Call Your Congressman Today
Via The Register:
There's still a chance to spare small time webcasters from the axe, but hurry. The House votes on the Relief for Small-Business Webcasters Act (HR 5469), so today's the last day to make your views heard to your local Congressional representative.Give 'em an inch, and they'll take a mile.
New Technology for Digital Democracy
From everybody's favorite news source, Slashdot, comes the idea for a new kind of software:
"What is needed is a new technology that enables all citizens to safely and peacefully assemble, exercise their rights to free speech, and perform civil disobedience if necessary. This can be accomplished using an innovative application of open-source, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology on the Internet, which we call 'Votester.' Votester does not exist yet. It is the hope of the authors that one or more groups of technologists reading this document will be inspired to create versions of it and make them freely available to the general public."Any programmers in the crowd?
Sensenbrenner to the rescue?
From the Associated Press (in the San Jose Mercury News): Sensenbrenner suyggests giving Internet broadcasters an extra six months before new fees.
From the Los Angeles Times: Webcasters May Get Repriee on Roayalties. The lead paragraphs:
Offering a potential lifeline to hundreds of Internet radio stations, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee introduced a bill Thursday to give Webcasters a six-month reprieve on the new royalties they must pay to record labels and artists.Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) plans to try to push the bill through the House next week, using a procedural shortcut typically reserved for noncontroversial proposals, an aide said. Under this approach, the bill must be approved by a two-thirds vote.
Other links, courtesy of Google News:
Watch the Radio And Internet Newsletter (RAIN) for more developments.
Larry trumps The Mouse
Larry Lessig and his fight to win Eldred v. Ashcroft is the subject of The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State, the cover story of today's Los Angeles Times Magazine.
It's highly favorable. Read it before the paper takes it down.
Yahoo and other ISPs side with Verizon to fight the RIAA, MPAA
C|NET News.com reports on today's Amicus brief filed by Yahoo and other Internet Service Providers in the suit brought by the RIAA against Verizon.
"What we hope to accomplish is to force the RIAA to follow established legal procedures and due process," said David McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, which organized the brief. "The music industry pays the RIAA to investigate and prosecute copyright infractions. They don't pay us a penny to do that. They don't pay ISPs a penny to do that. Even if they did, it would be a violation of due process and subscriber privacy."
Lest we forget
The Congress shall have the Right to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by Securing for a limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
That phrase in the U.S. Constitution outlines the purpose of copyright, and the scope of copyright law.
AOTC wouldn't be in business if that scope had not been exceeded by the drift of copyright law over the years.
ProSUA — To promote te Progress of Science and useful Arts — is an effort by Kevin Marks (of Epeus Epigone and Mediagora) to blogthevote2000usa (that's a blog tag Kevin explains here), and obtain other positive results. Toward that end, ProSUA has T-shirts that tastefully bear the Constitution's opinion on copyright, plus a petition to John Ashcroft from Rafael O. Quezada that needs to bear more signatures.
Blog on.
Eldred reply brief posted
The latest reply brief for the petitioners in Eldred vs. Ashcroft (the Free the Mouse case) has been posted to the net. After reading the brief, I have finally grasped the true first amendment implications that the case addresses. Many thanks to Larry Lessig (the primary author) for the link.
Building out the commons
What is the Open Source Streaming Alliance?
Open Source servers, exchanging streaming content and replicating content.
The driving idea is global networking of servers and high-bandwidth centers in ways that avoid unnecessary multiplication of Net traffic while delivering content as locally as possible.The Open Source Streaming Alliance is extension of the networking paradigm with one crucial addition: it transcends the current only-for-profit context, allowing experimental, independent media and arts centers to catch up with the need to stream content creation and distribution. It thereby gives voice to diversity and facilitates global accessibility for all.
The thinking behind Hollywood's Death Star
From James D. Miller's Let Hollywood Hack
Peer-to-peer networks pose a vastly greater threat to intellectual property than Napster did. Internet thieves copy content from each others' hard drives. With Napster, these criminals needed to operate through a centralized server. Peer-to-peer computing, however, allows thieves to exchange copyrighted content directly. Napster was like a single large open-air drug market that authorities could easily locate and shut down. Peer-to-peer pirating is analogous to having thousands of drug markets operating out of private homes.To hinder peer-to-peer thieves, someone must hack into their network homes. Unfortunately, without monitoring, you can't identify which networks thieves use to exchange copyrighted materials. Consequently, to fight peer-to-peer piracy, Congress must curtail everyone's cyber privacy and allow copyright holders to access and sometimes disable private networks. While we should regret any loss of privacy, fighting crime often requires reducing the privacy rights of innocents.
This is an important document because it makes clear exactly how Hollywood conceives the peer-to-peer nature of the Net. It's not a "commons." It's more like the worst sort of drug market: stealthy and undetectable. By default Congress sees the Net in exactly the same way. And why not? Copyrighted digital materials are somebody's property, and there is zero difference between copying and stealing that property, because somebody who didn't pay for it ends up having a perfect copy of their own.
We need to find a way to grant some validity to this point of view (let's be real: we're not going to talk them out of it) while stopping the laws Hollywood wants to write that will blow up the peer-to-peer world we call the Net.
It won't be easy.
Listeners miss the good fishin' in their old streams
'Net Listeners Want Streams Back; Don't Mind Hearing Ads
Those are among the findings of Arbitron-Edison Media Research's "Internet 9" study, released today. In the phone survey of 2,511 spring 2002 Arbitron diarykeepers, two-thirds of respondents who use streaming media at least monthly are upset about losing a webcast that has gone offline during the controversy over digital rights and royalties, and the same number would like Congress to intervene to help webcasters stay online.
The piece goes on to say listeners don't mind audio ads (like Live365's). Less than a quarter of the respondents would be willing to pay a fee of some kind.
Interesting context not explained in the piece (which is for radio professionals who know what "diarykeepers" are). Arbitron is the one and only fully-respected ratings service for commercial radio. They produce the ratings by recruiting radio listeners to keep diaries of their listening for a week at a time. Upwards of a thousand diaries per region are kept, and the results are crunched into "the book" — a document by which commercial stations set their advertising rates. So the numbers here are subsets for radio listeners; that is, people who like radio enough to be willing to fill out diaries.
An uncomon gift to the Commons
The Register reports that an anonymous doner has given a $1 million grant to Duke Uiversity, home of the Center for the Public Domain.
Inside the Silver Walls
For a pretty good rundown on how Hollywood sees the Net, check out the lineup at the Digital Hollywood event in Beverly Hills. I'm going to try to get press credentials and attend this thing. Be nice to see if we can get a few more people from the Net's side of the fence to get in there.