Groklaw’s PJ has the goods on SCO’s loss:

Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive!

Friday, August 10 2007 @ 04:52 PM EDT

Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here it is as text. Here is what matters most:

[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights.

That’s Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that “SCO is obligated to recognize Novell’s waiver of SCO’s claims against IBM and Sequent”. That’s the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big picture is, SCO lost. Oh, and it owes Novell a lot of money from the Microsoft and Sun licenses.

One of the witty commentators at slashdot pithily summarized the whole sorry ordeal:

There once was a CEO called McBride
Who thought he could take on Linux in stride.
But the creep from Santa Cruz
Was destined to lose
And get fscked in the ass by New York Gay Pride.

I think it’s worth reprinting Doc Searls’ latest comment on the sclerotic nature of U.S. internet connections at the local level. Incumbent telecom carriers continue to impede market growth by offering crippled, asymmetric internet service, and by subordinating internet connectivity to older technologies.

Searls’ comment:

Local cooling

The U.S. continues to lag in Net connectivity. Right now it’s down to 15th, according to one among a variety of discouraging surveys. Kevin Barron:

While I admire the desire to drill down into the details, no matter how you count the lifeboats, the fact is the Titanic is still going down. Unless we wake up and realize how critical the Net has become to every facet of society, including our economy, we will wake up in icy waters instead.

Meanwhile, House Bill 1587 in North Carolina, misleadingly titled “The Local Gov’t Fair Competition Act”, would effectively prevent local governments from offering public services that “compete” with the barely competitive private phone/cable duopolies that currently offer Internet service as a side dish to their legacy offerings.

This legislation is nowhere informed by the realization that Internet service should be as much a public utility as roads, water, electricity and waste treatment.

What we really need is opening up of data connectivity to all kinds of enterprise and grass-roots initiative, with government help in the form of easements to both private and public network build-out efforts. We need the market to open up for other parties to do what the incumbent carriers will not do.

What we don’t need is more pro-incumbent carrier legislation that will further lock out not just competition at the connectivity level, but prevention of countless businesses and public services that can only thrive on a wide open and ubiquitously deployed Internet.

In more hopeful news, my ISP, Sonic.net, lead by CCSF alumnus Dane Jasper, has applied to be a phone company. No doubt Sonic is being forced to do this due to the monopolistic machinations of our local oligarchy.

In following some of the trackbacks to the ZDNet article, Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user, I stumbled across an excellent blog, Diary of a Mad IT Manager. As I was reading through the posts, I began to come across tales of the all too typical kind of disastrous, Microsoft-induced IT expenditures that I too had witnessed in my days as a tech support person, and later as a network administrator. For example:

A thought occurred to me today about the state of our computers here. We’re so used to rebuilding them, we’ve gotten better and more efficient at it. I mean, we’ve got all manner of support software designed to do nothing more than recreating and restoring an operating system and associated loaded applications on a computer in as efficient and timely manner as possible. Why? Because Windows sucks so much that we have to reload it on a regular basis.

And so I decided to put the question directly (though a bit profanely): why do corporations persist in using Microsoft products, when they so clearly cost so much more money than the alternatives? His reply, I thought, clearly articulated those reasons.

I replied in turn, and I think the exchange describes fairly concisely, at least in the corporate shop, the reasons for resistance to change: the cost, due to the weight of history, is too high. You may read the full exchange on Mad IT Manager’s blog here, or archived on my site here.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a rather bone-headed analysis, User revolt at Digg.com shows risks of Web 2.0 (bylined Verne Kopytoff, Thursday, May 3, 2007) of the recent 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 dust-up on Digg.com.

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 is allegedly an encryption key that unlocks high definition media content encrypted using the AACS standard. It was cracked and posted to a web news group, Digg’d by others, and Digg was then hit with a DMCA ‘take-down’ diktat by the MPAA (The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is an unfortunate piece of legislation passed by the U.S. Congress that is the equivalent of outlawing kitchen knives because they could be used to commit crimes. Worse, the DMCA is being used by the MPAA and the RIAA to deny citizens fair-use copyright of media those citizens have legitimately purchased. Want to back up that DVD collection? Can’t do it in the not-quite-so-free United States of America).

Digg obliged the MPAA by censoring posts containing the AACS key, but users persisted, and Digg relented.

The Chronicle’s take on the controversy? Such shenanigans are the inevitable outcome of naive Web 2.0 companies’ loose reigns on the unwashed masses of the internet. It’s such a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the internet, the web, ‘Web 2.0,’ and this whole technological arena as to be an embarrassment.

