California wireless access bill 855

AB 855 (current text here) aims to streamline leasing of public lands for cellphone companies, and earmarks 15% of the revenue for 'digital divide' projects, to be disbursed by a committee.

How about simply creating a presumption in favour of granting community and non-profit 802.11 wireless projects access to public lands for their base stations and backhaul?

If Niue can have ubiquitous public wireless access, why not California?

Wolfram's conference

Is being thoroughly and clearly blogged by David Weinberger

Can San Jose choose freedom?

Comcast is suing San Jose on First Amendment grounds.
SJ's quid pro quo for renewing Comcast's cable monopoly was providing public internet access for the council.

So here's a radical suggestion. Instead of handing out a monopoly, open the cable poles to anyone who wants to run wires on it. Encourage community wireless networks to be formed.

Anyone want to help lobby for this? Offer advice? sjcable@epeus.com

Nationalizing music, protection rackets and freedom

Jim Griffin vehemently objected to my description of his proposals for funding music as 'nationalization'. He is working on an actuarial way to fund copyright payment via a kind of insurance. At present he has not publicly documented his ideas, and he pointed me at this article, which does give a good background, but then advocates these 'solutions':
1) A compulsory license on all media for use over computer networks
2) A tax on all computer networks and other computing storage devices
3) a statistically vague statutory metering model to distribute this money.

Calling this nationalization is not an exaggeration.

Will this compensation scheme pay me for my blog, for my posts to the pho mailing list, for my IM chats and video conferences?

People buy internet connectivity to connect to one another; transferring copyright works is incidental. This is like charging a annual car tax to pay for music listened to on the radio while driving.

Jim's suggested scheme plays into the heart of the democracy debate, because he does not trust the public. He does not believe they will voluntarily pay for music, so they must be coerced. Here's what he said:

payment for music can now truly be said to be voluntary, technically and practically if not legally. [...]
A civilized society should not -- I think cannot -- tolerate a voluntary economy in knowledge, creativity, art and speech. [...]
I am avowedly for compulsory payments for digital art assessed at the source of the digits, whether internet service provider or digital wireless provider. In the country where you get your digits, you must pay through the service provider, which worldwide is regulated by a sovereign communications agency.

Jim is a good man, and I'm sure if he were given control of disbursing the taxes on computers he would try to do it fairly and well, but I don't believe he'd get the job. I think the kind of regulatory capture we have seen before would take place, and the placemen for the big publishers who feel most threatened by a widening of the market would divert the revenues to themselves.

The iTunes music store and others like them show that people will voluntarily pay, when they perceive a fair deal. 5 million songs sold in 8 weeks to the relatively small pool of users has generated more revenue for Jim's erstwhile clients, the record labels, than 5 years of compulsory licensing from the DMCA.

This is the zeroth law of economics. Uncoerced trades create value, as both parties perceive a benefit, or they don't trade. Coerced trades destroy value.

To increase the funds for art in a sustainable way we need to come up with models that provide that perceived value.

Jim's 'insurance for copyright payment' is less like nationalization, but it is a lot like a protection racket. Pay off the RIAA and they won't use the Verizon decision to harass you with automated DMCA takedown requests?

It also is predicated on the payment for art falling to the marginal cost of distribution; effectively treating music as homogeneous and of low value; he advocates the great 'lost dream' of the celestial jukebox service.

There has been huge growth, as he concedes, in devices designed to store streams for playback. The million iPods, the success of TiVo devices, and yes, all those CD burners, are concrete counter examples that show how much people value having their own stored media, not relying on a centralized, and possibly ephemeral service.

If the iTunes store's terms were adjusted a bit, to provide a lifetime right to obtain a high-quality unencrypted copy of the work in question, rather than the right to download an encrypted one once, and back it up and burn to CD in your own time, I think it could realise even greater value, as this is what people are trying to buy when they buy CDs.

Jim's (January) post in full, reproduced with permission:

At its essence, I think the current situation can be summed up as follows: Increasingly, we live in a world where payment for music (and other digital art) is voluntary.

Sure, that's always been true to some degree, but the degree is increasing with the erosion of friction. Technology is propelling us to a world of friction-free delivery of music (and books and movies and most speech and art). Indeed, it is fair to say that some are already there -- Qualcomm has a demo vehicle equipped with 2.4mbps wireless (almost two T-1 connections) -- and it is a slippery slope as the rest of us follow.

