Darknet

The digital transition

Tech columnist Rob Pegoraro in the Washington Post on digital and high-definition television and society's digital transition. Good advice here. Excerpt:

I doubt that the broadcast flag will stop Internet copying of programs -- people will just share lower-quality copies of programs that take less time to download -- but I am pretty confident that the flag will do a fine job of inconveniencing law-abiding viewers. You would be wise to buy an HDTV, or least an off-air tuner, before the FCC's deadline, assuming its manufacturer hasn't implemented broadcast-flag support ahead of time (as if customers are screaming for this feature today).

If you buy too late, or you buy a set that's already flagged, there's still a way out of this copy-restriction mess. Make sure digital-TV hardware has analog connections. Analog component-video inputs and outputs offer almost the same quality as digital connections, but they can't enforce the copying limits of the broadcast flag or its equivalents in cable and satellite transmissions. Make sure that your digital tuner, however it gets its signal, can send the picture along to a TV or a video recorder via a high-resolution analog output.

Preserving the Information Exchange

The New York Times editorial board gets it right in an editorial today: Grokster and the Information Exchange.

Grokster can certainly be used to swap music illegally. But it can also be used to exchange electronic copies of books already in the public domain, transcripts of Congressional hearings or any number of other legitimate types of information. Much like a VCR that does not distinguish between a pirated tape and one legally acquired, the technology does not care what is shared. It is impossible to strike down software like Grokster for its use in illegal file-sharing without also destroying its capacity for legal and socially beneficial activities. ...

Is society better served by restricting or even prohibiting new technologies to protect the rights of copyright owners or is there a greater good in the widest possible exchange of information? The resolution lies somewhere in the middle. Finding it, as the court acknowledges, is properly left to Congress.

These are thorny issues indeed. Freedom of information is at the root of American democracy, and yet every day we see that freedom being compromised, controlled and limited. The Grokster decision is a ruling in favor of keeping our bets open about which technologies will turn out to serve our freedoms best.

Valenti on the clash between Hollywood and tech

I've begun a regular Q&A feature for Engadget, the Web's leading site for information about cool new gadgets such as handheld devices, cellphones, cameras, wireless gizmos, etc.

My first interview is with Jack Valenti, whose tenure as president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America ends tomorrow -- after 38 years. We talk about movies, technology and whether the new breed of digital gizmos threatens Hollywood. Excerpt:

I’ve talked to about 3,500 students at Harvard, Yale, NYU, Stanford and Duke -- eight universities in all. When I ask, how many of you believe that what you’re doing is wrong, morally and legally, most of their hands go up. But they rationalize it by saying, yes, it is a kind of stealing, but everybody else is doing it, and it costs too much to go to a movie. There’s a rationalization that goes on, but I am convinced if we keep putting this moral imperative before them and if the professors follow through on this, it will have an effect.

I'll post the entire interview with Valenti on this blog at a later date. And I take issue with many of his assumptions in my book, so I'll keep my powder dry until then.

Bootleg Clash mashups

Webjay - Listener-created radio offers this London Booted - A tribute to the Clash playlist, courtesy of UK's Culturedeluxe.

Says Marc C.:

Lucas Gonze likes the "Peaches vs Clash" mashup on London Booted, but I'm totally in sync with "I'm Not Down (Hold Your Head Up) ", "Funky Guns of Brixton", "What about Brixton" and of course "Four Hoarse Men".

The downbeat "Lost Souls in the SuperMarket" rocks as well. I keep breaking out in laughter when I hear it.

New Amazon review passes muster

I trimmed my Amazon review of Dan Gillmor's We the Media by a third, and so far it's still up.

Unlike before.

The death of radio

Barron's (subscribers only): Losing the Signal. Radio may be in a long-term decline.

IT'S HARD TO SAY EXACTLY WHEN radio started to lose the love and the power and the magic celebrated in that 1975 rock anthem, but a good bet would be 1996. Landmark telecom legislation back then unleashed a powerful wave of consolidation that left the airwaves cluttered with commercials -- and investors set up for disappointment down the road.

Though many radio stocks soared seven- or eightfold during the merger frenzy, the excitement proved ephemeral. The stocks came back to earth with a thud, and the industry has since reverted to its former status as a generator of steady but unspectacular returns, with revenues growing little more than the economy as a whole. Worse, there's increasing concern that radio is entering a long-term decline, the result of new competition and technologies and changing consumer tastes.

Younger adults -- the key targets of radio advertising -- have clearly been losing their ardor for the medium. By one key measure, the number of listeners ages 18 to 34 has declined by about 8% in the past five years, as portable digital-music players, Internet radio programming and other innovations have started to take hold. And while the dollars spent on radio advertising have been essentially flat for the past few years, competing media like cable TV, the 'Net and outdoor advertising have been gaining steadily.

