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Friday, August 06, 2004 |
The FCC wants out of copyright.
The Broadcast Flag regime is, I think, something of an embarassment for the FCC. Many of the commissioners came to the FCC to deregulate telecommunications law, not to regulate the electronics industry. Yet they find themselves in mission creep mode, making rules for the design of products, surely prompting some to wonder what exactly they’re fighting for.
Evidence that the FCC’s heart is really in this stuff comes from its approval this week of thirteen distribution technologies, without much fuss. It supports the sense that the Commission wants out.
Of greatest symbolic importance: Approval of Tivo’s TivoGuard system. That’s the technology behind the TivoToGo system, designed to let Tivo users swap shows they’ve recorded, within certain limits. The MPAA and NFL opposed it for the usual reasons - marginal threats to existing revenue streams. Classic rent-protection behavior, and supposedly what the new FCC exists to fight.
Others have said this before, but the FCC plays at copyright at its peril. As many know, the late 1960s was the last time the FCC played copyright cop, and it was perhaps the most embarassing episode in the history of the Commisison. Acting mainly on the advice of the Broadcast industry, the FCC did what it could to sabotage cable TV, in favor of the great technical wonder of UHF. The motto from the FCC’s own Vietnam should have been “never again.” Today, the FCC’s back in the pseudo-copyright game, and it should be looking for a graceful exit strategy.
[Lessig Blog]
5:23:16 PM 
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My Beef With Big Media: How government protects big media--and
shuts out upstarts like me.
By Ted Turner.
(Yup. That Ted Turner.)
1:32:12 PM
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"Open Water". Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the movie theater ... along comes a flick that uses real-life shark footage instead of special effects to spread its caul of terror. [Salon.com]
I read the NYT story about this one over the weekend. Sounds (literally) terrific.
8:56:19 AM
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Oh: and I think I'm supposed to give a shout out to Jason and Susan, so: HEY, you guys!
6:44:41 AM
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The File Sharing Experiment.
The File Sharing Experiment is a project with the goal of demonstrating how file sharing actually helps the music, movie, and software industry. Folks are encouraged to post purchases they've made and a short explanation of how they learned about the band/movie/game and why they ended up buying something for it. All the evidence is anectdotal, but when taken together, it's already over a quarter million dollars in reported sales and the site has been up for one week.
Personally, this was the point I tried to make in the heyday of Napster. You could find anything on Napster, but rarely could you find complete albums, so the service had the effect of promoting CD sales. I would often surf others' music lists whenever I noticed things I liked, download the things I hadn't ever heard of, then I'd end up buying CDs from Amazon. [unmediated]
6:39:23 AM
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Living in 1954 for 10 days
My former editor at Yahoo! Internet Life, Larry Smith, wrote a great article for Popular Science about his 10 day experience living without technologies under 50 years old. (It reminds me a little of my only published fiction story, Retro-A-Go-Go, which I wrote for Wired in 2000.) Link (Thanks, Frank!)
(thanks, Mark!)
6:33:53 AM
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NewsIsFree Visualisation.
The NewsIsFree service has an interesting visualisation of the news. They categorised the news in eight categories and you can visualise each category separately. The visualisation presents a large rectangle and each news-item has a square. The location in the rectangle. its colour and size of the square is used to analyse the news-item. You can choose your own code based on popularity, age and source. Mousing over a square shows a summary of the article. It is not the first example of such...
[Blueblog]
Implementation of the representation approach I first recall being used in the stunning Map of the Market. Not as clean or, I think, dense as that one, but worth a gander. (And we'll see what develops.)
http://www.newsisfree.com/newsmap/
6:21:04 AM
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