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Wednesday, October 29, 2003

the flipside of diebold at swarthmore

timothy burke of swarthmore’s history department has a thoughtful comment on the diebold events unfolding at the college.

this is an important read. it may change some of your opinions of the situation. i still think swarthmore should be spinning this differently, even if they feel compelled to comply with dmca provisions. these are bigger issues. copyright should never be used as a shield to obscure the truth.

one point that is clear from this message is that the effort to drag diebold into the light needs to be more focused and precise. and i agree completely. random hosts and random comments from random people will keep the memos “exposed” (and no matter how many letters diebold’s lawyers send, they won’t go away), but chasing documents around the web with lawyers is a waste of good intentions.

this needs a call to get organized. don’t just host these memos. write letters to the people who sign contracts with diebold. and your elected officials. demand accountability and transparency for every company involved in the voting process. nothing less is acceptable.

and if that doesn’t work, tell your local election officials (election day is coming up, they’d love to hear from you so you can complicate their lives in the next couple weeks) that you won’t vote using diebold machines and demand an alternative.

posted by roj at 11:49 am  

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

credit where it’s due

(i want to apologize up-front for the mostly-quote nature of this post, but i do want to put this “on the record”).

recently, president bush gave his tenth press conference, and someone asked a very bad question… and it stuck with me, so i had to go find a source. the bold parts are my doing. i don’t have a banner to hang on this blog.

source – white house news release.

Q Mr. President, if I may take you back to May 1st when you stood on the USS Lincoln under a huge banner that said, “Mission Accomplished.” At that time you declared major combat operations were over, but since that time there have been over 1,000 wounded, many of them amputees who are recovering at Walter Reed, 217 killed in action since that date. Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks?

THE PRESIDENT: Nora, I think you ought to look at my speech. I said, Iraq is a dangerous place and we’ve still got hard work to do, there’s still more to be done. And we had just come off a very successful military operation. I was there to thank the troops.

The “Mission Accomplished” sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff — they weren’t that ingenious, by the way. But my statement was a clear statement, basically recognizing that this phase of the war for Iraq was over and there was a lot of dangerous work. And it’s proved to be right, it is dangerous in Iraq. It’s dangerous in Iraq because there are people who can’t stand the thought of a free and peaceful Iraq. It is dangerous in Iraq because there are some who believe that we’re soft, that the will of the United States can be shaken by suiciders — and suiciders who are willing to drive up to a Red Cross center, a center of international help and aid and comfort, and just kill.

the president’s answer continues, but you can read it from the whitehouse, since it’s not relevant to this comment.

well, that’s not what the story was back in may….

source – New York Times, May 16, 2003, Elisabeth Bumiller, “Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights”

Mr. Sforza and his aides had every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush’s right shoulder and the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call ‘magic hour light,’ which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.

(reading that article will cost you $2.95)

now, c’mon boss. scott sforza has worked really hard to make you look good. and i mean really, really hard. give the man some credit and stop beating him down in public. this is no way to keep your staff happy.

posted by roj at 11:29 am  

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

bounties to support indigent lawyers

i haven’t done a “business model of the hour” for some time now, but with the directv, riaa and red-light ticket camera examples to build on, there’s an obvious successor to explore.

the premise that supports this business is that the law has become so unweildy and complicated, with so many fine points of violation, that all of us violate some law, contract, terms-of-use agreement, acceptable use policy, tax code, or something all the time, usually without realizing it. with hundreds of millions of americans (and why stop at americans?) violating tens of thousands of legal terms every day, there is a vast opportunity to commercialize law and contract enforcement.

red-light cameras are a great starting point. the law is the law. running a red light is a bad thing. it’s an illegal thing. companies sprung up to monetize the crime – the fines are set by the legislators, but a good chunk of those fines are kept as a sort of bounty by the company operating the camera. everyone wins. the law is enforced, the public is safer, the government gets new revenue, and the operating company gets piles of cash. who can argue with that kind of success?

the approach is spreading, so it’s critical to move on this quickly. why should the riaa have to track down and sue its own customers? why should directv have to track down people who buy smartcard programming gear?

start a company that does thorough economic analysis of every fine point of every law and contract ever written. cherry-pick the most monetizable ones – the ones with the most potential violators – and pursue them with all the resources available on a purely contingent, bounty-like basis. to get started, use the dmca subpoena provisions to slap together copyright-violator hit-lists and score fast revenue.

the plan is to hire hundreds – no, thousands – of new, fresh lawyers and form them into “industry strike teams.” these teams will pick industries and industrial segments where a number of average citizens are violating some legal or contractual provision, create a mailing list with tens or hundreds of thousands of potential violators, and send threatening letters. offer an amnesty in exchange for a check and a signature promising to never, ever do whatever it was again.

and that opens up a second revenue stream – data-mining to ensure compliance with all those new promises.

there are a lot of smart people in law school these days, and they are all going to need jobs….what’s wrong with helping out a few poor, needy, debt-ridden lawyers at the expense of everyone?

i guess this company would need a good number of really good spin doctors too. and probably a bomb-proof headquarters.

posted by roj at 8:00 am  

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

guilt by gear association

directv has an interesting approach to piracy… a short interview with “enforcement chief” lucas graves in wired sheds a bit of light…

wired

The company has filed about 10, 000 lawsuits and mailed more than 100, 000 “demand letters” giving suspected pirates a brutal choice: Pay $3,500 to settle or go to court. Problem is, the campaign targets anyone who bought smartcard programming gear from certain merchants; officials just assume it’s used for hacking.

