Reading this piece by Stewart Alsop I had the thought that TiVo+broadband = a P2P system for television content. But when I got to the end of the article, it seemed that Alsop had backed off the idea. Or maybe he just didn’t see it? But the phrase “file-served television” is good.

Intriguing review of new book on network thinking.

The book is Linked: The New Science of Networks by Elbert-Laszlo Barabasi. This “NYT” review was good enough to make me order it from Amazon anyway. Quote:

“The extensions of Professor Barabasi’s thinking go in many directions. What caused Cisco Systems and other technology companies that outsource much of their production to be so clobbered in 2000 and 2001? Cisco, in particular, had bragged that its Internet-based supply chain meant that it would never be surprised by having too much inventory. But, Professor Barabasi writes, Cisco did not understand network effects and had to pay for billions of dollars’ worth of components in its extended supply chain; oddly, Cisco, the master of the network, didn’t think in network terms.”

ISOC warns about threats to the Net

The Internet’s potential for promoting expression and empowering citizens is under threat from corporate and government policies that clash with the medium’s long-standing culture of openness, some leading Internet thinkers warned.

At the annual Internet Society conference this week in Arlington, the engineers who built the Internet and many of the policymakers who follow its development urged caution as governments try to exert control and businesses look to maximize profits.

“We’re at a turning point in the evolution of the Internet,” said William J. Drake, a fellow at the University of Maryland. A wrong turn means “robbing it of its real democratic potential.”

Vint Cerf, co-developer of the Internet’s basic communications protocols, worries that big, traditional businesses could gain unprecedented control through manipulating the high-speed services that are delivered over cable and phone networks.

Companies are inhibiting innovation, Cerf said, by letting users receive information faster than they can send it.

“That leads to a lot of peculiar effects,” he said. Two people “could each receive high-quality video but can’t send it. They can’t have high-quality videoconferencing.” [ more…]

Useful summary of current state of play on access to personal data under RIPA

So why did the government back off the proposal for extending surveillance powers under the RIP Act?

Interesting piece in Stand arguing that one important factor was the volume of email and faxes to MPs by cyber-activists worried about online liberties. Quote:

“As most of you will already have heard, the government has backed down from the RIP s22 Order that would have given access to traffic data to dozens of government departments. We thought you’d like to know that this U-turn was largely down to you. The FaxYourMP folk say that they relayed 1789 faxes from last monday, and estimate that around 1600 of those were related to the s22 RIP Order. That means that, on average, every MP received at least two messages expressing concern over the measure. We’ve received mail from constituents saying that their Member of Parliament called them directly to discuss the issue. We’ve had MPs mail us with advice. We’ve had TV companies and newspapers contact us after they’d been hassled by their readers and viewers. We’ve even had MPs writing letters to constituents explaining, mournfully, that there was nothing they could do – and then had their own voters explain to them how to attend Standing Committee debates, and who to get in contact with others to help fight this order. Ah, those apathetic votees. ”

What does the financial services industry do for us? Answer: Zilch.

“One expert, formerly an investment banker who lived through the good times and got out of the City before the decline, says: ‘The financial services business has failed the three basic tests – fund management returns are falling, mergers and acquisitions have been shown not to work, analysts’ forecasts nearly always turn out to be wrong. How can they claim to have added any value to the well-being of the nation after all that? It’s a bloody scandal.’ ” Frank Kane on Britain’s rip-off financial services industry.

Dave Winer disappeared from the Web for a few days and then returned with some enigmatic references to illness. Seems to be connected with smoking. He’s not telling — just hinting. That’s his privilege. Hope he’s all right. I’ve been reading him for years, and he’s wonderfully insightful about the Net and refreshingly humane about life.

Why do we buy such absurdly powerful computers when many of us could get by with a good abacus? Are we all geneticists working on decoding the human genome? My Observer column this week.

Good interview with Larry Lessig by Reason magazine

Includes good succinct explanation of why intellectual property is different from other kinds of property:

“If you’re a lawyer, it’s OK to think of intellectual property as property, because we[base ‘]re trained to use the word property in a careful way. We don’t think of it as an absolute, perpetual right that can’t be trumped by anybody. We understand property rights are constantly limited by public-use exceptions and needs, and in that context we understand intellectual property to be a very particular, peculiar kind of property .. the only property constitutionally required to be for limited terms. It’s clearly established for a public purpose and is not a natural right.

The real problem is when people use it in the ordinary sense of the term property, which is “a thing that I have that nobody can take, forever, unless I give it to you.” By thinking of it as property, we have no resistance to the idea of certain great companies controlling “their” intellectual property forever. But if we instead use terms like monopoly to describe the control that companies like Disney have over art objects like Mickey Mouse, it’s harder to run naturally to the idea that you ought to have your monopoly right forever.

Another problem is the increasing ability of owners of intellectual property to control the actual use of that property. Before the network, if you bought a book, the First Sale doctrine made it impossible for the copyright owner to control what you did with it. Copyright law would not interfere with my ability to give you the book or copy a chapter or read the book a thousand times. All those things are completely within my control, partly because the law guarantees it, but also because the book producer couldn’t do anything about it even if he wanted.

As you move to the Internet, though, lots more control is possible. If you look in the permissions for an Adobe eBook, it has the power to control how many times you can print certain sections of the book, whether you can use technology to read the book aloud, whether you can cut and paste sections of the book. All these controls would not have existed without digital technology, because the cost of regulating those uses would have been too high.”

Also, very good on the way in which digital representations allow unparalleled extensions of IPRs:

“And now, if digital content has a built-in copy protection system, you aren’t allowed to interfere with it, even if the content isn’t protected by copyright laws. I have bought a number of eBooks, including Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle[base ‘]s Politics, of course, was never copyrighted, but the Adobe eBook reader forbids me from printing any pages of the book because the permissions have been set to disable any printing. If I try to interfere with those permissions .. if I write a bit of code to disable the limitations that forbid me from printing Aristotle’s Politics from my Adobe eBook .. that would be circumventing an access technology, which under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a crime.”

He also tells the story of how the Stanford network police got it wrong about his use of Morpheus:

“I was giving a talk at the New America Foundation. Jack Valenti from the Motion Picture Association of America stood up and talked about how awful it was that Stanford allowed a Morpheus server to exist on its network, and what did I think of this obvious technology to enable stealing? I told him I had a Morpheus server running on my machine at work, which was delivering my own content, both audio and text versions of lectures I[base ‘]ve given. When I first made this available, the Stanford network police came in and pulled the plug on my server over the weekend because they thought I was engaging in “illegal acts.” But I wasn[base ‘]t engaging in illegal acts. It[base ‘]s completely legal for me to distribute content that I have the copyright over, and this technology makes it very easy to do that.

The idea that you would assume that all uses are illegal is an overreaction to what I think is a legitimate problem. I’m not in favor of copyright theft, I’m just opposed to shutting down all technologies merely because copyright theft may occur on them.”

New Mac software implements ‘discover and share’ protocol
Register report.

Jaguar, or “Jag-wire”* as Jobs pronounced it, includes new utilities and important changes under the hood. A new service called Rendezvous automatically discovers other Mac users and drops their shared playlists into iTunes’ Source panel. Jobs showed one Mac notebook streaming to another. Apple said it will contribute the discovery and federation mechanism – which offers similar functionality to the low level services of Sun’s JCP-controlled Jini, and Microsoft’s UPP – as an Internet open standard.

“You want computers to discover each other and just share stuff” said Jobs.