According to the Chronicle,

The dust-up underscores both the power and the danger of what has come to be known as the Web 2.0 movement, a loosely defined group of Internet sites that foster online social networks and rely heavily on purely democratic principles to promote everything from news stories to music to photographs.

In truth, ‘Web 2.0′ technologies, which revolve around delivering a desktop PC-like, rich application experience to users via web browsers and the internet, have nothing at all to do with the democratising reach of the internet and the web. If anything, the development of centrally managed locations for posting material under the control of proprietary companies such as Flickr and Digg represent a step back from ‘democracy.’

What the SF Chronicle’s author fails to grasp is that the source of the internet’s democratising power is the nature of its underlying protocols, which make all hosts present in a single space (that is, a ‘cyber’ space) with zero distance between them. This is quite unlike traditional broadcast or print media, where delivery is expensive and slow, is overwhelmingly centralised, and ‘consumers’ of media contribute very little content in return.

Kopykoff continues:

Examples of Web 2.0 sites include the video-sharing site YouTube, the user-written online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the photo-sharing site Flickr. The movement also includes wildly popular social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, on which users can interact with each other in a virtual setting.

Digg’s problems this week are just the latest example of Web 2.0 growing pains. Wikipedia is routinely buffeted by inaccurate or self-serving information, while YouTube is flooded with pirated videos.

Kopykoff has conflated so many different technologies it is difficult to know where to begin to parse the misapprehensions apart.

MySpace could hardly be called a Web 2.0 utilising site, nor would Wikipedia be put into this category. Web 2.0 makes applications such as Google Earth possible — applications that draw data from net repositories, but behave like an application residing on a local computer’s hard drive, such as Microsoft’s suite of office applications, which grew up on stand alone PCs, before there was a net.

Wikipedia’s woes — and its tremendous, novel breadth — stem directly from the ability of each host machine to talk directly to every other host machine on the internet, but again, its web presentation has probably zero of what one would call Web 2.0. Its failings are those of any mob scene, and that’s something that we learned how to cope with long before internet technology came onto the scene. Parliamentary rules of order, editors in news rooms such as Kopykoff’s, meritocratic universities, rules of civil service, and representative democracy all serve to improve the output of the ordinary human lot. Wikipedia chose to run itself as a mob would, and this has precious little to do with the medium that conveys it.

Identifying which communications are valid and sound and which are merely rumours, or the rantings of a hothead, or a mob of them, is a task little changed from the print and broadcast era.

I could continue to parse the article, but you probably get the idea. Kopykoff badly misunderstands the beast he (or she) has been sent to report on.

Sadly, the kernel of a story was there, but somehow Kopykoff missed it. It is this: why are so many people unhappy with the DMCA, the MPAA and the RIAA? Is outlawing all copying, or banning all technologies such as peer to peer communication — or strings of characters and computer programs — a legitimate means for dealing with crimes committed with those tools?

I attempted to reply to this column by Doc Searls, Linux for Suits - The World Live Web, but the reply appears to have disappeared into the net ether, so I’ll try to restate it here. Searls outlines his conception of a “live web” in the article’s concluding paragraphs. To me, this idea sounds very much like Wiliam Gibson’s vision of a “consensual hallucination” (which is not necessarily a pejorative term — any human constructed social framework could be called a ‘hallucination’ of sorts), for which he coined the term “cyberspace.” I also wish(ed) to point to the concrete need for a juridical construction of a civil society in cyberspace, which I think parallels Searls’ calls for what he terms “identity,” as well as the “right” to “network neutral” access to the internet. I tend to frame these issues, following after Gibson’s realization that the franchise of civil society will move largely into cyberspace, in juridical and civil terms first, and technological terms only incidentally.

First, Searls’ concept of a live web, then my discussion of Gibson’s idea.

Searls:

Is it possible that “live” will join “free” and “open” in our pantheon of adjectives? Possibly. Whether or not it does, I’d like to thank my son Allen for being the first to utter “World Live Web”, providing me with a perspective I never knew I lacked, until I heard it.

His original vision of the World Live Web was a literal one: a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time. When he first encountered the Web, as a researcher, he saw it as something fundamentally deficient at supporting the most human forms of interaction: the kind where one person increased the knowledge of another directly.

We’ve moved a long way in the live direction since Allen first introduced me to the concept. VoIP alone is a huge live category. Mobile Web progress will all happen along its live branch.

Where it goes exactly is anybody’s guess. All we can say for sure is it’s headed toward the sky.