[wired] Your letters don’t distinguish between pirates and people who program smartcards for legitimate reasons, like security systems. Why not?
[graves] If an individual claims to have a legitimate use, he or she can furnish information – a business plan, maybe schematics – and our staff will evaluate it. In at least 20 cases, DirecTV chose not to pursue the matter after the individual provided background.

i’m just not comfortable with the idea of providing a “business plan” or “schematics” to prove i’m innocent.

are any tech-legal groups stepping up to defend anyone yet? 100,000 letters is a wide enough net that there should be more noise on this.

posted by roj at 9:55 am  

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

the hollywood model

a while ago, i took a quick crack at the top end of the music business and used hollywood as a model

today i stumbled into a different application of the hollywood model.

i’m fairly enthusiastic about the hollywood model. i think there’s a lot to learn here. regardless of the mechanism, when you go from a situation where you control your distribution channels (or think you do) to a situation where your distribution channels control you (or threaten to), hollywood, as an industry, demonstrated at least one approach that works, sometimes.

posted by roj at 9:44 am  

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

constructive disagreement

as usual, akma brings an eloquence to something i’ve been fumbling with here occasionally.

and it should be an important lesson to our friends at diebold and sunncomm – not to mention political “with us or against us” leaders.

posted by roj at 9:32 am  

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

mit goes analog

in a shocking development (ok, not so shocking, except that some time ago i was informed that mit students don’t “hang out with musicians” – that was more shocking). anyway, in a not-terribly-suprising development, the geeks of mit, home of the media lab, the toy symphony, and other cool innovative approaches to music… bring, to the mit campus, lamp.

they’re getting all kinds of interesting news coverage, but they’ll keep the list on the lamp page more up to date, so go there for what other people are saying.

16 all-music channels. college radio revived and pumped up on techno steroids. in analog. with requests. over the campus cable system. on a shoestring.

with nothing other than a decent infrastructure to work with (campus it and cable) and a few good hacks, the brains of mit have applied a machete to the legal jungle, taken a page from the bad old days of analog, and used the rules of the music business to get what they want.

nicely done.

posted by roj at 7:38 am  

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

mainstream light on sunncomm

in a front-page article in usa today, we find a brief presentation of the sunncomm story (1 2 3 4).

i think this counts as “more light on sunncomm” – this is “mainstream” and “non-technical” mass-market press. a couple bits are worth mentioning…

Jacobs knew nothing of Halderman’s research until shareholders started calling. He’d pulled SunnComm out of a crater during three years of tech-industry malaise, he says, and Halderman was out to ruin it. “He wanted to embarrass the record industry and put us out of business,” Jacobs says. “I had to launch a public defense.

jacobs still doesn’t quite get it… first, it’s very dangerous to go on the record declaring the intentions of other people. second, this wasn’t about putting sunncomm out of business (surely, there’s an easier way to do that…) i don’t want to commit the sin i just decried, but it seems to me that “the secret” would’ve “gotten out” no matter where this scheme originated or who decided to tease it apart. jacobs seems to have taken this very personally – and that probably resulted in a lot more damage to sunncomm.

BMG considers SunnComm’s system “an important first generation of the next generation of technology,” says spokesman Nathaniel Brown.

He offers proof from the sales of the Hamilton CD. Unprotected CDs typically see sales drop 35% to 45% in the second week, as pirated versions circulate. Sales of the Hamilton CD fell just 23%.

this is an interesting new spin on piracy that i hadn’t heard before…

intuitively, it doesn’t make sense. first, it only takes one person with autorun disabled to “spew the data forth unto the p2p networks” – and that certainly happened. second, this is all relative. maybe the hamilton cd just sucks and nobody’s buying it. i’m not privy to the raw data, of course, so i’m just guessing…

SunnComm has a new version of its technology ready. BMG plans to use it. The other major record labels are interested.

so much for my crystal ball… i wonder if this statement will ever be reflected in sunncomm’s bottom line.

posted by roj at 5:40 am  

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Rod Roddy

come on down!

posted by roj at 4:27 am  

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Arthur Barnett

oble lawyer

posted by roj at 4:25 am  
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