Category Archives: Culture

Why Lawyers are Scorned

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This is simply breath-taking:

Wholesale copying of music on P2P networks is fair use. Statutory damages can’t be applied to P2P users. File-swapping results in no provable harm to rightsholders.

These are just some of the assertions that Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson made last week in his defense of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum.

Nesson founded the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

If he made this argument with a straight face, I predict a world-wide botox shortage.

There’s more:

Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, “this does seem to be a question on many people’s minds.”

It’s not on my mind, nor on the minds of the students who serve as co-counsel:

The discomfort with strategy extends even to Nesson’s own students, who are doing much of the research and writing. Ray Bilderback, who is writing the “disclosures” about expert witness testimony, wrote that “all of this looks very bad from my perspective. I think that introducing our experts at this late stage to the very novel argument that we intend to raise at trial—an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarship—is a blunder that could have very serious consequences. At this point, I have no idea what our disclosures will look like. And they have to be filed TOMORROW. Bad, bad, bad. We should have been working on this for weeks rather than days.”

Read the whole thing, it’s even crazier than you think. Before it’s all over I expect to see Nesson invoking John Perry Barlow.

UPDATE: Here’s some more from The Register.

DTV Transition Starts, World Doesn’t End

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Contrary to the expectations of Congress and the FCC, the first phase of the DTV transition took place without major incident. Some 23% of American TV stations stopped sending out analog signals Tuesday at midnight, and only 28,000 calls came into the centers the FCC and the cable and satellite providers have established for transition help. The biggest category of call, close to half of all calls, was from people unable to pick up the digital broadcasts at all, or picking them up with very poor quality. A significant number didn’t know how to setup their converter boxes, or didn’t realize that the converter boxes have to scan for channels.

These numbers support a suspicion I’ve had for a while now, that the emphasis on converter boxes is misplaced. The problem that most people are going to have is a complete inability to receive digital broadcasts at all, because they don’t have the right kind of antenna, the antenna isn’t oriented properly, or because they live in the wrong place. Many stations are moving transmitter locations to alter service areas, and won’t be serving some traditional customers any more. Others are reducing power, sometimes quite substantially. Digital broadcasts are more robust, so some reduction in power is quite sensible. But I suspect that over-the-air delivery of TV is such a small percentage of the overall market – well below 20%, and in some areas less than 10% – that it doesn’t make financial sense for stations to invest heavily in high power transmitters.

The timing of the transition was very bad for this reason. A substantial number of OTA TV viewers are doing to need upgrades to roof-mounted antennas, and in many cases they’re going to need multiple antennas pointing in different directions. Getting up on a roof in February is not a pleasant experience in much of America, so a May or June transition date would have been much more sensible. In any event, it’s a good time to buy stock in antenna companies.

I’ve been doing some experiments with roof-mounted antennas that I’ll be reporting on shortly. So far, I can only get 5 stations where I live, and four broadcast in Spanish. Perhaps the FCC needs a budget for bilingual education as well as for converter boxes and antennas.

Internet Myths

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Among my missions in this life is the chore of explaining networking in general and the Internet in particular to policy makers and other citizens who don’t build network technology for a living. This is enjoyable because it combines so many of the things that make me feel good: gadgetry, technology, public policy, writing, talking, and education. It’s not easy, of course, because there are a lot of things to know and many ways to frame the issues. But it’s possible to simplify the subject matter in a way that doesn’t do too much violence to the truth.

As I see it, the Internet is different from the other networks that we’re accustomed to in a couple of important ways: for one, it allows a machine to connect simultaneously to a number of other machines. This is useful for web surfing, because it makes it possible to build a web page that draws information from other sources. So a blog can reference pictures, video streams, and even text from around the Internet and put it in one place where it can be updated in more-or-less real time. It enables aggregation, in other words. Another thing that’s unique about the Internet is that the underlying transport system can deliver information at very high speed for short periods of time. The connection between a machine and the Internet’s infrastructure is idle most of the time, but when it’s active it can get its information transferred very, very quickly. This is a big contrast to the telephone network, where information is constrained by call setup delays and a very narrow pipe.
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Incidentally, he speaks well too

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Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy:

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

“Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.”

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, “Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate — we get it, stop showing off.”

The president-elect’s stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

“Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can’t really do there, I think needing to do that isn’t tapping into what Americans are needing also,” she said.