My discussion (that I attempted to post in reply to Searls’ column):

The “World Live Web” sounds like the conception that William Gibson had of the then germinal internet. He foresaw that it would become a space into which the entire politico/socio franchise of society would move. In Neuromancer, Gibson coined a term for this new “place:” cyberspace.

And quite unlike the many Pollyanna-esque visions of the web that have followed, Gibson’s was dystopian. In the tradition of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the net can serve as the a tool of “universal surveillance,” to use Michel Foucault’s description of the “dark side of the enlightenment.” It needn’t necessarily be so, but that is up to us, the hopefully vigilant citzenry.

To wit, patents must not be overly broad, and must not apply to ideas (as Thomas Jefferson argued), copyright must guarantee the right of individuals to benefit from their ingenuity within reason (and for a reasonable length of time, not a corporate lifetime, but rather a human person’s lifetime). Citizens must have a right to access civil spaces to express political opinion — whethor those spaces be cyber’d, shopping mall’d, or public square’d. Yes, that means that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, or whomever, cannot block port 25 or forbid the use of servers. Access to the internet will be instrumental to civil liberty in the future, as were postal service and free libraries in the past

San Francisco Bay Area KSFO radio announcers Brian Sussman, Melanie Morgan, Lee Rodgers and Tom Benner have been engaging in a kind of brown-shirt like demagoguery and hate speech that would make Radovan Karad�ić or Josef Goebbals proud. Blogger Spocko (Spocko’s Brain is his blog) succeeded in bringing to the attention of several advertisers the nature of the KSFO programs, and they began to pull their advertisements. Spocko has also drawn attention to the role of corporate hegemons such as ABC / Disney Inc. (owner of KSFO) in tolerating and promoting demagogic hate speech.

Shortly after advertisers began to pull ads, Spocko’s internet service provider, 1&1 Internet Inc., was served with a copyright cease and desist letter by ABC / Disney Inc. on December 22th. On Januaary 2nd 1&1 Internet Inc. shut down Spocko’s web site. ABC / Disney Inc. allege that Spocko violated copyright by posting audio clips of the KSFO hate speech on his web site.

Although Mike Stark of Daily Kos has documented the Spocko audio files controversy thoroughly, I would like at least to republish Spocko’s original letter to one of KSFO / Disney’s advertisers, and follow that up with Spocko’s statements regarding the cease and desist letter (Thanks again to Mike Stark for his work on this story):

To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

Dear Ms. Clark:

Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

“Now you start with the Sear’s Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. ” (Audio link)

You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie ‘em to a post and burn ‘em. Set ‘em on fire.

Officer Vic: Yeah.

Lee Rogers: Let ‘em know what it feels like.

Melanie Morgan: Hog tie ‘em first. That would be good.

Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

“Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out.” (Audio link).

Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a “joke”, note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged. (Audio link)

On Nov. 14th Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

“We’ve got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes.” (Audio link)

Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn’t know that Tom Brenner (the “comic relief” called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser’s products. Listen as he:

* calls Chevrolet’s product “shi**y”
* (audio link) suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)
* pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don’t respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

And it’s not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

“Say Allah is a Wh*re!” (audio link)

Or when Lee Rogers says,

“Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. … You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. ” (audio link)

Maybe you haven’t heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints? Doubtful. Morgan’s husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO’s operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

I understand you can’t listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don’t need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won’t have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you. If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I’ve listed a few below.

I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren’t limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?
I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc. heather.rim@abc.com.
Sincerely,

[Spocko]

P.S. I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

Spocko, on the significance of ABC / Disney’s cease and desist copyright action:

95 percent of blog fights don�t mean anything, but I think this one does since KSFO is using the full weight and force of an ABC/Disney lawyer and copyright law against a private citizen blogger. I dared to use the audio content in question for nonprofit educational purposes (I don�t even have ads on my blog!), and thus under the protection of the Fair Use Doctrine set forth in Section 107 of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.�107.

Here’s the balance of Spocko’s statement regarding the matter:

ABC Radio Lawyer tells Spocko to Shut Up

Two days before Christmas I got a Cease and Desist letter from ABC regarding my use of audio clips from KSFO radio hosts Melanie Morgan and Lee Rogers on my blog, Spocko’s Brain (see attached PDF).

KSFO is a Disney affiliate whose radio hosts broadcast violent rhetoric directed toward journalists, liberals, Democrats, Arabs and Muslims all over the SF Bay Area and to the world via the Internet. I commented about the content of these host’s broadcasts on my blog and informed KSFO’s advertisers about what they were supporting by letting them listen to the exact audio quotes from the hosts.

Why the C&L Letter Now?

