his ideas have lasting value.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in November 2005 the CEO of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, told Business Week that he was tired of big Internet sites like Google and Yahoo! using "my pipes" "for free". With those words he launched the issue of network neutrality onto the front pages and into the public consciousness. At the time, it seemed like what one of my editors used to grandly dismiss as an "American issue". (One such issue, it's entertaining to remember now, was spam. That was in 1997.) The only company dominant enough and possessed of sufficient infrastructure to impose carriage charges on content providers in the UK was BT - and if BT had tried anything like that Ofcom would - probably - have stomped all over it.

But what starts in America usually winds up here a few years later, and this week, the CEO of Virgin Media, Neil Berkett, threatened that video providers who don't pay for faster service may find their traffic being delivered in slow "bus lanes". Network neutrality, he said, was "a load of bollocks".

His PR people recanted - er, clarified a day or two later. We find it hard to see how a comment as direct as "a load of bollocks" could be taken out of context. However. Let's say he was briefly possessed by the spirt of Whitacre, who most certainly meant what he said.

The recharacterization of Berkett's comments: the company isn't really going to deliberately slow down YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer. Instead, it "could offer content providers deals to upgrade their provisioning." I thought this sounded like the wheeze where you're not charged more for using a credit card, you're given a discount for paying cash. But no: what they say they have in mind is direct peering, in which no money changes hands, which they admit could be viewed as a "non-neutral" solution.

But, says Keith Mitchell, a fellow member of the Open Rights Group advisory board, "They are in for a swift education in the way the global transit/peering market works if they try this." Virgin seems huge in the context of the UK, where its ownership of the former ntl/Telewest combine gives it a lock on the consumer cable market - but in the overall scheme of things it's "a very small fish in the pond compared to the Tier 1 transit providers, and the idea that they can buck this model single-handedly is laughable."

Worse, he says, "If Virgin attempts to cost recover for interconnects off content providers on anything other than a sender-keeps-all/non-settlement basis, they'll quickly find themselves in competition with the transit providers, whose significantly larger economies of scale put them in a position to provide a rather cheaper path from the content providers."

What fun. In other words, if you're, say, the BBC, and you're faced with paying extra in some form to get your content out to the Net you'd choose to pay the big trucking company with access to all the best and fastest roads and the international infrastructure rather than the man-with-a-van who roams your local neighborhood.

ISPs versus the iPlayer seems likely to run and run. It's clear, for example, that streaming is growing at a hefty clip. Obviously, within the UK the iPlayer is the biggest single contributor to this; viewers are watching a million programs a week online, sopping up 3 to 5 percent of all Internet traffic in Britain.

We've seen exactly this sort of argument before: file-sharing (music, not video!), online gaming, binary Usenet newsgroups. Why (ancient creaking voice) I remember when the big threat was the advent of the graphical Web, which nearly did kill the Net (/ancient creaking voice). The difference this time is that there is a single organization with nice, deep, taxpayer-funded pockets to dig into. Unlike the voracious spider that was Usenet, the centipede that is file-sharing, or the millipedes who were putting up Web sites, YouTube and the BBC make up an easily manageable number of easily distinguished targets for a protection racket. At the same time, the consolidation of the consumer broadband market from hundreds of dial-up providers into a few very large broadband providers means competition is increasingly mythical.

But the iPlayer is only one small piece of the puzzle. Over the next few years we're going to see many more organizations offering streaming video across the Net. For example, a few weeks ago I signed up for an annual pass for the streaming TV service for the nine biggest men's tennis tournaments of the year. The economics make sense: $70 a year versus £20 a month for Sky Sports - and I have no interest in any of Sky's other offerings - or pay nothing and "watch" really terrible low-resolution video over a free Chinese player offering rebroadcasts of uncertain legality.

The real problem, as several industry insiders have said to me lately, is pricing. "You have a product," said one incredulously, "that people want more and more of, and you can't make any money selling it?" When companies like O2 are offering broadband for £7.50 a month as a loss-leading add-on to mobile phone connections, consumers don't see why they should pay any more than that. Jerky streaming might be just the motivator to fix that.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some years back when I was writing about the data protection directive, Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, predicted a trade war between the US and Europe over privacy laws. It didn't happen, or at least it hasn't happened yet.

