Posted in Photography, Travel on July 31st, 2012 by glennm
A wonderful place that transports you back to the past. Marriott Ranch, Hume, Virginia.
Sitting on porch of country lodge once owned by US Chief Just… on Twitpic.
Tags: photosPosted in Social Media on July 29th, 2012 by glennm
Tags: social networking, TwitterPosted in Business, Cyberspace, Tech Bytes on July 26th, 2012 by glennm
Google’s Kansas City fiber project has just launched. As CNet commented, it is
much more advanced than what the average American is able to access from any cable operator or telco broadband provider in the country. And Google is offering it at prices that beat the local and even national competition.
Google shows broadband providers how to build a superfast network | CNET News.
There’s a place in American business for firms willing to in invest in long-term network upgrades. Verzon’s FIOS ruled the U.S. for years in terms of speed, pricing and content. Not anymore!
Tags: fiber, Google, InternetPosted in Lawyers, Guns & Money, Politically Incorrect, The Sporting Life on July 23rd, 2012 by glennm
For decades Penn State football fans claimed their program was different, better and purer than others-a model for all college sports. But former FBI director Louis Freeh’s 267-page report blew a hole through that claim last Thursday. It is withering, thorough, believable: When Nittany Lions coach Joe Paterno, school president Graham Spanier and others were told that Sandusky was molesting children, they all felt bad. For Sandusky.
The whole Sandusky scandal is revolting. This quote from Michael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated captures the disgust which most Americans feel towards the once-proud institution. Joe’s family protests, but taking down his statue and revoking the record-setting coaching victories was the least that could be done to restore some modicum of respect to college football.
I’m not a reactionary liberal and think the personal loyalty shown towards Sandusky was admirable. But when one is talking about serious child abuse for more than decade, a crime is a crime, just as much now as in 1998. Not reporting this serial child molester to the authorities for prosecution — and at the very least severing his ties to the Penn State football program, which facilitated his evil — is and remain completely inexcusable. We can only hope Paterno is red-faced in his grave.
NCAA sanctions Penn State for Sandusky scandal | Reuters.
Tags: football, NCAA, Paterno, Penn State, SanduskyPosted in Formula One, The Sporting Life on July 23rd, 2012 by glennm
Change epitomizes Formula One. Yet as the decades roll by, incremental season-by-season changes have produced a sport that is different in fundamental ways from the one in which Juan Manuel Fangio competed in the 1960s, Jim Clark in the 1960s and Emerson Fittpaldi in the 1970s — even Niki Lauda and Aryton Senna in the 1980s and 1990s.
The differences are not hard to spot for the observant enthusiast. Most obvious is that F1 seasons today are very, very much longer than in seasons past. The reason is economics (money!) — the overarching goal of F1 impresario Bernie Ecclestone — but the reality is that what was once a nine-race season in 1962, a 12-race season in 1968 and a 16-race season from 1976 through 1999 has grown to a 20-race season in 2012. As a consequence, modern F1 pilots routinely compete in more GP races in their first five years than three-time World Champion Sir Jackie Stewart did in his entire Formula One career. Nico Rosberg, still a relatively young driver, won his first GP in 2012 after 100 races. more than Stewart himself. Remember when the championship required drivers to drop race results because one could only count a certain number of races for purposes of the final standings? Few do, but that was the reality through the late 1980s.
As the F1 season has gotten longer, so too have the cars themselves gotten stronger, essentially insulating drivers from the unpredictable ignominy of mechanical retirement. DNFs are basically a thing of the past in modern Formula One. Once it was routinely assumed that nearly half of the F1 starting grid would fail to finish, giving rise to the truism — only marginally relevant, if at all, today — that “To finish first, first one must finish.” The 2011 European GP at Valencia, for instance, featured a race in which there were no retirements, the entire paddock making it to the checkered flag. Part of this has to do with carbon fiber monocoques, the space-age fabrication material that allows drivers to bang and barge in ways that old-timers like Sir Stirling Moss find unsporting. “In a modern racing car, as long as the driver is stuck inside it, he is as safe as houses.” Yet this development has also yielded far closer, and way more aggressive, racing tactics than were possible throughout F1′s history, where colliding with another car risked mechanical failure or a shunt into the woods or hay bales, bereft of the moderns runoff areas that shelter drivers from their own mistakes.
