MPAA: Kings of Irony

Here's a quick timeline: ~2000: Anyone who could afford a DVD drive for their computer could rip movies with some minor hassle with free tools floating around the internet. ~2003: The free tools become easily usable by anyone with a brain stem and interest in doing so. The programs crack DVD encryption methods with frankly embarrassing ease and speed. 2007: RealNetworks tries to make a legitimate tool for ripping DVDs while leaving in some DRM (i.e., restrictions on use). 2008: The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sues them for aiding infringement. The EFF files a brief supporting RealNetworks position, basically claiming it is fair use to copy your own DVDs and people have been doing it for almost a decade. Today: MPAA mocks the EFF for "living in the past". So, with dozens of commonly used programs out there for backing up DVDs - a perfectly reasonable thing to do, since the lifespan of data on commercial hard drives is basically infinite if you back it up properly - the MPAA decides to target one that actually keeps the encryption that they original put on the disks. Their definition of the past is pretty funny too, since (eight years ago/today/in the foreseeable future) DVD backup (was/is/will continue to be) easy and legal under the terms of fair use and really, really easy. I'm kinda surprised RealNetworks even found a market for it with the number of effective free tools out there.

The i9/11 and the iPATRIOT Act

Excellent, excellent talk on the future of the internet with some very smart people. Jonathan Zittrain: Author of "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" (available free here). Lawrence Lessig: Lawyer and author of dozens of books about free culture, recently having switched from talking about copyright specifically to a more broad range of IT and government corruption issues. Vin Cerf: He basically invented the internet with two other guys. No, really. Currently he is Google's chief internet evangelical (that is his real job title). The whole video is good, but the thing that stands out the most is a comment made by Lessig - the PATRIOT Act wasn't written really quickly in the wake of 9/11, it was sitting in a desk drawer waiting for the opportunity to be passed by a frantic legislature. He asked Richard Clarke, former chief counterterrorism advisor to numerous presidents, if a version of the PATRIOT Act for the internet was waiting for some kind of major internet-based attack which could be compared to 9/11 in terms of disruption and financial loss. Clarke said that, without question, there was. The heart of the problem is our national infrastructure is based on a system that our representatives are largely entirely ignorant of. Here is Senator Ted Stevens demonstrating such ignorance. Here is John McCain admitted to not knowing how to use a computer, much less the internet. None of this would be a problem, except these are the kind of people that can (at least attempt) to legislate internet activity in the country. And when some major incident occurs, which is inevitable due to the open nature of the internet, they may kill the largest and most important communication/content/distribution instrument ever conceived by humankind.

The viable solution to internet piracy

The sad fact of the matter is piracy as it is currently defined cannot be stopped without enormous breaches of privacy. Absent the restriction of tools to even create programs that can effortlessly defeat protection methods, you can't stop people from copying digital information. Mostly because the mere act of being on the internet means you are required to copy things just to view/listen to them. This is a sample of some of the points of a paper I recently read at Cato called The Future of Copyright. My personal favorite part:

When American troops liberated the city of Luxembourg in 1944, they made a strange capture: a machine capable of recording sound on magnetic tapes. Shortly after the war, this German military invention made its appearance in private homes. Tape recorders integrated listening and reproduction in one device, but as separate functions. That’s no longer the case with digital technology. Today, to use digital information is to copy it.

Computers operate by copying. They couldn’t care less whether the physical distance between original and copy is measured in micrometers or in miles; both work equally well for them. Copyright law, on the other hand, must somehow draw a line between use and distribution. That means putting an imaginary grid over the chaotic myriad of network nodes, delineating clusters of devices that can be attributed to individuals or households.

Every person reading this article is actually copying it illegally. You can't help but do it. As you surf the internet your computer is constantly caching (saving locally) data that you are viewing. Anyone who has ever used the internet for anything is almost certainly a pirate. I'll let you all off with a warning this time. Humor aside, the problem is one that the music industry found itself in a long while ago with the invention and mass adoption of radio. John Philip Sousa was convinced anything but live shows would completely destroy music. The solution, after much complaining, was to just license the distributor. Now of course the distributor and consumer and creator is anyone and everyone on the internet. The compromise is an idea that is not new and is even talked about by both sides of the issue with increasing interest: mass public electronic media licensing. If everyone on the internet is a pirate, license everyone. Everyone who wants to buy in at least. You've solved 99% of your piracy problems by facing the reality of a system, the internet, that requires copying. You also don't even have to host the files themselves, users are more than willing to do so. The idea has merit but the problem is the pie to be divided. We need an organization as trusted as the Nielsen statistics are for downloaded media content to correctly award creators and their labels/studios/whatever. The only alternatives are to entire restrict piracy with the kind of locking down that would destroy the internet and privacy in general (people could still just rip stuff from friends/renters) OR to see an attempt to destroy internet and privacy while the major content holders die a slow and painful (for everyone involved) death at the hands of unrelenting technological innovation. Edit: Hahaha. Bonus quote from a Guardian article linked from the Cato piece:

"For somebody who has spent 30 years in the music industry, you instinctively know this stuff is going on. But when you actually sit looking at your computer and see a number that says 95% of people are copying music at home, you suddenly go, 'Bloody hell'," he said.