The key element to this prediction was the rule in the EU's data protection laws that prohibited sending data on for processing to countries whose legal regimes aren't as protective as those of the EU. Of course, since then we've seen the EU sell out on supplying airline passenger data to the US. Even so, this week the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party made recommendations about how search engines save and process personal data that could drive another wedge between the US and Europe.

The Article 29 group is one of those arcane EU phenomena that you probably don't know much about unless you're a privacy advocate or paid to find out. The short version: it's a sort of think tank of data protection commissioners from all over Europe. The UK's Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, is a member, as are his equivalents in countries from France to Lithuania.

The Working Party (as it calls itself) advises and recommends policies based on the data protection principles enshrined in the EU Data Protection Directive. It cannot make law, but both its advice to the European Commission and the Commission's action (or lack thereof) are publicly reported. It's arguable that in a country like the UK, where the Information Commissioner operates with few legal teeth to bite with, the existence of such a group may help strengthen the Commissioner's hand.

(Few legal teeth, at least in respect of government activities: the Information Commissioner has issued an opinion about Phorm indicating that the service must be opt-in only. As Phorm and the ISPs involved are private companies, if they persisted with a service that contravened data protection law, the Information Commissioner could issue legal sanctions. But while the Information Commissioner can, for example, rule that for an ISP to retain users' traffic data for seven years is disproportionate, if the government passes a law saying the ISP must do so then within the UK's legal system the Information Commissioner can do nothing about it. Similarly, the Information Commissioner can say, as he has, that he is "concerned" about the extent of the information the government proposes to collect and keep on every British resident, but he can't actually stop the system from being built.)

The group's key recommendation: search engines should not keep personally identifiable search histories for longer than six months, and it specifically includes search engines whose headquarters are based outside the EU. The group does not say which search engines it studied, but it was reported to be studying Google as long ago as last May. The report doesn't look at requirements to keep traffic data under the Data Retention Directive, as it does not apply to search engines.

Google's shortening the life of its cookies and anonymizing its search history logs after 18 months turns out to have a significance I didn't appreciate when, at the time, I dismissed it as insultingly trivial (which it was): it showed the Article 29 working group that the company doesn't really need to keep all that data for so long. In

One of the key items the Article 29 group had to decide in writing its report on data protection issues related to search engines (PDF) is this: are IP addresses personal information? It sounds like one of those bits of medieval sophistry, like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In the dial-up days, it might not have mattered, at least in Britain, where local phone charges forced limited usage, so users were assigned a different IP address every time they logged in. But in the world of broadband, where even the supposedly dynamic IP addresses issued by cable suppliers may remain with a single subscriber for years on end. Being able to track your IP address's activities is increasingly like being able to track your library card, your credit card, and your mobile phone all at the same time. Fortunately, the average ISP doesn't have the time to be that interested in most of its users.

The fact is that any single piece of information that identifies your activities over a long period and can be mapped to your real-life identity has to be considered personal information or the data protection laws make no sense. The libertarian view, of course, would be that there are other search engines. You do not actually have to use Google, Gmail, or even YouTube. But if all search engines adopted Google's habits the choice would be more apparent than real. Time was when the US was the world's policeman. With respect to data, it seems that the EU has taken on this role. It will be interesting to see whether this decision has any impact on Google's business model and practices. If it does, that trade war could finally be upon us. If not, then Google was building up a vast data store just because we can.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the last ten days or so a stormlet has broken out about the announcement that BT, Carphone Warehouse, and TalkTalk, who jointly cover about 70 percent of British Internet subscribers, have signed up for a new advertising service. The supplier, Phorm (previously, 121Media), has developed Open Internet Exchange (OIX), a platform to serve up "relevant" ads to ISPs' customers. Ad agencies and Web sites also sign up to the service which, according to Phorm's FAQ, can serve up ads to any Web site "in the regular places the website shows ads". Partners include most British national newspapers, iVillage, and MGM OMD.

A brief chat with BT revealed that the service, known to consumers as Webwise, will apply only to BT's retail customers, not its wholesale division. Consumers will be able to opt out, and BT is planning an educational exercise to explain the service.