In mid-December I got confirmation that a major national advertiser, VISA, pulled their ads from the Melanie Morgan and Lee Rogers show, based on listening to audio clips I provided them. I also think that FedEx, AT&T and Kaiser are considering pulling their ads. Visa isn’t the first advertiser who has left KSFO, multiple advertisers have left the station, especially from the Brian Sussman show. In July of this year when KSFO lost MasterCard as an advertiser someone from KSFO “outed” me on a counter-blog (which I won’t link to). This same person has also threatened me with local and federal criminal action for using the audio (which I clearly used under the fair use portion of copyright law). And because they have suggested violence toward me (in addition to talking about suing me “for everything I have”) I have chosen to remain anonymous.

As Thers has said, 95 percent of blog fights don’t mean anything, but I think this one does since KSFO is using the full weight and force of an ABC/Disney lawyer and copyright law against a private citizen blogger. I dared to use the audio content in question for nonprofit educational purposes (I don’t even have ads on my blog!), and thus under the protection of the Fair Use Doctrine set forth in Section 107 of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.�107.

It’s about Money not Ideology

Talk Radio is a multi-billion dollar industry. It is also a regulated industry because the public gave the broadcast airwaves to radio stations. There are rules. First there are FCC rules with fines of $325,000 for obscene and indecent speech, thanks to the Christian Right. Interestingly, the radio union, (which KSFO hosts hate so much) worked very hard to stop those fines from being directed to individual radio hosts. So the corporation will bear the burden of any fines. Next, there are guidelines at the local station level, the network level and the parent company level. So even if the inciting of violence and hate speech is ignored by the FCC, the continued violent rhetoric has been, and continues to be, approved at the station level (KSFO) the group level (KGO-KSFO) the company level (ABC Radio) and the parent company level (Disney). They are ALL aware of this speech, and because they have not acted in a meaningful way, they all are giving approval for it to continue.

No Management Action

When Keith Olbermann and Media Matters ran Melanie Morgan’s comments about “putting the bull’s-eye on” Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, management did nothing. Morgan did a jokey non-apology where she never even mentioned she used the term bull’s-eye.

I’m guessing Lee Rogers may have gotten a memo telling him to stop talking about burning people alive, torturing them and blowing their brains out, because on November 30th, he defiantly said to management and advertisers, “Nobody is gonna tell me what to talk about or not talk about or in what fashion on this radio program. It ain’t gonna happen!”

ABC/Disney acted only when they lost revenue. Then they went after ME with a cease and desist letter.

Why me? I’m not the one saying journalists should be hanged, thieves should be tortured and killed, people should be burned alive, stomped to death or have their testicles cut off. I’m not the one saying that millions of Muslims should be killed on the presumption that they are extremists or just because they live in Indonesia. I’m not the one who says that lying is as natural as breathing to Egyptians and Arabs or demanding that a caller “Say Allah is a Whore” to prove he is not an Islamist. I’m simply documenting this speech and providing it to the people who are paying KSFO hosts on commercially supported broadcast radio.

They have Lawyers, Guns and Money. I’ve got a 5th tier blog and no money

Because I and some other listeners hit right-wing talk radio in the pocket book, they are acting like wounded animals and brought out the big guns, Corporate Lawyers. Am I scared? Hell yes. They can easily squish me like a bug and tie me up in legal battles for the rest of my natural life (and Vulcans live a long time), not to mention that unlike KSFO radio hosts, I’m not getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and generating millions of revenue for a multibillion-dollar parent company. If I pursue this further I expect the next step is a “CyberSLAPP” suit.

I don’t want to consider the possibility of Morgan’s good friend Michelle Malkin deciding to publish my address and real name so that her minions can send me death threats or “white powder” in the mail. Chad Castagana, was charged with mailing more than a dozen threatening letters containing white powder to liberals. He got the idea from someone that journalists, liberals and democrats were the enemy and deserved to die.

Brian Sussman proudly poses with his handgun in KSFO publicity shots and says that he thinks that everyone should have the right to have a machine gun. Maybe I’m over reacting, why would they attack me? I’m not famous, I’m not an elected official, I tried very hard to be accurate about what THEY said BY USING THEIR OWN WORDS.

I tried to help companies protect their brands from being tainted with the violent rhetoric and anti-any-religion-but-right-wing-christianism speech. I wanted to help the VPs of marketing avoid being associated with Lee Roger’s “testicle talk” or Sussman talking about cutting off a finger and a penis of an Iraqi in his imaginary torture sessions.