How dare he.

The best in women’s wear

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Y’all should go read about this amazing dress designer, Miranda Bennett, in Time Out New York

A very feminine and elegant woman’s line with a little edge and a lot of versatility. “For my current collection, I imagined a really well-packed suitcase,” she explains. “I wanted the pieces to function together and fit a woman’s daily transition as she leaves the house in the morning, goes to work and goes out afterward.” Utilizing a casual wool fabric, Bennett innovatively creates jumpers; soft, flowing dresses; and flattering tops that look chic in any setting. And, unlike most multipurpose items, each piece has a surprising touch, like hidden pockets or a cozy silk lining. “I like to give the wearer a hidden luxury—it’s a nice secret for her to have.”

She does really amazing things with the cloth, like this:

Miranda dresses

a Miranda dress


Go forth and purchase.

Jeff Jarvis is tripping

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Jeff Jarvis is an intelligent man with a sentimental populist side. He’s writing a book praising Google, and sharing his thoughts as he goes along. Today’s entry goes off the deep end with this dismissal of intelligence:

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. I’ll argue just the opposite: Only the playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit – as defined by the public rather than the priests – which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.

Pardon me, but don’t we all know better than that?

Most people are stupid, and the Googlenet hasn’t changed that. The wisdom of crowds isn’t wise, it tends to the lowest common denominator. You don’t get popularity in the Googlenet by saying things that are intelligent or insightful, you do by showing naked women in various states of compromise and by inflaming the emotions in other equally manipulative ways. So this commentary simply ignores these truths of human nature. The link economy isn’t about “merit;” people link indiscriminately to things that made them laugh, get sexually aroused, pissed off, or confused.

If you want a culture that rewards excellence, you aren’t going to get it by ranking pages by the number of morons who saw fit to link to them, you rank them by the number of intelligent people who found them valuable. And that evidence shows up in the real world, not on the Googlenet.

Testing Internet capacity

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NBC is streaming the Olympics over the Internet, in multiple resolutions, in what amounts to a massive test of the ability of the Internet fabric to handle load. Nothing on this scale has been done before, although BCC did stream the last Olympics inside the UK using Multicast. So we’re going to learn just how realistic net neutrality really is:

This will be the biggest test today of Internet viewers’ appetite for streaming video of live sporting events – and of the Internet’s ability to handle that.

If the Internet service providers networks start getting maxed out, you can probably expect some “rate shaping” or other bandwidth management techniques to come into play, Eksten notes. After all, you still have to get the e-mail through for non-sports fans.

Which means not just technologists like Eksten but network neutrality proponents should spend a lot of time looking at logs and statistical reports from the service providers, after this is all over to see how the streaming affected the Internet’s fabric of networks.

Stay tuned, if you can.

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Crazy but not stupid

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I like Andrew Keen, occasionally. He makes an interesting observation about Larry Lessig in Internet Evolution:

The cold Net neutrality war is about to get very hot. Lessig may be crazy, but he isn’t stupid. He knows that Obama will probably win the election and that a Democratic president and Congress are much more likely to pass Net neutrality legislation.

So expect more stories from Lessig and his pro-Net-neutrality allies about government plots to close down the Internet. These catastrophe theorists want to scare us. They are ratcheting up the paranoia so that we’ll support legislation that will make it illegal for any broadband provider to set tiered pricing over its own network.

Think twice about the Net neutrality debate. The real horror story here could be that Lessig and his pro-Net Neutrality lobby are discouraging investment in broadband infrastructure. And it may be them, rather than the Justice Department or the big telephone or cable companies, who are the real threat to the long-term viability of our Internet.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, only more moderately.

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TiVo rolling out YouTube support

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Another sign of the ongoing convergence is TiVo new software enabling Series 3 and HD customers to play YouTube directly from TiVo in the latest software:

As I’d suspected, TiVo support for YouTube is indeed hidden within the 9.4 software update. Series 3 and TiVo HD subscribers should start seeing the application show up as early as tomorrow (Thursday), though the rollout will be completed over the next few weeks. And in some form of meta-irony, I’ve shot a brief video of YouTube on TiVo… on YouTube.

Switched digital video and TCP remote control are also parts of this release. TiVo is evolving into a bit of a nano data center, albeit very limited one.