I repeat, payment for music can now truly be said to be voluntary, technically and practically if not legally. Violations are less enforceable than speeding tickets, with only large-scale violators the avowed targets of authorities. You can find anything you want with a simple software client, and that's not going to change during our lifetimes; in fact, it's going to get easier. Or worse, depending on your perspective.

A civilized society should not -- I think cannot -- tolerate a voluntary economy in knowledge, creativity, art and speech. Quite the opposite, the hallmark of civilization is advancement in the creative arts, and art is indispensable in the advancement of science.

Clearly, some differ on this point. They advocate the straight-line efficiency of free markets on the one hand, but believe morality or technology or the law or some combination will sufficiently compel us to satisfy and stimulate art, knowledge and speech with payment that is essentially by choice. This talk is about speed bumps, or keeping honest people honest, or inducing just enough friction to make a market, or virtual tip jars, suing the supernodes, whatever. Call it what you will, it is the last grasp of an argument that began with control and now pleads for just enough inconvenience or persuasion to keep people buying products or digital keys or authentication services they now know they no longer need to enjoy the art they love.

I do not believe voluntary payment for music will sufficiently spur the growth of the information economy to reward rightsholders in music, movies, books and other digital art, nor do I believe we will develop legal, technical or persuasive means to make payment more than voluntary, unless we enact a sovereign, global system of compulsory payments on digital access, whether wireless or wired.

If you are not part of finding an appropriate solution for compulsory payments then you are part of supporting a world of voluntary payment. Knowingly or not, you must either advocate a solution that collects the money needed to support a global world of audio, video, text and graphics you love, or watch them whither and die.

Supporters of rights management technologies are also unwittingly supporting a world of voluntary payments. These hypothetical, unproven so-called solutions never have and never will achieve their aims for a long list of reasons, but here I will offer only one: Digitization liberates art and knowledge that can be digitized to establish the shortest, most efficient path from source to destination, and this bionomic (www.bionomics.org) notion was designed into the internet and is an inherent feature of digitization. The cat is out of the bag; the shortest path to the music you hear in the dorm room next door will never again include the record store down the street.

As a result, I am avowedly for compulsory payments for digital art assessed at the source of the digits, whether internet service provider or digital wireless provider. In the country where you get your digits, you must pay through the service provider, which worldwide is regulated by a sovereign communications agency. The penetration rates of digital services are now sufficient in almost every country to spread the costs across many wallets such that the payments will not seriously diminish the growth and use of those services. In fact, the opposite is true, because without access to content, whether because of licensing or because its economy continues to dry up for lack of revenue, the services cannot thrive.

Finally, I now believe compulsory payment to be more important than compulsory licensing. I think we cannot live without the former, and the latter will take care of itself with a sufficient pool of money. Like performance rights, you needn't license them, needn't choose a society, but you'd be silly not to do so. Given a sufficient pool of money, there will be plenty of content, and the serious pools created by per connection payments will grow the business by multiples that will bring all major studio content by choice, and offer independents access to global markets previously restricted by practical, legal and illegal obstacles.

We today live in a world of voluntary payment for music, movies and other digital art. Technology's liberation of this content will increasingly outstrip its ability to control the content. We must either fashion and enact a global, sovereign compulsory payment system on digital access or accept an art and knowledge economy based on ever more voluntary payments and the inevitable loss of revenue. And we needn't compel rights holders to join this system; building it will draw them, and while they may not be wrong to await its creation, I believe them certainly wrong if they are not actively a part of bringing it about.

Blogalite

A new term was just coined in #joiito:
Blogalite (noun)
1. One who blogs about all the exciting people at parties
2. One who starts a blog to get invited to parties
3. One who flits through the comments on other people's blogs but rarely gets round to blogging themselves

Etym. from blogger + socialite

oblig. Limerick:

Chatting in IRC late at night,
We coined a new word 'blogalite'
For someone who's arty,
Always at a blog party,
But never quite finds time to write.

Jim Griffin - an apology

Jim Griffin tells me I mischaracterised his views on music.

I was relying on second-hand reports, and have removed this post.

I will read his congressional testimony more thoroughly, rather than just skimming it, and give a more detailed reponse.

remote heckling continued - Dan Gillmor

I don't really want to heckle Dan, as his 'We media' piece is spot on.

