Category Archives: Culture

These posts will deal with Copyright and other cultural topics

Occupy Wall Street

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Since September 17th people have been having a live in protest on Wall Street in New York City. The protests are attempting to bring attention to the inequities between Wall Street, CEOs and the rest of the US and world. There has been a media blackout since it started until recently. The Daily Show has covered it twice (Here and Here). There were two reasons for this. First the media didn’t know how to deal with the protests. They act differently, the people protesting aren’t grandmothers yelling about the government, instead it’s a bunch of hippie like people that are protesting corporations. Another problem was that there was no cohesive voice coming out from the movement. However yesterday there was an actual list of “demands” released. Basically these demands explain the need for changes at all levels of government and how corporations behave towards both workers and the environment.

The protests are in their third week now. They have been growing every week. Initially, there were only a few hundred protesters now it’s been reported that up to 20,000 people have started to protest in NYC. The occupy movement has spread from only being in NYC to Boston, LA, DC, and several other cities as well. While the Daily Show is right that these protests are very similar to the Tea Party protests the problems they hope to address the end goals and the means are very different. Both groups also had a lot of uninformed people, for example you had the old lady saying keep the government out of my healthcare when she had medicare (government healthcare), and here you have people just saying they want Wall Street to take less money. These protests have gone beyond just the hippies, unions in NYC have also joined the protesters as well as more “responsible” people from other walks of life.

I think these protests could eventually make a difference. I don’t think it will happen in time for the next presidential election. The changes that they are demanding are structural changes that require socio-economic changes. They require complete changes in our ethics and our goals in lives. These are not changes that happen over night. There are some changes that we can do that will have immediate impacts though, and these aren’t popular among policy makers. We need to get money out of politics, we need to limit how politicians can make money off the laws they pass and we need to use public funds for elections (as well as have elections on the weekend or a holiday). Removing the money by creating public funds will eliminate the leverage that lobbyists can use on politicians. Preventing politicians from making money off the laws through stock purchases will prevent tit-for-tat behavior with lobbyists as well. Making it easy as possible to vote will increase the immediate participation in the government.

The reaction to OWS in NYC has been horrifying. The cops have been brutal towards the protesters and really show that the indignation our leaders displayed during violent responses to protest are just words. If US politicians cared about freedom and democracy they would support the protesters. Protesting is part of being American. It’s part of our constitution because it drives conversation and it drives democracy. Protesting is a form of participation. If we aren’t able to participate we don’t have a democracy. Arresting 700 people for going to the protest isn’t acceptable. Pepper spraying women that were corralled is not acceptable, it’s not how a democracy deals with protests. The right way to deal with these protests is to invite them into the conversation and really take a look at what they have to say. We aren’t doing that in the US. The 99% don’t have the same voice as the 1%. As can be seen from Fox News, that 1% is trying to divide the 99%.

Facebook dirty filthy liars

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Facebook has patented the ability to continue tracking users after they have left their website. Despite this Facebook repeatedly claimed that they were not in the business of tracking their users. However, Facebook’s business is knowing their product as well as possible. You are their product. They are extremely interested in knowing everything they can about you. Why? It’s really simple. The more they know about their user’s online browsing activities the better they can customize ads for you. I imagine that they will create some pretty sophisticated models to determine who will click what sorts of ads. The more people click the more accurate the ad targeting will become.

While individual users do have a web “fingerprint” as the EFF puts it, people will typically browse the same types of websites together. For example people who play fantasy football will be going to yahoo! sport (or some other competing service), they then visit sites like espn, sports illustrated and probably a few sports blogs to try to figure out the best way to get an edge in their game this weekend. Facebook will take this data and aggregate it for a larger set of data. As there are 800 million facebook users and millions of players of fantasy sports, this data could be extremely useful for Facebook to use in placing ads. From these data they may be able to determine which sports team you’re interested in, which players are on your fantasy team, and then display ads for jersey’s from that team or for a specific player. They will also be able to figure out which ads will have an higher likelihood of someone with your browsing profile to click on.

