Author: john

Engineering free of politics

Richard Bennet, an engineer who among other things works on Internet standards, comments on why the FCC should stay out of the internet neutrality fight. He convincingly argues why “the Internet is too neutral in some places, and not neutral enough in others.” I for one truly value hearing some of the complexities of net traffic explained so well. A little bit of technical understanding is great transparency.

There are, however, a two crucial points that Bennet misses:

  1. Engineering or technical decisions can have a social impact: Inventions and design decisions don’t happen in a social vacuum. While sometimes these effects are unintended, often a good technical design can change the way that people use technology.
  2. It is the FCC’s job to balance the politics and the engineering: As a governmental body, the FCC has been charged with doing more than setting technical standards. They (supposedly) regulate for the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.”  An example of their operating beyond technical standards-setting is the “must carry” rule in cable television. Rather than require television owners or manufacturers to use an “A-B” switch to select cable or over-the-air television, the FCC requires cable operators to include local broadcast stations in their service. Despite the fact that there was a technical means to this end, the FCC stepped in to resolve a dispute between rivaling television providers.

If I were an engineer, I would want to steer clear of the politics of technology; yet, the potential for. Yes “engineers solve engineering problems,” but there are historical lessons, political interests, and a number of other factors that a governing body like the FCC must balance. If there are places where the Internet is not neutral enough, past experience is a good guide for why we can’t simply trust the businesses that provide the service.

More on AP News & fair use

Simon over at Bloggasm tipped me off to an interview he did with Rogers Cadenhead of the Drudge Retort. There’s a couple of issues of concern that the Times article didn’t focus on:

When the AP requested a takedown of a few sentences from an article, Drudge retorted:

…that we think this is fair use. This was a small amount of quoted text and it linked to an AP story. Commenters commented on it and were evaluating the article. That’s a fundamental aspect of blogging. That’s when they told me that they don’t think that’s fair use either.

This is a surprising claim. While the DMCA forces the site owner to take the material down, it’s not clear in a case like this who would challenge the takedown (since the owner is the poster) or how conversation would continue absent the quote. It’s also the type of thing that one might not want to spend the energy/resources to fight.

This dual role of “service provider” and editor/poster wasn’t to my knowledge addressed in the DMCA takedown procedures. It leaves site owners in a precarious position of having to comply with the order, yet having to file a counter notice with… themselves? Ultimately, it probably comes down to whether the site owner wants to fight the claim.

Blogs and comments are in some ways the salon of today–if the public can’t discuss the news and issues of the day by giving their feelings and interpretations of what are largely facts our internet-based civil society will feel the impact. It just occurs to me that perhaps one of the greatest offenses of stories like this is the attempt to “micromanage copyright.” The problem here is that micromanaging is directly affecting this conversation.

Great scoop, Simon; and cheers for at least trying to get comment from the AP.

AP blogging fair use guidelines

The AP is setting guidelines to “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.”

This is a bit troubling.  Short of taking an entire article without comment, it’s hard to see how commenting on the news from one of the few sources that can afford to have bureaus around the world isn’t fair use free speech. Since the stories are primarily factual, in many cases political, and short (so there’s no “heart”) I would guess the guidelines will come down to a number of words or seconds they will “allow” a blogger to use.  My question is: will they consider this a license?

This was funny, though:

“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Mr. Kennedy [of the Associated Press] said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”

Another quick thought… where does this leave aggregators that automatically pull in entire stories (like our friends NewsObama.org)?  How is this different than copy/pasting an entire article into a blog entry.