Obviously all concerned hope Webwise will be acceptable to consumers, but to make it a little more palatable, not signing out of it gets you warnings if you land on suspected phishing sites. I don't think improved security should, ethically, be tied to a person's ad-friendliness, but this is the world we live in.

"We've done extensive research with our customer base," says BT's spokesman, "and it's very clear that when customers know what is happening they're overwhelmingly in favor of it, particularly in terms of added security."

But the Net folk are suspicious folk, and words like "spyware" and "adware" are circling, partly because Phorm's precursor, 121Media, was blocked by Symantec and F-Secure as spyware. Plus, The Register discovered that BT had been sharing data with Phorm as long ag as last summer, and, apparently, lying about it.

Phorm's PR did not reply to a request for an interview, but a spokeswoman contacted briefly last week defended the company. "We are absolutely not and in no way an adware product at all."

The overlooked aspect: Phorm called in Privacy International's new commercial arm, 80/20, to examine its system.

PI's executive director, Simon Davies, one of the examiners, says, "Phorm has done its very best to eliminate and minimise the use of personal information and build privacy into the core of the technology. In that sense, it's a privacy-friendly technology, but that does not get us away from the intrusion aspect." In general, the principle is that ads shouldn't be served on an opt-out basis; users should have to opt in to receive them.

Tailoring advertising to the clickstream of user interests is of course endemic online now; it's how Google does AdSense, and it's why that company bought DoubleClick, which more or less invented the business of building up user profiles to create personalized ads. Phorm's service, however, does not build user profiles.

A cookie with a unique ID is stored on the user's system - but does not associate that ID with an individual or the computer it's stored on. Say you're browsing car sites like Ford and Nissan. The ISP does not give Phorm personally identifiable information like IP addresses, but does share the information that the computer this cookie is on is looking at car sites right now. OIX serves up car ads. The service ignores niche sites, secure sites (HTTPS), and low-traffic sites. Firewalling between Phorm and the ISP means that the ISP doesn't know and can't deduce the information that the OIX platform knows about what ads are being served. Nothing is stored to create a profile. Phorm instead offers advertisers instead is the knowledge that they are serving ads that reflect users' interests in real time.

The difference to Davies is that Google, which came last in Privacy International's privacy rankings, stores search histories and browsing data and ties them to personal identifiers, primarily login IDs and IP addresses. (Next month, the Article 29 Group will report its opinion as to whether IP addresses are personal information, so we will know better then which way the cookie crumbles.)

"The potential to develop a profile covertly is extremely limited, if not eliminated," says Davies.

Phorm itself says, "We really think what our stuff does dispells the myth that in order to provide relevance you have to store data."

I hate advertising as much as the next six people. But most ISPs are operating on razor-thin margins if they make money at all, and they're looking at continuously increasing demand for bandwidth. That demand can only get worse as consumers flock to the iPlayer and other sources of streaming video. The pressure on pricing is steadily downward with people like TalkTalk and O2 offering free or extremely cheap broadband as an add-on to mobile phone accounts. Meanwhile, the advertising revenues go to everyone but them. Is it surprising that they'd leap at this? Analysts estimate that BT will pick up £85 million in the first year. Nice if you can get it.

We all want low-cost broadband and free content. None of us wants ads. How exactly do we propose all this free stuff is going to be paid for?

As for Phorm, it's going to take a lot to make some users trust them. I'd say, though, that the jury is still out. Sometimes people do learn from past mistakes.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

There is a certain kind of mentality that is actually proud of not understanding computers, as if there were something honorable about saying grandly, "Oh, I leave all that to my children."

Outside of computing, only television gets so many people boasting of their ignorance. Do we boast how few books we read? Do we trumpet our ignorance of other practical skills, like balancing a cheque book, cooking, or choosing wine? When someone suggests we get dressed in the morning do we say proudly, "I don't know how"?

There is so much insanity coming out of the British government on the Internet/computing front at the moment that the only possible conclusion is that the government is made up entirely of people who are engaged in a sort of reverse pissing contest with each other: I can compute less than you can, and see? here's a really dumb proposal to prove it.

