Proscriptions from an Analyst

Jupiter Analyst, Lydia Loizides has the following to say regarding the Verizon Decision

Legal jargon aside, this as-yet-to-be-identified individual is an idiot. Six hundred songs in a day? If the RIAA hadn't jumped for infringement, Verizon should have based on the amount of data they were sucking down in a 24 hour period. Hmmm, let's do the math -- 600 x 2 MB (average file size) = a whole lot of data that is passing through your pipe. Someone was clearly asleep at the wheel.

From So You Wanna Play Hard Ball?.

That seems extraordinarily foolhardy to me. When my hard drive fried I needed to download a few Linux and FreeBSD distributions. That was easily in the many gigs in a day. I would have been absolutely flabbergasted had my service provider shut me down in the middle of my transfer. And, I assume that my service provider (or Verizon) would soon have very few broadband customers, or be overrun with "action items" requiring them to violate their customers' privacy by checking on what they were downloading if they took Ms. Loizides' advice.

Later:Not to pick on Ms. Loizides, but her most recent web log entry also has this to say about the decision: "Under the law, Verizon lost their bid to re-define themselves." While I agree with her proposition that definitions matter in law, the Verizon decision was not about Verizon trying to redefine itself or fit into a different sub-section of 512. The court found that the type of service provider that Verizon is (512(a)) doesn't matter for 512(h). Any type of service provider under 512(a)-(d) must respond to a 512(h) subpoena.

Eldred Sadness

As will be reported all over the internet today, the Supreme Court decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft is out. Justice Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion. Dissents were written by Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer. Sadness.

Description of Legal Bricolage

A friend of mine who has been a courts reporter for a daily newspaper and is now freelancing about, among other things, digital rights issues, sent me the following:

I think [litigating internet issues is] along the
lines of playing cowboy, but instead of cattle, you're roping the abyss. When
I was writing about the courts, so much of it dealt with established criminal
statutes that it was hard to find something unique -- it usually involved a
tiny point of federal sentencing guidelines. Here, it's completely under
construction -- the laws are still being written and the new ones are still
being tested.

Good luck building the barn...

Of course, that made my day, but I am not sure we are so unique either in the legal profession or in the world. I wrote back:

You made my day. Thanks, never been called a cowboy before. But, this is true of every type of law -- I think. If you look closely enough, there are always issues that have never been heard, or facts that laws have never been applied to, or the need to come up with a creative application of some old legal doctrine or new statute. As with journalism, whatever story you are currently working on has never been told the way you are about to tell it (and you get to be learning along the way). Probably why I love my job and why freelancing is such a kick.

And, why I think bricolage is something that we all do and that we all could do more of.

Fisher's Price Continued

Seth has replied to Ed's post on Fisher's watermark music payment proposal (more on that in my original post).

Here I want to take issue with Seth's question: whether Fisher has suggested the "dreaded pay-per-view society." To which I would answer, not necessarily. As I understand Fisher's suggestion, money is collected as a tax/license on media or other digital music associated goods (bandwidth etc) and then is allocated based on use. So I pay what amounts to a fee for use of bandwidth or other goods and then the money I pay gets distributed (along with everyone else's) based on my (and everyone else's) listening etc. to the music. Artists are paid-per-view (although sampling may be more appropriate here and I don't know which Fisher proposes) but I pay-per-related-good. Some uses will in fact be pay-per-use (streaming if bandwidth is taxed and metered for example) but many will be flat rate (listening to an mp3 on a taxed hard drive for example).

Fisher's Price

Terry Fisher's proposed solution to the problem of music piracy has been picked up on Copyfight and commented on by Seth Finkelstein among others.

One of the main questions is, how will the compulsory license revenues be distributed. In Fisher's model, there will be some sort of counting done. Since I have been working on a voluntary version of this for some time in order to help me keep track of what I listen to and listen more often to tunes I don't hear as much, I can certainly attest to how difficult it is to do rigorously. So, Seth's point is certainly well taken. The devil is in the details and 100% measurement sounds Fritzian, (or Orwellian). However, on many platforms it is relatively easy -- hey if I can code it, it must be easy. Particularly if you don't have to worry about cheating. So, if we aren't worried about being accurate, but only about sampling and estimating, I think it can be pretty easily done (see Neilson's).

Update: Ed Felten has picked up the thread with a similar but different post which takes into account why people might want to cheat.

Update 2: Seth has replied to Ed's post. Seth has more nits to pick, writing:

But even if there was perfect sampling, I think there's a major obstacle in making the money numbers work. ... I'd really like to see some numbers attached to the idea. These are the sorts of grubbly details that tend to sink appealing speculations.

See also my comments on Seth's reply.

London Tube Map

Jason Kottke has a geographically accurate London tube map up [from Raelity Bytes].

Fred von Lohmann Interview

TechFocus posts its interview with Fred von Lohman of the EFF [via Greplaw]. Fred always has something interesting to say, so go take a look.

17 Inches

Mac tech envy [via Gizmodo].