What Nathan [Myhrvold] Did Next…

Start an invention factory of course.

Dan Gillmor’s notes from the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference
Full text here. Quote:

“The floor for the entertainment and other “content” industries is increasingly clear. They don’t fundamentally believe in fair use, and they see technology as a way to turn everything into pay-per-view — a system that would eliminate fair use almost completely.”

My Observer column about John Gillmore’s essay on the implications of the Hollings Bill is here.

Salon: Napster’s wake. The MP3 movement may have already had its day in the sun — the revolution, with all its attendent celebrity, has ended — but file-swapping still continues in a quieter sort of way. Will the record labels eventually catch up to reality and offer a reasonable product that customers won’t resist? [Tomalak’s Realm]

John Robb: “Did the Internet enable a new economy? I think the latest evidence says that it has. But it isn’t the new economy corporate America expected.”  [Scripting News]

Dan Gillmor on the next P2P wave
Posted on Tue, May. 14, 2002

“Napster seems closer to death than ever. But its progeny are multiplying.

On Tuesday, the pioneering file-sharing company lost its latest chief executive and moved closer to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. Sometimes the revolutionaries take the bullets.

Napster’s descent was partly the company’s own fault. It knew, as internal documents showed during the court case that led to a shutdown and attempted re-engineering of the service, that many users of its software were engaging in misbehavior that ranged up to outright theft. The company’s legal defense didn’t move a federal judge, and the entertainment cartel curbed its most visible threat in decades.

Yet anyone stopping by the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara this week surely noted the insurgency’s continuing strength. The concepts Napster made popular, notably in the arena known as “peer to peer” technology, are an indelible and growing part of the scene.

Peer-to-peer, also known by the abbreviation P2P, continues to infiltrate the tech landscape. It simply makes sense to make more efficient use of capabilities — of devices and people — at the edge of networks.

Consider the “content-addressable Web” being introduced at the conference today by a Minnesota-based company, Onion Networks.

It’s based on the first wave of peer-to-peer applications, and makes clever use of the P2P concept, enabling people at the edge to distribute large files much more easily and cheaply.

Here’s a rough description of how it works: Say you have a video you want lots of people to see. You configure your server computer with some of Onion’s capabilities. When someone downloads your file, that person’s own computer becomes a site where other people can go to download the same file. The more people who get the video, the more widely it’s distributed — with the Onion software keeping track — and the less load you’ll see on your own computer.

It’s somewhat analogous to the class of products known as caching servers, such as those run by Akamai. Companies pay Akamai to store copies of their most widely requested Web material in various physical locations, so people can get it more easily and locally. Cory Doctorow, a technologist and writer, calls the Onion technology “Ad-hoc-amai” — reflecting the ad hoc way the data spreads out to local computers.

Justin Chapweske, Onion’s chief technology officer, says the company will license its technology free to open-source and public-domain projects. “Our focus is to give something back to the open-source community,” he says.

Open source and the public domain are under attack as never before, largely from the entertainment cartel that so successfully brought Napster to heel. But resistance is beginning to surface to tactics that would not just curb the Napsters of this world, but would literally require Hollywood’s approval for technological innovation….”

Wonderful story by Larry Lessig about the way the copyright thugs have reached deep into even elite universities. He wrote a scholarly paper. He launched a copy of Morpheus and put his paper in the shared folder. Went home for the weekend. On Monday he comes into the office and his computer is disconnected. Stanford security had paid him a visit. “That’s illegal,” they said. Note the irony. Larry is the author of the paper. He owns the copyright. All he sought to do was to use Morpheus to share it freely. But the RIAA and its legal lackeys are so obsessed with the idea that we are all thieves that they cannot contemplate the notion of anyone using file-sharing software for sharing ideas.  [Thanks to Dave Winer for this.]

A Dozen Things We Know About Blogs
Thoughtful web essay about the phenomenon.

Why openness is best — even in cryptography. (Especially in cryptography?)

“Cryptography is hard, and almost all cryptographic systems are insecure. It takes the cryptographic community, working over years, to properly vet a system. Almost all secure cryptographic systems were developed with public and published algorithms and protocols. I can’t think of a single cryptographic system developed in secret that, when eventually disclosed to the public, didn’t have flaws discovered by the cryptographic community. And this includes the Skipjack algorithm and the Clipper protocol, both NSA-developed.”

Excerpt from Brice Schneier’s latest Cryptogram newsletter.

More fallout from AOL Time Warner
“NYT” report on Gerald Levin’s departure.

“You just lost $54 billion,” an angry shareholder told the executives yesterday, referring to the noncash charge that AOL Time Warner took in the first quarter to account for the company’s plunge in value since the merger. “Where’d that come from?” the accuser continued. “Our pockets — the shareholders — not the options you got.”

Because Mr. Levin is expected to continue as an adviser to the company, analysts and company executives are wary of discussing his legacy on the record. But a recurrent criticism is that Mr. Levin gave away too much of the company when he agreed to merger terms in January 2000 that granted America Online 55 percent of Time Warner for AOL stock — just months before the bursting of the Internet bubble.

No one can predict the future of the stock market, of course. But industry executives also fault Mr. Levin for having overestimated the opportunities for complements between Time Warner’s conventional media holdings and AOL’s Internet business.

“When he sold to AOL, he sold for nothing,” one industry executive said. “It was pretty clear that the great synergies Jerry talked about were unrealistic.”