What I would like to point out is something Joi & I were discussing:

Kevin Marks: newspapers biz model is backwards
Kevin Marks: they give away news and sell olds
Joi Ito: haha
azeemxazhar: K: you are right!
Kevin Marks: shoudl make archives free and charge for breaking stuff
Joi Ito: yup
azeemxazhar: it's where the value lies.
Joi Ito: you should buy futures on news from journalists
Joi Ito: You get it first.

Slashdot and FuckedCompany both do this already. The mainstream papers need to remember the old adage that 'todays news is tomorrows fishwrap' and adjust pricing accordingly.

One thing Dan says is that big media companies work to protect Journalists from lawsuits; which is the opposite of what Bill O'Reilly (Tim's evil twin?) says - he wants just media companies big enough to sue, and damn the 1st amendment.

Why was this line printed at the bottom of Bill's piece instead of the top:

Time now for "The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day"...

Heckling through a timewarp

Cory's upcoming novel, 'Eastern Standard Tribe' is about people whose locus of attention is displaced from their timezone. This happened to me last weekend when Joi Ito, Cory and Dan Gillmor were in Finland for an earnest conference about emergence, democracy and the like.

I was invited into an AIM chat by Joi, along with Jeannie, and had the odd experience of heckling the conference remotely. Having met most of the participants beforehand at ETcon or read their blogs, I had some idea of what they might talk about.

I'll post a few remote heckles later

Liebowitz sees decline, blames downloading. I disagree.

Stan Liebowitz has posted an updated and revised examination of the impact of MP3 downloads on record sales.

The bottom line: MP3 downloading is harming sales. No other explanations that have been put forward to explain the recent decline hold up under analysis.
Nevertheless, how far should we be willing to go to protect the record industry from a 20-25%
decline in business? Are recent proposals, such as the Berman bill going too far? My own view is that
such proposals are going too far. Should we switch to a non-market alternative as suggested by Lessig,
Natenal, and Romer? I believe that switching to a non-market alternative should be an absolutely
last-resort policy [...] Allowing record companies to protect their wares using digital right management technology seems to be a far more reasonable alternative.

I've just managed to read this through in detail; it is a thorough piece of work, as before, and measured in its conclusions, but it is still missing a few key measures.

Stan notes that the 'amount of time spent on activities' survey he uses to dismiss displacement of music by DVD or other activities, is methodologically flawed.

The librarying of DVDs rather than albums is not really tested. Seeing per capita DVD sales (and rentals) on the same composite chart showing the different music formats would be very interesting.

The cell-phone/text messaging/chat displacement should not be underestimated either. The amount spent on cellphone connectivity by the text-message generation is enough to displace a fair bit of prerecorded entertainment spending.

These quibbles aside, there is a key methodological problem at the core of the project. It works from the assumption that the RIAA records sold represent the totality of music consumption, and that any online music downloaded necessarily is an infringement of RIAA copyrights.

In fact, there is a great deal of music available online that is from artists outside the RIAA orbit, and freely made available, sometimes to promote CD sales, sometimes just for pleasure. This does reduce RIAA profits, but by displacement, not by theft.

A more subtle point is that network theory predicts that as interconnections between customers grow, the chance of a big cascade hit grows at first, but then as they are exposed to a more diverse range of advice and opinions, it falls off. The hugely increased connectivity that the net and cellphones enable may have caused the phase transition on the customer base.

This is discussed in Duncan Watts' classic paper.
In either of these two scenarios, the independent labels and musicians do better.

why are communications so much slower than chips?

Martin Hellman ponders why we haven't seen the kind of growth of speed in networking we do with chips.

I have a 54 Mbps wireless network at home, connected to the 'net by 56 kbps dialup.
So I don't have a 'last mile' problem - the last 300ft are fine.
I just need to grow outwards from that.

Blog clothing

Show the body part most commonly fact checked by weblogs:

AlienAid - expats - UK to Spain

Bar�ablog talks about the expat life in Spain. Much the same is true in the US, but the fact that you can communicate in English reasonably well makes it less obvious.

Blogrepping

Dave Sifry's new Technorati search is cool enough to need a verb, like 'googling'. I propose 'blogrepping' - from 'blog' and 'grep'.

Social software readings

Liz has a good reading list
I'd say don't forget those game designers:
Richard Bartle's classic paper on the kinds of players you need in MUDs
Stuart Cheshire on the Monopoly effect
Some other good sources I gathered for mediAgora