It’s about Brands: All the Blessings, None of the Taint

I have found out that KSFO is sold to advertisers as “a Disney affiliate” with all the associated family-friendly connotations. So KSFO is getting all the benefit of the Disney name as well as the massive infrastructure of ad sales at the national level. Clearly ABC Radio doesn’t want KSFO hosts’ horrific comments to actually reach advertisers. Advertisers are kept in the dark so KSFO can benefit from the Disney brand glow (ABC Radio News creditability glow?).

Advertisers should be able to decide if they want to keep supporting this show based on complete information. We already know that management at ABC and Disney support these hosts, which means that the ABC/Disney Radio brand now apparently includes support for violent hate speech toward Muslims, democrats and liberals.

But instead of directing the hosts to refrain from violent rhetoric and hate speech, they go after the weakest person with the fewest resources. It’s cheaper and easier.

Bottom line: ABC/Disney is supporting and profiting from this violent speech, they should at least also accept any negative connotations or financial impact it might have to their image.

What can you do?

1. As El Gato Negro suggested, let’s distribute the audio clips of violent rhetoric and hate speech to multiple locations on the internet so that the ABC/Disney lawyers will have to find and send cease and desist letters to ISPs with stronger policies than the nice people at 1&1.

2. Crank this up around the blogosphere, if you have a blog link and post about this.

3. Let’s see if anyone in the mainstream media cares. Sadly they have a hard time writing about people who want them dead. I would think that at least the PUBLISHERS and MANAGEMENT at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associate Press would want to at least defend their own journalists and photojournalists. To date only the LA Times has called Morgan out for accusing them of photojournalist misconduct…

Some members of the press HAVE covered this. When Joe Conason at Salon did a story about Morgan and KSFO he got called a hack by Morgan. When Todd Milbourn of the Sacramento Bee did a story about Move America Forward he got called a liar by Morgan.

4. Donate to groups who would defend bloggers, journalists and others that Morgan, Rogers and Sussman attack. Specifically I’m recommending you donate money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists , and Media Matters.

You can also support the journalists who are doing their jobs and are threatened with death from talk radio hosts.

5. Write the advertisers of KSFO. I have a list of SOME of the advertisers who advertise on KSFO. Drop me a line at spockosemail @ gmail.com and I’ll send you a link to an updated list.

As always, be polite, let them know what they are supporting and how it is impacting their brand in your eyes. They often times have their own stated values that they want to maintain, you may want to ask if their corporate values align with what is being said on KSFO (often times the hosts are the VOICE of their brand in the Bay Area, so it’s not just the fact that their ad is run right after some violent hate speech, but that the person who is reading their copy is the person who is spewing the violent rhetoric.)

I’m open to other ideas too.

I’d like to thank everyone who has written letters to advertisers, especially PTcruiser and BP. Thanks Blog-Integrity folks for the forum, and special thanks to El Gato Negro.

LLAP,
Spocko

Does anybody know if Earthlink’s service is to be of the typical consumer flavor? That is, will the terms of service permit Earthlink to block ports such as 25 and 80 (or whatever their whim dictates)? Also, will Earthlink define the service as an “information service” rather than as mere provision of bandwidth, as a common carrier would? Will hosts connected via this network experience true network neutrality by being permitted to send packets without restriction to other hosts?

[Note: I had posted this question earlier in response to an sfist.com article.]

I have always followed the rule that one need know only the funding behind propositions and candidates to know what to vote against: the side with the laughably small funding probably best represents the interests of the vast majority of the populus. The oligarchs, as always, have their shills. Telco (telephone company) funding of front groups opposed to internet network neutrality, as reported by Common Cause, should, therefore, come as no surprise (Wikipedia network neutrality introduction).

The Common Cause site provides a revealing look at each of the front groups. For example, there is a description of the deceptive advertising of HOTI (Hands Off the Internet), a group that includes BellSouth, Cingular, and AT&T:

With its pithy name, viral web cartoons, high profile spokesman (former White House press secretary Mike McCurry) and barrage of print and television advertising, HOTI has been effectively injecting the telephone industry’s arguments on net neutrality into the public debate in recent months.

And they manage to do it while hiding their relationship with their corporate backers. K Street Confidential columnist Jeffrey Birnbaum wrote in The Washington Post that “no one can determine who is supporting Hands Off the Internet by looking at its ads alone. To find out, one must dig into its Web site.”[1]

Not surprisingly, the Common Cause report continues, HOTI poses as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and fundamentally misrepresents the issue at hand:

HOTI ads “are the epitome of doublespeak,” according to Birnbaum.[4] For example, one print ad attempts to frame the Hands Off the Internet message in pro-consumer terms. “Net neutrality means consumers will be stuck paying more for their Internet access to cover the big online companies’ share,” the ad claims.[5] But every major consumer group supports net neutrality, and opposes HOTI’s plan to give telephone and cable companies gatekeeper status over the Internet.[6]

HOTI’s web-based advertising campaigns look and feel like something a consumer or grassroots group might publish. Their catchy, flash animation web videos try to persuade citizens that the government and Google are trying to control the Internet through net neutrality. The benefits that would accrue to the telephone and cable industry if telecom legislation passes without net neutrality language are never discussed, of course.

