6. januar 2004

First amendment history primer Eugene Volokh, who participates in a brilliant group blog, has written an article in NRO debunking some popular rightist myths about freedom of speech. It is a common belief on the right that the first amendment's protection of free speech has a glorious past and are lately under threat from liberals invading campuses and the courts. Furthermore, they argue, "liberal" judges are eager to "make law" instead of just accepting the pure text of the constitution. In fact, from the very start freedom of speech was a very narrow right indeed, and at no time has freedom of speech been absolute (as a direct reading of the text should indicate). In the first half of the 1800s, courts held that blasphemy could be outlawed, and blasphemy covered not just swearing but the offensive public denial of the truth of Christianity. Until the mid-1900s, judges routinely sent people to jail for publishing newspaper articles that criticized the judge's decisions. Until the mid-1900s, obscenity laws punished not just hard-core pornography, but serious literature as well as discussion of contraceptives. And who started pushing back restrictions on free speech? And modern free-speech protections were largely the work of Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis, who were generally associated with the liberal wing of the Court on most issues; of FDR's liberal appointees to the Court; and of the notoriously liberal Warren Court. On today's Supreme Court, conservative Justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas take a broad view of free speech, often broader than many of their liberal colleagues. But until the late 1980s, conservatives generally took the narrower view, not just on matters such a sex and flag desecration, but even on political and social advocacy. History is annoyingly brutal to most political myths. There never was a lost golden age of free speech, or anything else for that matter. Volokh's followup here, more technical as can be expected from a law professor. 4:00:55 PM    comment []

Alleged decline in music downloads a false comfort for recording industry The RIAA is crowing that its hardline tactics on file sharing is paying off, as a widely reported study allegedly shows that the number of Americans who download music on the net fell drastically after the recording industry started suing individual users: The percentage of Americans who downloaded music from the Internet fell to 14 percent over the four weeks ended Dec. 14, from 29 percent in a 30-day sample conducted in March, April and May, according to a telephone survey of 1,358 Internet users conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Conducting a study is one thing, correctly interpreting and reporting it is another entirely. How about my take on this study: The percentage of Americans who admitted downloading music from the Internet to a complete stranger on the telephone fell from 29 to 14 percent after the RIAA started suing people for thousands of dollars. This is what they found out. Not how many actually download music over the Net. In addition, the research showed that the use of peer-to-peer file sharing programs, which allow users to swap music for free, fell significantly in November from the year earlier. The user base of leading platform Kazaa shrank by 15 percent while Grokster's declined 59 percent, according to comScore Media Metrix, Pew's data partner for the study. Eh, no. Let's get this straight: Kazaa sucks big time. It is overloaded with spyware and nagware, and it simply doesn't deliver very well. In addition, this is the service the RIAA is busy harassing. There are much better alternatives out tthere, and people are starting to discover that. It's still quite possible that there is an actual drop in downloading. It is also possible, likely even, that RIAA's threats has had a short term effect on the practice, but if we judge by the results of lawsuits against "software piracy" in the past, it's not going to be a big success. If there is a real decline in music downloading, consider this fact: Getting MP3's off the net is so easy and fast that once you start using file sharing software, you download hundreds and thousands of songs over the first few months, at least if you have broadband. Then, you actually have exhausted the songs you are interested in downloading. You have filled up your hard disk with the songs from all your favourite bands, copies of all songs you already have on CDs (it is easier to play from the PC than to play a record), and every song recommended to you from a friend or contact. You only download a few new songs now and then, on a much lower volume. Result: a decline in overall music downloading. It is precisely the same mechanism that resulted in soaring mobile phone sales when the good phones first became available, and then a serious decline as everybody already had one, and only replacements and upgrades drove the market. Add to this the ease of burning around a thousand songs on a single CD, or using USB portable MOS "disks" or private IM file transfer to exchange lots of music files with your friends, who probably share some of your music taste, and it's pretty much inevitable that the massive downloading we saw earlier should start to decline. But that doesn't give much comfort to the RIAA, which is precisely why there has been no increase in music sales. 10:23:53 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.02.2004; 20:40:02.