Digital rights

The big players on the Internet--Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others--are making changes in the way they push their data and services around the Internet. Stung by revelations that the NSA has been vacuuming up their customer data, these firms are adding new encryption to their data streams between data centers and between their data centers and customers. As they should.

I seem to have crossed some kind of spam tipping point over the weekend, with more spam hitting my Inbox than is being filtered out by two levels of spam filters (one on the server, one on my mail client). There was a time when as much as 90% of the spam was being caught by this two-level approach, but no more. I'm now getting only about 50% of spam trapped by the filters.

Major sites on the Internet are displaying either a black banner (e.g. Google) or are completely blacked out, meaning there is no access to site content today (e.g. Wikipedia). The two bills (SOPA is the House version, PIPA is the Senate version) are appallingly bad, as they toss due process out the window and give unelected bureaucrats the right to shut down any site in the U.S. without any actual proof of a copyright violation--all that is needed is an unfounded accusation. But wait! Like a Ginzu knife ad, there is more!

Facebook is now going to give Politico every singe public AND PRIVATE Facebook posting that mentions the name of a Presidential candidate. Supposedly this will be done anonymously, but there is no way to opt out. So either you never discuss anything political anymore or mention a candidate's name in every single post to make the whole exercise worthless.

SandMonkey, a prominent Egyptian blogger who was briefly detained by Egyptian security forces, advocates that opponents of repressive regimes should store all their documents, writing, and information (e.g. email addresses and data on compatriots) on a cloud-based service located in a different country. That way, if a laptop is confiscated, there are no incriminating documents on it.

Congressman Rick Boucher (D) of Virginia's Ninth District has proposed an Internet privacy bill, which is co-sponsored with Cliff Stearns (R) of Florida. The bill has critics from both the business community and consumer advocates, which suggests it probably strikes the right balance as a place to start. I am constantly amazed at how casually people give up personal information like their birthdate, street address, and other information just to get some "free" service (e.g. Facebook).

Digital music downloads continued to gain a larger share of the music sales in the U.S. While CDs still are the most popular way to buy music, digital downloads increased in the first half of 2009 by 50%, up to 30% of music purchases. The iTunes Store is now the largest retailer of music in the country, with 25% of the total market.

Via Boing Boing, the entertainment industry has grandly announced that their customers should not expect to be able to play songs, watch movies, or read books "forever." Instead, you should only be able to do that "for a while." Okay, I made that last quote up, but that is, in effect, what they are saying. It is really is strange that an profitable and successful industry is so contemptuous of its own customers.

Facebook has quietly changed its terms of service. Formerly, if you canceled your account, all your content was deleted and that was that. Under the new terms, Facebook retains an "irrevocable, perpetual" license allowing the company to do whatever it likes with whatever you have posted.

A blogger named Jason Scott, among other online writers and discussion groups, has been talking about a new problem--over-hyped Web services and Web sites that have failed financially and are shutting down without giving users of those services or sites an adequate opportunity to make copies of blogs, pictures, and other materials posted to those sites. It is likely to be a growing problem as the economy slumps and many poorly thought out "Web 2.0" business plans fail.

Back in 1995, I foolishly proposed a project for the Blacksburg Electronic Village that would have us partner with the local public radio station to begin broadcasting over the new Internet thingy that was just beginning to take off. It was very modest, and involved streaming audio news reports over the Internet--5 to 10 minutes of mostly local news a day, but in four languages, because of the large international population in Blacksburg.

No one believed anyone would ever be interested in listening to audio over the Internet.

Walmart has killed its movie download business, which is not even a year old. There were many problems with it:

A lot of companies are frustrated at Apple's domination of the portable music and video market via the popular iPod, which has about 80% of the market for such devices. NBC recently announced it is pulling its TV programs from the iTunes store, and now Universal is going to distribute its music catalogue via SpiralFrog, which will compete directly with the iTunes store.

In yet another Google flop, the company has announced it is closing its video store. Some thing work, some things don't. No problem there. But customers who downloaded videos from the Google store received a letter from Google notifying them that the videos they had "purchased" were going up in smoke. The movies have DRM (Digital Rights Management) attached to them, and once the store is closed, the movies are no longer watchable.

Mark Pryor (D-Ark) has decided that Congress and the Federal government should decide what we can and cannot see on our TVs, cellphones, and portable media devices. Pryor is sponsoring a bill that would require the FCC to develop a "super V-chip" that would have to be installed in every device that connects to any third party network, including the network.

The New York Times (registration required, links disappear) has an article about the plunging fortunes of the music industry. Sales of CDs have fallen more than 20% in the past year. While the article does acknowledge that a lack of good music may have something to do with it, no mention is made of the possible effect price also has on buying decisions. Most new CDs cost $18 and up.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) may be on its way out. Amazon has announced it intends to get into the music business and will offer only digital tunes that do not have DRM, which limits what buyers can do with the music.

Viacom is suing Google over unauthorized video clips on Google's recently acquired YouTube. YouTube fans record clips from their favorite shows (including many shows owned and produced by Viacom), and post them on YouTube for other people to watch. Part of what is going on is the fact that Viacom just bought into Joost, a YouTube competitor that will carry all of Viacom's content. So the lawsuit has two purposes: protect Viacom's intellectual property but also drive people to Joost.

I recently installed an 'ebook' reader on my Palm Treo. I went to the Palm Web site where they have lots of ebooks for sale, but the prices are quite silly. Recent releases--the books you are most likely to want to read on an airplane--are priced at about what you would pay for a paper copy on Amazon or some other big box book store. Some books are as little as five dollars, and many others are ten dollars or more. "Classic" books have even more baffling prices. Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" cost ten dollars, while a much more recent book, H.

In an interesting essay covered in a Wired article, Steve Jobs of Apple has called for an end to DRM (Digital Rights Management) for music. Apple has found that, on average, only 3% of music on a typical iPod uses the Apple FairPlay DRM; the rest is music that has no DRM at all. Typically, this means most people are simply ripping music from CDs and putting it on their iPod.