Forget about the perversion of the F1 record book caused by the combination of long seasons and strong cars. This is a change that radically alters the sport itself. Even 20 years ago, Nigel Mansell had to be concerned when electronic gremlins disabled his “active” FW14 Williams after waving to the crowd at the 1991 Canadian Grand Prix. Except perhaps for Heikki Kovalainen at Singapore and Seb Vettel in Korea, both during the 2010 season, the cars continue to circle the circuits continuously. Coupled with new, cost-cutting rule changes requiring engines, gearboxes and the like to last for four or more races, with grid penalties for changing components early, and the result is a succession of F1 cars that no longer flirt with mechanical failure because designers, engineers and drivers are prohibited from pushing the performance envelope to and past its limit.
Legendary Colin Chapman of Lotus used to believe that if a Formula One car lasted one lap further than the race distance it was too solid and thus too heavy. We now live in a bizarro F1 world where the opposite tenet prevails. Does that make for a better sport? You decide.
Tags: F1Posted in Social Media on July 22nd, 2012 by glennm
Tags: social networking, TwitterPosted in Social Media on July 15th, 2012 by glennm
Tags: social networking, TwitterPosted in Lawyers, Guns & Money, Tech Bytes on July 13th, 2012 by glennm
For all the discussion, dead-on accurate, about law holding back technological innovation, sometimes it works the other way around. When industries are transformed by disruptive new technologies and business models, the law itself can be in for a game-changing, forced makeover.
Take the European Union (EU) and digital music. Everyone by now realizes that the introduction of portable MP3 music players, coupled with Apple’s pioneering iPods and iTunes music store, have revolutionized the market for distribution of recorded music. Gone are the days of buying albums (or even CDs) just to get one hit song. Music is available on any device, in the cloud, streaming on desktops, and everywhere else, and it’s intensely personal playlists involved. As a result, the hockey stick adoption curve shows that hardly a decade after digital music downloads first gained popularity, “record stores” – Tower Records,
anyone? – are a thing of the past, record labels (EMI as the latest) appear to be on their last hurrahs, and fully 1/2 of all music
purchased in the United States is totally digital, never burned to a physical product.
That has not been the case in the EU. Despite a standard of living in excess of the US, less than 20% of music sold in Europe is digital. That’s in part because, under the EU Treaty, copyright licensing is conducted on a member state basis. This “balkanization” of the law (pun intended) means that digital sellers in the EU need to negotiate separate deals with each label and for each country, from France to the Czech Republic to Turkey, under very different legal regimes. That’s obviously a recipe for increasing costs and timeframes for entry, bad for business and keeping new distribution models from consumers.
In response, the EU Commission used its competition powers a couple of years ago to harmonize copyright laws in order to make them consistent throughout the EU, aimed at breaking down national barriers in the digital music business and making it possible for rights holders to issue pan-European licenses. As one can observe from a similar step towards telecom “liberalisation” in the ‘00s, however, that itself requires a vigilant enforcer at the EU level to ensure that parochial national legislatures and courts do not slow roll the process. This 2008 licensing change helped Apple launch its iTunes music store in all 27 European nations, but so far no one else. In 2009, major members of the online music industry — including
Amazon, iTunes, EMI, Nokia, PRS for Music, Universal, and others — signed a pact with the European Commission to work towards wider music distribution in Europe.
Yet Apple remains the only digital music seller with licenses to operate in every EU country. And even then, Apple rolled out iTunes stores in Poland, Hungary and 10 other European countries just last year, seven full years after arriving in Germany, the UK and France. As ArsTechnica comments:
Unlike the US, online music in Europe is typically only sold through one country’s stores at a time — this is despite the EU’s efforts to effectively eliminate the borders of its 27-country membership when it comes to products and services. As such, if you’re in Spain and want to buy a song from France’s iTunes store, you can’t — the store blocks you from making the purchase because you aren’t in France. This has led to companies like Apple rolling out individual music stores for each European country with a large enough market, but the fragmentation has caused nothing but headaches for end users who just want to listen to their favorite music.
Finally—One iTunes Store to Rule Them All (in Europe).
The reality is therefore that the “single market” for intellectual property rights (IPR) contemplated in the EU’s 2011 report is far from ready to roll. As Neelie Kroes, who once took on Microsoft and now serves as the EU’s Vice President, asked rhetorically in ’08, “Why is it possible to buy a CD from an online retailer and have it shipped to anywhere in Europe, but it is not possible to buy the same music, by the same artist, as an electronic download with similar ease?”
So this week the EU is going a step further. Singling out “collecting societies” – European analogs to ASCAP and BMI which gather royalties of about €6 billion, or $7.5 billion, annually from radio stations, restaurants, bars and other music users and distribute the proceeds to authors, composers and other rights holders – the EU plans to push towards a directive requiring greater efficiency, transparency and reciprocity. Royalty-collection societies could be forced under the draft rules to transfer their revenue-gathering activities to rivals if they lack the technical capacity to license music to Internet services in multiple countries. The idea seems to be that if it cannot reduce the sheer number (some 250) of collecting societies, at least the European Commission can make sure they operate as much in unison as possible.
