This headline from a blog post on CNet sums up well what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: The state of copyright law ensures that an emergent business which is not on unquestionable legal ground must endure a great deal of pressure from content owners.
What do I mean by the state of copyright law? Currently, service providers are granted immunity from copyright as long as they take down infringing material at an owner’s request (DMCA). YouTube could arguably fit in this category because they don’t monitor what individuals upload until they receive one of these letters (which they obviously follow through on). Yet, on the other hand, if one makes a ‘business model’ out of infringement (Grokster), there is liability for the infringement of users.
The legislation and case law in this case has created a situation which (as is common in copyright) is far from clear for owners, providers, or users. The result: if YouTube chooses to fight, may be a trip to court which would resolve the issue–but in what way? Will the courts create a threshold of how much infringement a business model could allow? This could create further complications for other providers in the future.
As copying becomes easier and managing control becomes more complicated, simpler rules will serve business and users the best because of a decrease in litigation. From what I can tell (at a very quick glance), the Copyright Modernization Act proposes to add greater complexity to this very issue.
I’ll try to post more about the Act and the pending WIPO treaty sometime soon.
Other Sources:
Copyright Axe To Fall On YouTube? (Slashdot), YouTube in Copyright Cross Hairs? (Reuters/Wired)
The FCC (nobody’s saying exactly who) has allegedly ordered the destruction of a report which found in part that:
local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of “on-location” news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market. (AP)
This is quite a surprising cover-up and may be seen as evidence of the push within the FCC towards media consolidation. I’ve heard it claimed that one of the arguments in support of consolidation is that there is no hard evidence that it causes a harm to media content or communities. This report appears to speak to this concern.
Sources:Media ownership study ordered destroyed (AP), Officials Ordered FCC Report Destroyed, Says Ex-Staffer (Broadcasting and Cable)
A recent Slashdot question to readers on How Much Does Your Work Depend on the Internet? includes a number of posts remarking on how important redundancy is to running an effective network.
Also, Ars is noting that the fight over encrypted Bittorrent is coming down to the creation of systems which systematically examine each packet a user sends/receives.
This has brought a few questions to mind:
First, how technically effective could a network that is not redundant and not packet neutral be? The original DARPA net was designed to be neutral to withstand attack, but it was later found that this design also has the benefit of greater reliability from being able to route packets through the path of least resistance. Routers know where to send packets, but if they have to additionally take on the task of looking ‘inside the envelope,’ will they still be as effective (read: fast and reliable)?
Second, I am having a difficult time understanding the basis for bandwidth throttling of bittorrent (or any other resource intensive application) users. My understanding of purchasing a network service is that one is allowed to use the service in whatever legal way they see fit up to the capacity of what was purchased (be it minutes or kb/s). Bittorrent users may use a greater amount of this capacity over time…but didn’t they already pay for it?
Perhaps these are two other aspect of the definition of network neutrality: packet neutrality and service/content neutrality (or the freedom to use a service, in whatever capacity desired, as long as it’s within the bounds of time/’bandwidth’ limitations).
Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0: “nobody even knows what it means”
I haven’t listened to the interview yet, but it looks as though the inventor of the Web isn’t too hot on the idea of Web 2.0 as something new. Specifically, he argues that the original web acted as a collaborative space.
For geeks like me who were learning html in 1995, that might have been partially true, but there are a number of emergent aspects which I would argue make the ‘connecting of people’ more of a reality:
- Greater interactivity through scripting and databases has brought the web beyond just static pages,
- Greater attention to design has made using web pages, and even publishing much easier (think Blogger), and finally
- Greater connections are being made between content points. Digg, delicious, trackbacks and other collaborative/responsive linking and moderation is tying the web much closer together than simple static links.
- (edit: add to this extensible web applications and open web services/APIs which allow for greater customization of experience)
Sure, this might not be “2.0,” but the name does indicate what has been happening on the web: something new which has even more greatly democratized mass communication.