Turns out you could nuke the internet from orbit and the current copyright model is doomed. Note: Copying this work is no longer actually illegal in any sense, since I have licensed everything with Creative Commons.

Geodata distribution, piracy, and the future business models.

The big talk in the GIS world is the presentation Jack Dangermond of ESRI and John Hanke of Google at a recent conference (Where2.0). In it, they effectively outline the plan to do as much as possible to encourage the greater GIS community to openly offer their data to be served up by their products, which are going to be integrated in a much closer fashion when 9.3 comes out in a few weeks. A lot of firms and even public agencies offer geographic data for money, and they are probably going though a variety of stages of "freaking out". Already a lot of data that they could formerly milk has been put up in some form or another in Google Earth, VE, or NASA's WorldWind. Anyone who has taken a passing interest in the internet for the last decade can probably tell you this model, selling data for profit, is not going to work forever in the same way it always has. The sustainable model in the digital age is in offering expert, specialized services rather than trying to produce artificial scarcity via DRM or hiding yourself entirely behind a firewall. Ask the entertainment industry how the latter two options are working out. For geographic digital data, this is already happening. Go on any given piracy website and prepare to find the latest TomTom or other proprietary maps/data. Undoubtedly there are more specialized and discrete sites out there just for geodata (or if there isn't then there will be when the demand exists). This kind of thing can be mitigated by making your product very accessible (easy to buy) and superior to the free alternatives. Working with Google or other distributors to set up a one-click purchase system for geodata together with free samples and an open format. Continue to improve by offering semantic and interest associations (people who bought this also bought this, etc). Young people - time rich and cash poor - will still pirate the heck out of it. But when they join the business world they will be pitching your data to their bosses/clients. And they'll be buying it themselves because they will eventually be relatively poor in time and rich in cash. Selling to businesses will still be perfectly viable though (they assess the risk of piracy a little differently than individual actors), but the mass market is a different animal.

The benefits of being a late bloomer

This isn't a post about an embarrassing teenage angst. It is actually a story about natural resources, the industrial revolution, and programming for Windows. Ars Technica, one of the better tech sites on the internet, recently did a series on the lead up to the most recent malaise we've seen with Windows programming. As I read the piece, I kept noticing parallels between Microsoft's difficulties and the early innovators in the industrial revolution. Despite the fact that you probably know nothing about the 19th century about Britain besides the fact the nascent United States kicked its ass off the better parts of North America, it is actually pretty relevant. Rule Britannia Britain ran the 19th century. It controlled all of the sea lanes, dominated world trade/finance, and ran nations which were ten times its landmass and population by occasionally machinegunning down crazy-brave hordes of natives who were attacking them with spears. It got this way because it not only was the first to recognize and reap the massive benefits from new industrial machinery, but also because it ruthlessly closed itself off in terms of technology to retain their advantage. A lot of the first major industries that started in America were based on stealing the technology anyway - not completely unlike piracy in China at the moment. In the late 19th century this initial advantage actually started to hurt them in places. A "second" industrial revolution started when better techniques for creating stuff like steel were developed. Nations a little behind the times compared to Britain could buy better stuff fresh without the perceived cost of replacing older equipment. A newly united Germany bears mention here. Relevance to Windows development Programming in Windows is a bunch of old equipment that needs replacing according to the Ars series (they are not at all alone in this suggestion). Old 16bit windows stuff will still work in the new 64 bit systems, but the odd things you have to account for to maintain this backwards compatibility makes programming new stuff for it a tremendous pain. Relatively late comers (in terms of popularity) like Apple and the more user friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu can and do start from scratch in order to build better tools and not incur the kind of fallout that would happen if MS did the same. Apple pulled this of by creating a virtual machine for their old apps. Desktop Linux distributions don't really have to worry about this because their user base really isn't so large as to cause mass customer loss at breaking compatibility. The apparently sexier place to do development is for the web, which is OS neutral and can increasingly do stuff that was once limited only to the desktop. That stuff that still needs to be done on a local machine - heavy audio/image/video processing - have a lot of good tools on alternatives to Windows. The only exception here seems to be in the gaming industry, which in general steadfastly refuses to develop for multiple operating systems because, from what I understand, the open tools for rendering graphics (OpenGL) are more difficult to use than Microsoft's DirectX.

