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Broadband Politics » New Age crazy http://broadbandpolitics.com On the theory and practice of networking Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:39:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Why Lawyers are Scorned http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/ http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 05:35:21 +0000 Richard Bennett http://bennett.com/blog/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/ 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 trialâ€”an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarshipâ€”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.]]> http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/feed/ 12 Internet Myths http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/01/internet-myths/ http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/01/internet-myths/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 04:45:15 +0000 Richard Bennett http://bennett.com/blog/?p=5348 Both of these features are side-effects of packet switching, the information transfer system used by the Internet and all the stuff that rides on it. Packet switching isn't hard for people of reasonable intelligence to understand by reference to postcards and the like. Engineers can generally take such an audience on a productive trip through the essentials in a few minutes, even relatively unskilled ones. It's not that hard. Some of the people who make a living explaining the Internet to the mass audience get it all wrong, however. Most of these people are lawyers or law professors, which is kind of mystifying because they're bright people and really should know better. One such example I encountered this week is an article in The New Republic by Tim Wu comparing the Internet to movies, radio, and TV. I've met Tim and find him to be a bright person, certainly brighter than many of this para-technical adversaries, so it's odd that he would make statements that are simply ridiculous on their face. Wu invents a fictitious element:

History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.

How radical it would be, according to Wu, for someone to build a radio that could carry spoken words without regard for their language, message, political orientation, or emotional expression. Who could possibly imagine a movie theater capable of showing content produced by Warner, Sony, or Four Wall Productions? How revolutionary it would be if we had a transportation system capable of handling trucks laden with either the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times, instead of the tightly interconnected system we have today! Where does this nonsense come from, and who can possibly believe it? Wu is probably mislead by the language that engineers use when describing network structure (or "architecture" as we like to call it.) At the dawn of packet switching, we mistakenly guessed that each problem in the delivery of a packet could be solved once and for all at one point in the system and if we could identify these points we'd be on the right track to developing a general theory of network design and optimization. The embodiment of this idea was the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, which decomposed networks into seven functional layers from application (at the top) to physical signaling (at the bottom.) Somewhere in the middle a line was drawn between content and transport, or more pertinently between representations of content and systems of transport. But this structure was simply an abstraction that can be applied to any system of information or transport just as easily as to Internets. Movies represent information as sounds and pictures on a strip of film, and films move from studio to theater in trucks. Replace the film with a disk file and substitute fiber optic cables for trucks and nothing changes in the realm of structure or description. The Internet moves digital information, and it does so by copying bits and then discarding them. Bits move quickly and inexpensively because the ratio of information to mass in a digital system is very, very high. Walls of separation are fine and good in the realm of law, but they have very little to do with technology unless we want them to. The Internet differs from old media technologies in terms of speed, cost, and reach, but not in structure. Now you know why. ]]> http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/01/internet-myths/feed/ 12 Jeff Jarvis is tripping http://broadbandpolitics.com/2008/08/jeff-jarvis-is-tripping/ http://broadbandpolitics.com/2008/08/jeff-jarvis-is-tripping/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:20:08 +0000 Richard Bennett http://bennett.com/blog/2008/08/jeff-jarvis-is-tripping/ with this dismissal of intelligence:

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. Iâ€™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 hasnâ€™t changed that. The wisdom of crowds isnâ€™t wise, it tends to the lowest common denominator. You donâ€™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 isnâ€™t about â€œmerit;â€ 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.]]> http://broadbandpolitics.com/2008/08/jeff-jarvis-is-tripping/feed/ 1 Crazy but not stupid http://broadbandpolitics.com/2008/08/crazy-but-not-stupid/ http://broadbandpolitics.com/2008/08/crazy-but-not-stupid/#comments Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:29:30 +0000 Richard Bennett http://bennett.com/blog/2008/08/crazy-but-not-stupid/ about Larry Lessig in Internet Evolution:

The cold Net neutrality war is about to get very hot. Lessig may be crazy, but he isnâ€™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 weâ€™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.

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 trialâ€”an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarshipâ€”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."

History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. Iâ€™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.

The cold Net neutrality war is about to get very hot. Lessig may be crazy, but he isnâ€™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 weâ€™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.

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 trialâ€”an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarshipâ€”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."

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 trialâ€”an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarshipâ€”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."

History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. Iâ€™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.

The cold Net neutrality war is about to get very hot. Lessig may be crazy, but he isnâ€™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 weâ€™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. Technorati Tags: net neutrality, New Age crazy, Lessig, Google]]> http://broadbandpolitics.com/2008/08/crazy-but-not-stupid/feed/ 1 Sharecroppers Have it Better http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/01/internet-myths/ http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/01/internet-myths/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 04:45:15 +0000 Richard Bennett http://bennett.com/blog/?p=5348 Both of these features are side-effects of packet switching, the information transfer system used by the Internet and all the stuff that rides on it. Packet switching isn't hard for people of reasonable intelligence to understand by reference to postcards and the like. Engineers can generally take such an audience on a productive trip through the essentials in a few minutes, even relatively unskilled ones. It's not that hard. Some of the people who make a living explaining the Internet to the mass audience get it all wrong, however. Most of these people are lawyers or law professors, which is kind of mystifying because they're bright people and really should know better. One such example I encountered this week is an article in The New Republic by Tim Wu comparing the Internet to movies, radio, and TV. I've met Tim and find him to be a bright person, certainly brighter than many of this para-technical adversaries, so it's odd that he would make statements that are simply ridiculous on their face. Wu invents a fictitious element:

History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.