"It's over," Larry Haverty, a media specialist at State Street Research and Management in Boston, says of radio stocks' big run. "Something good happened in the 'Nineties; something less good has happened in the '00s. Every retailer is blowing its budget on advertising and radio is not getting any of it. If they don't get it now, they're not going to."

Clear Channel Communications, the big daddy of the industry, has seen its share price fall by nearly two-thirds since 2000 -- including 17% in just the past year. Citadel Broadcasting is off 33% this year and Cumulus Media is down 29%. But investors have by no means given up; the group is trading at multiples to cash flow that are higher than both their historic norms and the valuations of other media companies.

Investors, along with radio executives, may not be facing up to the full extent of the industry's challenges. While radio has always weathered past threats -- video did not kill radio's star, as a group called the Buggles prophesied in 1981 -- things could really be different this time.

Across the country, listeners are changing how they choose to receive music and news and talk radio. They are turning to portable music players like Apple Computer's iPod, streaming audio over the Internet and the emerging field of satellite radio to hear what they want, when they want to hear it.

Anne Kershaw, a 46-year-old lawyer who travels weekly between her home in Tarrytown, N.Y., and an office in Richmond, Va., bought an iPod in May, partly because "there is no decent radio station in Richmond. I was tired of being preached to." She still uses the radio -- but not in the old way. By attaching a transmitter to her iPod and setting it on a certain FM frequency, she can play the 983 tunes she has downloaded to the iPod through the radio, whether at home or in the car.

Music downloading is one of the "fastest-growing digital phenomena ever," says Forrester Research Group. It predicts download services will generate more than $200 million in revenue this year, $40 million higher than forecast and up from just $36 million in 2003. In all, some 35 million U.S. adults have downloaded music, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit initiative. ...

A TiVo for radio earns RIAA's ire

Reuters:

Catching Blondie's reunion tour broadcast at 4 in the morning wasn't an option for XM Satellite Radio subscriber and single father Scott MacLean.

"I was missing concerts that were being broadcasted when I was asleep or out," he said.

So the 35-year-old computer programmer from Ottawa, Ontario, wrote a piece of software that let him record the show directly onto his PC hard drive while he snoozed.

The software, TimeTrax, also neatly arranged the individual songs from the concert, complete with artist name and song title information, into MP3 files

Then MacLean started selling the software, putting him in the thick of a potential legal battle pitting technically savvy fans against a company protecting its alliance--and licensing agreements--with the music industry.

MacLean says he is simply seeking to make XM Radio--the largest U.S. satellite radio service with over 2.1 million members paying $10 a month for about 120 channels--a little more user-friendly.

"The larger issue here is they came out with one lock and another creative person goes out to create a key," said Michael McGuire, an analyst at technology research firm Gartner. "It's very hard for policy and copyright law to keep up with the pace of technological change."

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America said his organization had not reviewed the software, but said that in principle it was disturbed by the idea. "We remain concerned about any devices or software that permit listeners to transform a broadcast into a music library," RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy said. ...

Music labels fear that the convenience of MacLean's software will lead millions more to copy and distribute songs over file-sharing networks such as Kazaa, a music industry source said.

Well, no. The RIAA is worried not about people placing these songs on P2P networks. They're worried that people will be less inclined to buy CDs if they can record songs in a digital format off satellite radio.

Here's p2pnet's take: XM XM satellite app raises ire.

This is what Jim Griffin and I and others have been talking about for some time: a TiVo for radio. (And it's why the RIAA is pressing the FCC to adopt an audio broadcast flag.) Here's the XM Radio PC receiver, which costs $49 and works with TimeTrax.

Induce Act not dead yet

Xeni Jardin in Wired News: Hollywood loves it. Techies hate it. And now, nine senators are signing on to help it pass. That's the latest chapter in the short history of the Induce Act, a bill aimed at cracking down on technologies that can be used to steal copyright works.

During Senate hearings over the Induce Act in July, the U.S. Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters -- an Induce supporter -- said she believed new legislation should modernize the precedent set in a 1984 Supreme Court decision addressing the legality of the Sony Betamax. The court ruling, which protected technologies "capable of non-infringing uses," should be "replaced by a more flexible rule that is more meaningful in the technological age," Peters said.

Once again, it's abundantly clear that the U.S. Register of Copyrights is an enemy of creative reuses of digital materials by the public. "Modernize" the Betamax ruling? She -- and a disappointing phalanx of senators, including Tom Daschle (whose campaign I've contributed to!) -- are out to gut it.

Ashcroft goes after file sharers

Reuters: U.S. agents have raided the homes of five people who allegedly traded hundreds of thousands of songs, movies and other copyrighted material over the Internet, Attorney General John Ashcroft said.

Murdoch betting on the PVR revolution

News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch is a big believer in the revolutionary nature of personal video recorders: "I think they will become ubiquitous. People won't have loyalty to a particular channel. They'll hear about programes on some unheard-of channel and watch that."