In a decade or two, anything less will be like being illiterate

I casually linked a 12 year old who is doing a lot of development on a major Javascript framework in the previous post. Here he is giving a talk at Google on jQuery. The tools will only get easier and the next generation will have no problem picking it all up with their sponge-like brains. There are four consequences of this that I can immediately think of:

• More open source development. It looks great on a resume, there is a possibility of making a big name for yourself (publish something in academic journals, giving talks at Google, etc.) the satisfaction derived from contributing, and naturally you, like everyone else, get the benefits of the improvements.
• Possibly a citizenry that can more easily identify logical fallacies. Perhaps nothing is more important for a democracy besides free speech. As with the open source stuff, people should demand more transparency from their elected officials, and even if they don't get it though official channels, they will always find ways to fulfill this need.
• A greater appreciation for mathematics. Hopefully higher level math taught earlier, when the kids can absorb basically any information.
• More rational discussion of basic scientific facts about the world around us. Less of this tragic, mortifying stupidity.

Favorite nerd stuff of 2007

Yes, everyone seems to be doing something like this. And probably got it finished a week ago. So sue me.

• StumbleUpon: I first heard about it as an up-and-coming search-like engine in Wired. Effectively, it is a psuedo search engine that relies on user generated interests - not passively as Google does with link backs, but with actual intentional voting. There is something similar on the open source front (Wikia). Link

• xkcd: How did I miss this gem before? Link.

• DS R4: Play movies, listen to music, emulate classic games, and back up your whole DS game library for a little more than the cost of a single DS game. No mincing words, you want one of these if you own a DS. If you plan on buying one you'd be a fool not to get an R4 (or an M3, which I've been told does basically the same thing). Link.

• Mozilla Firefox 3 beta - It is still beta but amazingly stable. Automatically restarts with the tabs you had open when you closed it, prettier search bar, and way better multi tab support (no slowdowns or crashes with the 987,345 tabs I tend to have open). Bad news: perhaps it is just me, but the bookmarking isn't as good and more difficult to manage. Still really nice for beta.

• A finished Methods section draft: It is a good feeling having this thing 1/2 to 2/3rds done. Lets see how viciously my thesis chair, Bob Hickey, tears it apart. I think I might post it and have the 0 people that visit the site mock it.

• Ubuntu/QGIS: Though not ready to take over the huge ESRI-house I work for or actually threatening Windows desktop domination, the speed and good looks of the new open source GIS platforms that can be created for zero cost (and without having to reformat your computer - use use VMWare Player to create a virtual machine).

• Death of DRM music: For those that don't know, DRM is the reason you can't move around music you buy off iTunes to whatever you want as many times as you like. All of the major music content holders have realized what people on the internet have been telling them for years - only legitimate customers are hurt by DRM. Pirates - a term with already includes probably everyone younger than 20 - simply hack it or rip CDs their friends get during parties. Video will be next as it is easily as trivial to defeat.

• @GoogleTalks: It will be a supreme challenge for Google to keep its relatively good public image even as it grows more massive and run by more suits than engineers. They have given the internet many, many good things. One that is less commonly mentioned is this series of talks which include all of the major candidates, many famous/influential authors, and some other folks. Link.

• Portal: Game of the year out of nowhere. Witty dialog, excellent ending, and interesting mechanics.

Spending Iraq conditioned on withdrawl by Dec 08

It seems the more centralist DLC Democrats have finally bowed to pressure from the rest of their party regarding Iraq. Having capitulated on or ignored every other issue - torture, wiretapping, habeas corpus, executive authoritarianism - the more pragmatic needs of being reelected in 2008 have edged out previous reservations on Iraq. I was always amazingly unconvinced regarding the excuses of this group of Democrats in failing to preform as they suggested they would in 2006. They must realize how unpopular their opposition is, and how they could stop the war instantly with the "power of the purse" invested in them by the Constitution. Even if you do not believe this is the right course, you must concede that the Democrat's in Congress deception on this issue lacks the transparency and honesty they had promised. For as defeated as the Republicans seem to be, their libertarian-authoritarian breaking points do not seem as wide as the gap between the DLC and the masses that elected them a year ago. As a side note, I would just like to add Harry Reid is a vapid, corrupt legislator. His continued support of the Pirate Act - demanding stiffer and criminal penalties regarding copyright infringement - demonstrates his surrender to special interests whose motives are entirely counter to the public good. Similar to how taxes work (at a very high tax rate, you can lower it and actually increase revenue by reducing the incentive to cheat and because there is more consumption and growth in general), extremely protected copyright rules are unenforceable and actually reduce the innovation they are meant to encourage. Wow that was a long side note. UPDATE on copyright sidenote: In his talks, Cory Doctorow has repeated one of his many complaints of the current copyright legalism - everyone is guilty of copyright infringement, intentional or otherwise, and (to quote him) "Once everyone is a criminal, no one is free." If you criminalize normal behavior there is no need to trump up charges to quash dissent. I'll admit at first I was skeptical of such rhetoric. The first part is undoubtedly true. In a very technical sense humming a few bars for a friend or the mere act of your computer passively caching pictures on websites as you surf could be considered copyright infringement. The second part - that it would be used to suppress free speech - I felt needed an example. The Russian Federation has generously provided one. Unquestionably this is simply the start, and you should take care not to fool yourself. This will happen in the United States. It wouldn't need to be by government, the private sector would have no problem causing a similar chilling effect on free speech.