Facebook will then be able to set a premium for ads that they do this with, or they will earn more money from the number of clicks a given ad gets. This of course is why Facebook has decided to collect this data. Some of it seems harmless enough. It’s not that big of a deal that Facebook is getting my fantasy football information, why should I care? Well, you don’t just use the internet for fantasy football, you use it for banking, shopping and a plethora of other activities. Do you know what data facebook is collecting? I certainly don’t. From the patent it is unclear what protections they are providing on the data they are collection. It also doesn’t say what data they will be collecting when you visit a third party site.

As a personal precaution I have started to use Facebook in a separate instance of Chrome using the Incognito function. This prevents my browsing history from being saved and deletes many cookies. I have also taken to deleting all my cookies every time I close my browser. I don’t do it myself Chrome does it for me. Additionally, these settings are available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. I suggest that you look into doing similar safety measures to prevent Facebook from getting information from you that you don’t want them to have.

Finally, the other thing that isn’t really discussed in many places that mention the ads, this data is also being provided to law enforcement agencies. Now of course there’s the whole if you aren’t doing anything wrong then you don’t have to worry about anything. However, this worries me regardless because I’m losing my control over what information is going to the government and companies. I don’t like that. Patents like this one and cookies that record our daily activities are changing our private life into our public life.

Accessibility to Copyrighted Content

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Torrent Freak had this article today that discusses how the amount of piracy in Sweeden. In fact, it discusses how it has dropped with the introduction of Spotify. This isn’t the only case where access to material impacts piracy. Hulu (US only) has introduced an 8 day waiting period for new Fox episodes, this has lead to an increase in the amount of pirating of Hell’s Kitchen. If people are going to pirate Hell’s Kitchen, HELL’S KITCHEN!, then why wouldn’t they pirate just about all Fox episodes? Limiting access drives people to pirate.

Why are people willing to use Spotify over other streaming services? For one, it’s free with ads, but people are also able to share. They are able to share legally too. I am able to access music, which my friends on facebook have shared, from friends back in the US. From people that I only talk to on an irregular basis. My friends are able to share with me, where before I would have had to ask them for music and either bought it or download it. Since, I’ve decided to forgo using Apple products I’m limited by what is on Amazon or other music sites. Not all of the songs that my friends listen to are on those services. They like a lot of indie music.

I think that it’s time for copyright holders to wake up to the fact that people don’t really want to illegally acquire music. Sure they’d like to pay as little as possible, but they are willing to have ads, visual or audio, to listen to the music they like. The other good thing about a service like spotify is the fact that on your phone, if you pay, you can access your music there. Access is the important thing. If I’ve bought something once I should be able to access that product on any device in any manner that I want.

The differences in ability to view copyrighted material drives piracy. If copyright holders want to reduce piracy they need to increase accessibility for users. Users are willing to put up with a great deal of things if they are able to easily access content they want. Copyright holders, like Fox, should figure out a way to include online viewership into their rating system. People don’t want to be forced to watch shows when they are on TV. They want to watch shows when they are able to.

On Being the Product

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Today I’ve read and reposted a few articles (another) about users being the final product for several companies. These of course are facebook, twitter, google (in various forms including plus), yelp and the list goes on. Personally, I think that the claims that we are only the product is a bit of simplification. There is no doubt that we are the product, however, it’s also a matter of to whom are we the product? For instance, my blog, which I post on facebook, twitter and Google Plus allows others to be consumers of my content. The people who are my friends, followers or in my circles are able to consume my content. We are not merely products to companies, but we are products for other people as well.

We consume what are friends put out there. We have habits an manners in which we’d like to be able to consume that information. However, we’re running into a bidirectional problem. We’re losing control over what information we’re sharing and we’re losing control over how we consume this information. In Tom Anderson’s (of myspace fame) post about the changes in facebook, he mentions something called seamless sharing, where you have to do nothing and it’s instantly shared. This, to me, raises all sorts of privacy concerns. In this TED talk the speaker addresses the problem of filtering algorithms in google and facebook.