Learn more: visit Save the Internet’s FAQ.

Cory Doctorow’s Anti-DRM Speech gives a good summary of why DRM (”Digital Rights Managment” — an excellent piece of Orwellian new-speak, if ever there was one), as advocated by oligopolists’ mouthpieces such as the RIAA, violate fair use rights, and stifle intellectual and commercial innovation.

An excerpt:

Remember Schneier’s Law? Anyone can come up with a security system so clever that he can’t see its flaws. The only way to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system’s workings and invite public feedback. But now we live in a world where any cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to that kind of feedback. That’s something that a Princeton engineering prof named Ed Felten and his team discovered when he submitted a paper to an academic conference on the failings in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking scheme proposed by the recording industry. The RIAA responded by threatening to sue his ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the kind of client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut and the RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn’t so lucky.

Matter of fact, the next guy wasn’t. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the failings in Adobe’s e-book locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for 30 days. He copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket warning to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since we’d apparently turned into the kind of country where certain equations are illegal.

An excellent column by Robert Cringely proposes bypassing the telcos altogether in the last mile, thereby mooting the question of “Network Neutrality” (the proposal is in the context of a discussion of Microsoft’s future).

Cringley outlines the problem:

To Bob Frankston’s way of thinking this all comes down to who owns the infrastructure. The phone and cable companies own the wire outside our homes but we own the wire inside. (It didn’t used to be that way, you know. There was a time when the phone company owned the wire in our walls even though we paid for its purchase and installation.) The Internet has been a huge success to date specifically because nobody much controls the electrons. This is as opposed to services like broadcasting where some perceived scarcity of spectrum allowed governments to determine who could give or sell us entertainment and information. The ISPs (by which I mean telcos and cable companies) would very much like to go back to that sort of system, where they, not you, are the provider and determinant of what bits are good bits and what bits are bad.

No thanks.

Cringely describes Frankston’s solution to the Telco’s anti-capitalist, anti-entrepreneurial, and anti-social tendencies:

This would be a real marketplace not a fake one. Today’s system is a fake because it depends on capturing the value of the application — communications — in the transport and that would no longer be possible because with the Internet the value is created OUTSIDE the network.

“One example of the collateral damage caused by today’s approach is the utter lack of simple wireless connectivity. Another is that we have redundant capital-intensive bit paths whose only purpose is to contain bits within billing paths,” Frankston explains. “In practice, the telcos are about nothing at all other than creating billable events. Isn’t it strange that as the costs of connectivity were going down your phone bill was increasing — at least until VoIP forced the issue.”

“We have an alternative model in the road system: The roads themselves are funded as infrastructure because the value is from having the road system as a whole, not the roads in isolation. You don’t put a meter on each driveway. Tolls, fuel taxes, fees on trucks, etc. are ways of generating money but they are indirect. Local builders add capacity; communities add capacity and large entities create interstate roads. They don’t create artificial scarcity just to increase toll revenues — at least not so blatantly.”

“I refer to today’s carrier networks as trollways because the model is inverted — the purpose of the road is to pass as many trollbooths as possible. We keep the backbone unlit to assure artificial scarcity. Worse, by trying to force us within their service model we lose the opportunity to create new value and can only choose among the services that fill their coffers — it’s hard to come up with a more effective way to minimize the value of the networks.”

A model in which the infrastructure is paid for as infrastructure — privately, locally, nationally, and internationally can create a true marketplace in which the incentives are aligned. Instead of having the strange phenomenon of carriers spending billions and then arguing that they deserve to be paid, we’d have them bidding on contracts to install and/or maintain connectivity to a marketplace that is buying capacity and making it available so value can be created without having to be captured within the network and thus taken out of the economy.

So why not do it? Well the telcos and cable companies would hate it. Who made them gods?

Thanks to Doc Searls for the link.

Thanks to ceej for Fropen (sic) source community demographics, which points to an article entitled Open Source, Cold Shoulder. Ceej’s summary of the article:

As you know, Bob, there aren’t a lot of women writing software. It turns out there are even fewer women working on [open] source projects. The … article discusses this fact and engages in some speculation about why.