How else can we explain yesterday's news that the government is determined to proceed with Contactpoint even though the report it commissioned and paid for from Deloitte warns that the risk of storing the personal details of every British child under 16 can only be managed, not eliminated? Lately, it seems that there's news of a major data breach every week. But the present government is like a batch of 20-year-olds who think that mortality can't happen to them.

Or today's news that the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport has launched its proposals for "Creative Britain", and among them is a very clear diktat to ISPs: deal with file-sharing voluntarily or we'll make you do it. By April 2009. This bit of extortion nestles in the middle of a bunch of other stuff about educating schoolchildren about the value of intellectual property. Dare we say: if there were one thing you could possibly do to ensure that kids sneer at IP, it would be to teach them about it in school.

The proposals are vague in the extreme about what kind of regulation the DCMS would accept as sufficient. Despite the leaks of last week, culture secretary Andy Burnham has told the Financial Times that the "three strikes" idea was never in the paper. As outlined by Open Rights Group executive director Becky Hogge in New Statesman, "three strikes" would mean that all Internet users would be tracked by IP address and warned by letter if they are caught uploading copyrighted content. After three letters, they would be disconnected. As Hogge says (disclosure: I am on the ORG advisory board), the punishment will fall equally on innocent bystanders who happen to share the same house. Worse, it turns ISPs into a squad of private police for a historically rapacious industry.

Charles Arthur, writing in yesterday's Guardian, presented the British Phonographic Institute's case about why the three strikes idea isn't necessarily completely awful: it's better than being sued. (These are our choices?) ISPs, of course, hate the idea: this is an industry with nanoscale margins. Who bears the liability if someone is disconnected and starts to complain? What if they sue?

We'll say it again: if the entertainment industries really want to stop file-sharing, they need to negotiate changed business models and create a legitimate market. Many people would be willing to pay a reasonable price to download TV shows and music if they could get in return reliable, fast, advertising-free, DRM-free downloads at or soon after the time of the initial release. The longer the present situation continues the more entrenched the habit of unauthorized file-sharing will become and the harder it will be to divert people to the legitimate market that eventually must be established.

But the key damning bit in Arthur's article (disclosure: he is my editor at the paper) is the BPI's admission that they cannot actually say that ending file-sharing would make sales grow. The best the BPI spokesman could come up with is, "It would send out the message that copyright is to be respected, that creative industries are to be respected and paid for."

Actually, what would really do that is a more balanced copyright law. Right now, the law is so far from what most people expect it to be - or rationally think it should be - that it is breeding contempt for itself. And it is about to get worse: term extension is back on the agenda. The 2006 Gowers Review recommended against it, but on February 14, Irish EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy (previously: champion of software patents) has announced his intention to propose extending performers' copyright in sound recordings from the current 50-year term to 95 years. The plan seems to go something like this: whisk it past the Commission in the next two months. Then the French presidency starts and whee! new law! The UK can then say its hands are tied.

That change makes no difference to British ISPs, however, who are now under the gun to come up with some scheme to keep the government from clomping all over them. Or to the kids who are going to be tracked from cradle to alcopop by unique identity number. Maybe the first target of the government computing literacy programs should be...the government.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On the Net, John Perry Barlow observed long ago, everything is local and everything is global, but nothing is national. It's one of those pat summations that sometimes is actually right. The EU, in the interests of competing successfully with the very large market that is the US, wants to harmonize the national laws that apply to content online.

They have a point. Today's market practices were created while the intangible products of human ingenuity still had to be fixed in a physical medium. It was logical for the publishers and distributors of said media to carve up the world into national territories. But today anyone trying to, say, put a song in an online store, or create a legal TV download service has to deal with a thicket of national collection societies and licensing authorities.

Where there's a problem there's a consultation document, and so there is in this case: the EU is giving us until February 29 (leap year!) to tell them what we think (PDF).

The biggest flaw in the consultation document is that the authors (who needed a good copy editor) seem to have bought wholesale the 2005 thinking of rightsholders (whom they call "right holders"). Fully a third of the consultation is on digital rights management: should it be interoperable, should there be a dispute resolution process, should SMEs have non-discriminatory access to these systems, should EULAs be easier to read?