How radical it would be, according to Wu, for someone to build a radio that could carry spoken words without regard for their language, message, political orientation, or emotional expression. Who could possibly imagine a movie theater capable of showing content produced by Warner, Sony, or Four Wall Productions? How revolutionary it would be if we had a transportation system capable of handling trucks laden with either the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times, instead of the tightly interconnected system we have today! Where does this nonsense come from, and who can possibly believe it? Wu is probably mislead by the language that engineers use when describing network structure (or "architecture" as we like to call it.) At the dawn of packet switching, we mistakenly guessed that each problem in the delivery of a packet could be solved once and for all at one point in the system and if we could identify these points we'd be on the right track to developing a general theory of network design and optimization. The embodiment of this idea was the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, which decomposed networks into seven functional layers from application (at the top) to physical signaling (at the bottom.) Somewhere in the middle a line was drawn between content and transport, or more pertinently between representations of content and systems of transport. But this structure was simply an abstraction that can be applied to any system of information or transport just as easily as to Internets. Movies represent information as sounds and pictures on a strip of film, and films move from studio to theater in trucks. Replace the film with a disk file and substitute fiber optic cables for trucks and nothing changes in the realm of structure or description. The Internet moves digital information, and it does so by copying bits and then discarding them. Bits move quickly and inexpensively because the ratio of information to mass in a digital system is very, very high. Walls of separation are fine and good in the realm of law, but they have very little to do with technology unless we want them to. The Internet differs from old media technologies in terms of speed, cost, and reach, but not in structure. Now you know why. ]]> http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/01/internet-myths/feed/ 12 Broadband Politics » New Age crazy http://broadbandpolitics.com On the theory and practice of networking Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:39:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Why Lawyers are Scorned http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/ http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 05:35:21 +0000 Richard Bennett http://bennett.com/blog/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/ 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 trialâ€”an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarshipâ€”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."

History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. Iâ€™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.

The cold Net neutrality war is about to get very hot. Lessig may be crazy, but he isnâ€™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 weâ€™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.

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. Iâ€™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 hasnâ€™t changed that. The wisdom of crowds isnâ€™t wise, it tends to the lowest common denominator. You donâ€™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 isnâ€™t about â€œmerit;â€ 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.]]> http://broadbandpolitics.com/2008/08/jeff-jarvis-is-tripping/feed/ 1 Broadband Politics » New Age crazy http://broadbandpolitics.com On the theory and practice of networking Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:39:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Why Lawyers are Scorned http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/ http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 05:35:21 +0000 Richard Bennett http://bennett.com/blog/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/ 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 trialâ€”an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarshipâ€”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."

History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. Iâ€™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.

The cold Net neutrality war is about to get very hot. Lessig may be crazy, but he isnâ€™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 weâ€™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. Technorati Tags: net neutrality, New Age crazy, Lessig, Google]]> http://broadbandpolitics.com/2008/08/crazy-but-not-stupid/feed/ 1 Broadband Politics » New Age crazy http://broadbandpolitics.com On the theory and practice of networking Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:39:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Why Lawyers are Scorned http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/ http://broadbandpolitics.com/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 05:35:21 +0000 Richard Bennett http://bennett.com/blog/2009/05/why-lawyers-are-scorned/ 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 trialâ€”an argument which has no real basis in case law or moderate academic scholarshipâ€”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."

History does not always repeat itself, to be sure; and it is possible that the Internet is different. Its most fundamental feature, after all, is a radical separation of distribution and content, which is the very opposite of the NBC/Paramount system... The Internet's wall between content and distribution also creates considerable power for those who can harness it. It is little appreciated how dependent the Internet's business models are on a neutrality in the infrastructure.

The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. Iâ€™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.

The cold Net neutrality war is about to get very hot. Lessig may be crazy, but he isnâ€™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 weâ€™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.

In general, we are poorly served by slogans such as the "wisdom of crowds", which often stand for nothing beyond finding a few popular selections by various types of polling. It may work well for entertainment sites, and business owners are enthused at how consumers can be led to volunteer to undertake part of the process of determining what to sell to a target market. But the idea that these simple systems can be applied to deep value-laden social problems, of politics, or even relevant search results, is like trying to use a hammer to turn screws on the basis that it works so well to hit nails.

He uses the "digital sharecropper" image to describe Wikipedia contributors. Actually, sharecroppers do make some money from their work, so Wikipedia contributors are more like slaves. But given the voluntary nature of their participation, "slaves" overstates the inferiority of their status relative to Wiki overlords Wales et. al. Perhaps "brainwashed cult members" works best. See Seth's blog for more. And for related news, see this Valleywag story about Wikipedia's number two and his defense of pedophilia. Not kidding, boys and girls, it's for real.]]> http://broadbandpolitics.com/2008/05/sharecroppers-have-it-better/feed/ 0