Thanks to Birdhouse for the following:

The EFF has assembled a list of ten of the worst patent abusers out there, and wants their heads on a platter for “Crimes against the public domain, willful ignorance of prior art, egregious display of obviousness.” Fortunately, fair use has a posse.

I posted on the issue of net neutrality in a classroom forum (for my Network Administration class at CCSF):

Doc Searls of Linux Journal wrote a column, “Saving theNet: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes,”about this issue recently.

Searls is a strong advocate of the point of view that the main reasonfor the internet’s extreme malleability and explosive growth has beenthe abstraction of applications from the underlying networkinfrastructure. To use his term, the internet is a “stupid” network: thenetwork says nothing about what applications (the networks “endpoints”)can or should be. In contrast is the PSTN, of Ma Bell fame — thepenultimate example of a circuit switched “smart” network. Searlsargues that the telcos, owners of the PSTN, yearn to exert the kind ofcontrol over the internet that they have over the PSTN, and that theyare moving to reestablish their hegemony by arguing before the USCongress in favor of doing so.

What would this mean in a pratical sense for you and I? It would meanmuch less diversity on the application side, and little or no control,or ability to develop our own solutions. Think cell phones, where it isvirtually impossible — if not illegal — to control the software on thebox. Reverse engineering the software, even if only to build beneficialnew applications, is a violation of an agreement that you entered intoin order to get phone service. This closed, proprietary software worldis a fundamentally different development (and user) environment from theworld of tcp/ip, where standards are published and vetted openly in theform of RFCs.

This is a complicated issue, but it would behoove us not tounderestimate its implications. The outcome of the fight for control ofintellectual “property” in the form of patents and copyright onsoftware, in conjunction with the struggle for control of networkinfrastructure, may very well determine whether the “useful arts”continue to flourish in the U.S., or, conversely, as we’re alreadywitnessing in both the software and telecom world, the US slips intorelative obsolesence.

I posted a reply in a discussion of Digital Rights Management on Shelley Powers Burningbird weblog:

In regards to this statement:

But the same copyright laws that protect big corporations also are the same laws that protect individual artists’ rights. I know because I have used copyright to protect my own work from infringement.

I beg to differ. Big corporations are not people. It is disingenuous, at best, to imply that their rights somehow are equivalent to those of individual persons. The enormous concentrations of wealth and power that corporate entities have become — so powerful now that they are fundamentally subverting the system of free exchange of ideas, in the form of copyrights with reasonable limits, reasonably and narrowly defined patents, and subordination to the will of legislatures — can in no way be equated to individual persons.

It is ironic that corporations (and by the use of the word corporation here I refer especially to the 1% that control about 80% of our economy) are subverting the system of free scientific and cultural inquiry, created by legislative fiat (again, in the form of reasonable limits on scope and life of patents and copyright), that gave birth to them.

I would like to add, because it seems necessary to say so out loud, that a reasonable juridical system of copyright and patents is the best guarantor of the free exchange of ideas. The free exchange of ideas, coupled with robust legislative and judicial oversight, helps to ensure that markets are productive and flexible.

This is not the system we in the U.S. have now, and the recent extension of copyright life to absurd lifespans, as well as the distortions we are witnessing in the patent legal arena, serve the interests of an extremely narrow segment of society, and do not serve the general welfare.

Marc Cantor has written a good summary of current open standards projects (maybe calling them ‘movements’ might be a little more accurate) in an article titled Breaking the Web Wide Open!

His description echoes my experience, which has been that although “incumbents” (Cantor’s term) may be using new technology, they often mimic what they know. Cantor says:

For decades, “walled gardens” of proprietary standards and content have been the strategy of dominant players in mainframe computer software, wireless telecommunications services, and the World Wide Web—it was their successful lock-in strategy of keeping their customers theirs.

And:

While the incumbents use cheap open source software to run their back-ends systems, their business models largely depend on proprietary software and algorithms.

Cantor gives an excellent and concise summary of open web services technologies, and lists areas being developed:

Today’s Open APIs are complemented by standardized Schemas—the structure of the data itself and its associated meta-data. Take for example a podcasting feed. It consists of: a) the radio show itself, b) information on who is on the show, what the show is about and how long the show is (the meta-data) and also c) API calls to retrieve a show (a single feed item) and play it from a specified server.