Well, sure. But the consultation seems to assume that DRM is a) desirable and b) an endemic practice. We have long argued that it's not desirable; DRM is profoundly anti-consumer. Meanwhile, the industry is clearly fulfilling Naxos founder Klaus Heymann's April 2007 prophecy that DRM would be gone from online music within two years. DRM is far less of an issue now than it was in 2006, when the original consultation was launched. In fact, though, these questions seem to have been written less to aid consumers than to limit the monopoly power of iTunes.

That said, DRM will continue to be embedded in some hardware devices, most especially in the form of HDCP, a form of copy protection being built, invisibly to consumers until it gets in their way, into TV sets and other home video equipment. Unfortunately, because the consultation is focused on "Creative Content Online", such broader uses of DRM aren't included.

However, because of this and because some live streaming services similarly use DRM to prevent consumers from keeping copies of their broadcasts (and probably more will in future as Internet broadcasting becomes more widespread), public interest limitations on how DRM can be used seem like a wise idea. The problem with both DRM and EULAs is that the user has no ability to negotiate terms. The consultation leaves out an important consumer consideration: what should happen to content a consumer pays for and downloads that's protected with DRM if the service that sold it closes down? So far, subscribers lose it all; this is clea

The questions regarding multi-territory licensing are far more complicated, and I suspect answers to those depend largely on whether you're someone trying to clear rights for reuse, someone trying to protect your control over your latest blockbuster's markets, or someone trying to make a living as a creative person. The first of those clearly wants to buy one license rather than dozens. The second wants to sell dozens of licenses rather than one (unless it's for a really BIG sum of money). The third, who is probably part of the "Long Tail" mentioned in the question, may be very suspicious of any regime that turns everything he created before 2005 into "back catalogue works" that are subject to a single multi-territory license. Science fiction authors, for example, have long made significant parts of their income by selling their out-of-print back titles for reprint. An old shot in a photographer's long tail may be of no value for 30 years – until suddenly the subject emerges as a Presidential candidate. Any regime that is adopted must be flexible enough to recognize that copyrighted works have values that fluctuate unpredictably over time.

The final set of question has to do with the law and piracy. Should we all follow France's lead and require ISPs to throw users offline if they're caught file-sharing more than three times? We have said all along that the best antidote to unauthorized copying is to make it easy for people to engage in authorized copying. If you knew, for example, that you could reliably watch the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory (if there ever is one) 24 hours after the US broadcast, would you bother chasing around torrent sites looking for a download that might or might not be complete? Technically, it's nonsense to think that ISPs can reliably distinguish an unauthorized download of copyrighted material from an authorized one; filtering cannot be the answer, no matter how much AT&T wants to kill itself trying. We would also remind the EU of the famed comment of another Old Netizen, John Gilmore: "The Internet perceives censorship as damage, and routes around it."

But of course no consultation can address the real problem, which isn't how to protect copyright online: it's how to encourage creators.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I was involved in recording a segment of an edition of the regional ITV show London Calling that I'm told will be broadcast next week (by which time I will have avoided embarrassment by leaving the country). I was there as a skeptic, not an Internet commentator. But it was annoying enough that I'm going to pretend the experience is a suitable subject for net.wars.

I've said before now that in general the skeptics do not take a position on matters of faith: we think about things that can be tested and how to test them. If you want to tell me that you believe that a little pink cloud is up there guiding your way through life there really isn't much I can say. If, however, you tell me that every year that little pink cloud impregnates a virgin, we might start talking about how to test this phenomenon under proper observing conditions. The rise of the religious right in the US and the increasing fight over teaching creationism in the schools and Bush's disregard for science mean that many American skeptics are being forced to modify this long-held policy.

I was told the show would be a lively debate; it was more of a free-for-all, in which I, along with three humanists and the atheist stand-up comedian Robin Ince, found ourselves arguing about the threat to Christianity posed by the disappearance of school nativity plays. The show was fronted by a quintet of I guess bigger-league journalists and TV people: Vanessa Feltz, Eve Pollard, Nick Ferrari, a guy from the Evening Standard whose name I didn't catch. (They were all far too grand to consort in the green room with us lower-level invited guests, who were in turn kept away from the hoi polloi of the nondescript audience. Such is the role