I think it’s very obvious that Facebook still realizes that we’re consumers of the information. For without our work as the product, posting links, pictures and statuses, there’d be no facebook. However, without us as consumers reading various different posts and clicking related links there’d also be no facebook. The product we are to non-fellow consumers comes down to our network, what the people in our network are interested in and whatever information that is automatically shared with facebook through our web browser.

We need to be aware that this trend is going to continue. We as users and consumers need to fight to get control over our data and the right to control what we share when we share it. This gets back to my points in my earlier blog posts about pseudonyms and truly being anonymous on the web. If you are interested in knowing at least some of the information that you’ve shared on facebook over the years in some countries you are able to download a copy of your facebook history. I haven’t done so yet, but I plan on it. If it is not available in your country, try to get the rights to your data.

While facebook is using you as a product, you still should have the right to demand the information they have on you and are selling to 3rd parties. Being the product isn’t fun, however, it’s nothing new. We’ve been the product for years and have never really complained. The difference now, is that the information about your personally has never been better and is only going to get better the more you give them. For free.

Technological Layers and Layer Ownership

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This ars technica article outlines in extraordinary detail what is at risk in the smart phone wars. It discusses the various different layers involved with the smart phone industry. These layers are extremely important. Control of a layer allows you to move into another layer and can help you extract monopoly rents* from those layers as well. My friend Sean was complaining about bloatware** earlier today that comes a computer supplier. They are actually attempting to get into a different layer. If a PC company is able to provide support which can allow them to get money from a customer on a returning basis, monthly or yearly, they can help ensure return purchases on more expensive purchases as well as getting a lot more money out of first sale. Additionally, the manufacturer may also be using the bloat ware they install to subsidize the cost of the product you bought. If a third party asks to have software pre-installed the manufacturer could ask for money to put it on, which may be passed to you as a consumer, so you could get a computer at a slightly lower price.

Ars Technica, isn’t the only group of people that views this phenomenon as a stack with different layers in it. This is actually an economic model as well. Which was used in the original Microsoft EU case explaining how these different layers can be leveraged to foreclose on a new market.

Another way of looking at this is in a traditional manufacturing sense. When you are making a car you have many different suppliers. You have paint, tires, batteries, steel, etc… There are several different ways to make it cheaper for you to produce a car. You can become vertically integrated, with a very high production level, where you make the steel, tires, paint and the full car. If you were extremely good at producing steel you would be able to get the steel at cost whereas traditionally you would have to pay a higher cost so the producer could earn a profit.

We can see this same sort of thing happen within IT. There is serious concern with corruption of content and content providers, like Comcast, purchasing a wide range of companies. If they control the material and access to the material they could control what people can access and impact society in a serious manner.

I don’t think that Comcast is going to be able to significantly impact the smart phone layers as they have with TV. However, a company like Google or Apple definitely could. Google is actually attempting to get into every single layer in this market. They tried to purchase wireless spectrum (they are also installing a super fast network in Kansas City), they are going to purchase Motorola, they have an OS and they are an app provider.

I think that other technology companies are aware of this. This is part of the reason why Google is being attacked on all sides. While until Google gets a hold of Motorola, they will be mostly in the top most two layers, OS and Applications. Google is clearly trying to move into every layer possible. This will allow them to have the greatest likelihood of a customer going onto a website and click an ad to give them money.

To prevent this, almost everyone is suing Google or some aspect of their technologies. Google is trying to get around this. They want the control.

I’m going to be gone for a little while. My brother is coming into town and I’ll be in Amsterdam for the next few days and then Munich this weekend. Hopefully I’ll have a post up Thursday or early next week.

Further Reading: The New ICT Ecosystem by Martin Fransman

*monopoly rents means higher prices from controlling the market. It allows a manufacturer to sell a product for a higher price than they would be able to do under a competitive market. Microsoft is able to do this with Windows. However to protect themselves from other OS providers undercutting their prices, MS sells the same OS at lower price points. They give discounts to students and charge a lower price in poor countries. This allows them to increase their monopoly to new markets.

**excess software which slows down a computer or smart phone.