The combination of Open APIs, standardized schemas for handling meta-data, and an industry which agrees on these standards are breaking the web wide open right now. So what new open standards should the web incumbents—and you—be watching? Keep an eye on the following developments:

Identity
Attention
Open Media
Microcontent Publishing
Open Social Networks
Tags
Pinging
Routing
Open Communications
Device Management and Control

Cantor then discusses each of these in depth. Quite interesting.

I stumbled across an fairly good article, titled
Why Linux isn’t too fat & MS hurts customers, that enumerates reasons to switch from Microsoft to Linux (or, rather, to anything open source).

An excerpt:

The other big benefit is that companies can control their own destinies more finely by using Linux. When you use Windows, you get whatever version of Windows was shipping when you bought the PC.

Often, most of a company is using an older version of Office. Then someone gets a new PC with the latest Office, and starts sending around Word documents. People with the older versions of Office can’t read those, and pressure quickly rises to upgrade everyone to the latest Office. Microsoft could easily make the old and new file formats compatible, but they deliberately do the opposite to force unnecessary upgrades on the market.

The correct approach when your company stumbles into this situation is to take the opportunity to introduce OpenOffice into your company. Microsoft makes a big song and dance about “supporting what customers want,” but they really don’t support what customers want. Microsoft acts to protect its monopoly, rather than supporting what customers want.

At work, I tried to make the point that it might not be a good idea to encase the intellectual output of a thousand employees into formats whose proprietary owner not only has a record of extortionate capriciousness, but one who has broken the law to maintain its monopoly control of markets (I’m referring to Microsoft, of course), but I was ignored. One more reason to move on.

This post serves to memorialize a comment that I made, in the case that it disappears. The comment is still up here.

It was posted in the comments section of Joi Ito’s site, January 07, 2005, which was titled: “Bill Gates calls free culture advocates communists.”

27- Robert @ January 24, 2005 07:03 PM

I believe that the intent of the movement to reform copyright and patent law is to maintain a free society — one in which capitalism is possible. The irony of Bill Gates’ remarks in the interview Joi Ito cites is that Microsoft’s activities have stunted innovation through illegal monopoly.

Microsoft’s impetus has been towards control of markets, which is a perfectly predictable outcome, given the mandate of its constitutive documents. Nevertheless, Microsoft has more in common with Soviet-style ministries than Bill the propagandist would have us believe.

And this is why we have legislatures and courts: because some values cannot be represented fairly by truck in money alone.

One of those values is that for capitalism and “the useful arts” to flourish there must be some limit on their ownership. The progenitors of ideas must be rewarded, but so too must the benefit of their labor be dispersed to society as a whole.

It is precisely the belief of those who argue against irrational patent law and excessively lengthy copyrights that these benefits are not devolving to society in a reasonable period of time.

And, of course, there is nothing in the legal instantiation of property that forbids gifting, and volunteerism. The GPL and Creative Commons licenses are quite supportable legally, at least as supportable under international copyright law as any other.

I would argue that we are all the richer for the efforts of voluntary organizations; indeed, a good deal of liberty and civil society can be attributed to those who have given freely of their time, property — and ideas.

I neglected in the entry below to link to Eric Raymond’s The Magic Cauldron.

Whenever I’m trying to explain the difference between the web, the internet, and earlier media forms, I begin with this analogy: the first TV news shows looked like radio sounds. Announcers stood stiffly in front of a camera and sonorously read the news. Of course, it didn’t work, because TV abhors stillness. Even if it’s just Ken Burns moving the camera across a tintype from the U.S. civil war, you’ll notice that everything on TV moves now. It’s such a basic insight, but people didn’t automatically grasp it. I also believe that this process, as with the adoption of any technology, is fundamentally collective in nature: we learn, and adapt, as a group.

Similarly, the best ways to use the internet and the web are forming as we watch. An excellent example? The incomprehension with which traditional print news organizations greet the web. Dan Gillmor discusses the phenomenon of the “costwall” at traditional print news outlets’ web sites. Gillmor points to how traditional news organizations can adapt and even benefit from the ‘net, by turning fishwrap, as Cory Doctorow so aptly terms it, into an asset that is both communally and commercially valuable.

I think examining the unfolding of earlier adoptions of technology can be revealing, and here I usually refer to Benedict Anderson’s excellent book, Imagined Communities. His principal subject is nationalism, but along the way he examines the influence of the printing press on the spread of capitalism, vernacular languages, and nationalist ideologies. We can expect similar upheaval, given that the foundations of capital and property are threatened by the internet and the web.

The means of reciprocity usually get rearranged in such times, as was the case after the advent of radio. Eben Moglen’s 23 February 2004 Harvard address, as posted on Groklaw, is a lucid introduction to the unfolding of this story this time around.