A lesson to be drawn from this ongoing saga is that just as technical innovation can disintermediate industries and eliminate arbitrage as an economic profit motive among different markets, so too can it work to force elimination of legal differences among jurisdictions. Especially where the medium is the Internet, inherently global and regulated by no one (unless the European-centric International Telecommunications Union has its way), these legal changes can occur very quickly. Believe it or not, the four years over which the EU has been working for digital copyright licensing harmonization is lightning pace for the law.
Note: Originally prepared for and reposted with permission of the Disruptive Competition Project.
Tags: antitrust, competition, Project DisCo, technooPosted in Social Media on July 8th, 2012 by glennm
Tags: social networking, TwitterPosted in Boob Tube, Lawyers, Guns & Money, Media Matters, Pop Art, Tech Bytes on July 5th, 2012 by glennm
Comedy Central’s South Park has opened the door for “fair use” copyright defenses to shut down infringement lawsuits before they saddle defendants with discovery expenses or force a settlement for cost reasons.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago ruled just weeks ago that the cartoon’s parody of a popular Internet video — if you watch South Park, you know which one — was a protected parody. The episode “Canada on Strike” lampoons the juxtaposition of viral videos’ popularity with their typically paltry financial returns through advertising and licensing. Brownmark Films, which owns the copyright on the original video, sued Comedy Central and network owner Viacom for infringement. (Incidentally, both music videos were posted on You Tube, the same company that Viacom had sued for a billion dollars in March 2007 for alleged copyright infringement.) The appeals panel unanimously agreed that the South Park video was “obvious” fair use, “providing commentary on the ridiculousness of the original video and the viral nature of certain YouTube videos,” and upheld the suit’s dismissal.
Fair use under copyright law occurs when an earlier work is used by a latter work for commentary, parody, education or some other purpose whose main goal is not to secure financial gain. Recognizing the essential nature of South Park as a mature, adult-oriented animated series, the 7th Circuit emphasized that “[t]he show centers on the adventures of foul-mouthed fourth graders in the small town of South Park, Colorado. It is notorious for its distinct animation style and scatological humor [and] frequently provides commentary on current events and pop-culture through parody and satire.” Yet without getting into all the procedural wrinkles, the court also broke new legal ground in its discussion of the role of early dismissal of “weak claims” and disposition based on a fair use claim alone, in fighting against the “chilling effects” of First Amendment-related litigation.
Despite Brownmark’s assertions to the contrary, the only two pieces of evidence needed to decide the question of fair use in this case are the original version of [the viral video at issue] and the [South Park] episode at issue… We think it makes eminently good sense to extend the [incorporate by reference] doctrine to cover such works, especially in light of technological changes that have occasioned widespread production of audio-visual works. The expense of discovery … looms over this suit. Ruinous discovery heightens the incentive to settle rather than defend these frivolous suits. [Thus,] district courts need not, and indeed ought not, allow discovery when it is clear that the case turns on facts already in evidence.
An unusually frank and colorful opinion by long-time Circuit Judge Richard Cudahy (first appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979) provides some comedy itself. Brownmark could have offered its own evidence to defeat the fair use defense but chose not to, Cudahy wrote. Its “broad” discovery request made Brownmark look like a “copyright troll” and would allow “expensive e-discovery of emails or other internal communications.” Brownmark’s only plausible copyright claim could be be that the parody harmed the market for its original video, but “as the South Park episode aptly points out, there is no ‘Internet money’ for the video itself on YouTube, only advertising dollars that correlate with the number of views the video has had.” Cudahy concluded “[i]t seems to this court that” the parody video’s “likely effect, ironically, would only increase ad revenue.”
Sometimes the courts actually do get it when technology is involved, although we have no idea whether Judge Cudahy himself watches South Park. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which submitted an amicus brief on behalf of Comedy Central, explained:
The opinion joins a growing body of precedent affirming that it’s proper to dismiss some copyright cases early, and that it’s possible in appropriate cases to determine whether a use is noninfringing without engaging in lengthy discovery. These rulings are important not only to protect speech, but also in fighting back against copyright trolls. Trolls depend on the threat of legal costs to encourage people to settle cases even though they might have legitimate defenses.
Of course, “trolls” are in the eye of the beholder. Like terrorists, one person’s troll may be another’s “freedom fighter.” So whether or not particular litigants merit that somewhat pejorative description, it’s clear that the costs and burdens associated with defending copyright claims — including but not only for Internet-distributed video — just went down a whole lot. While Brownmark involved a seemingly easy fair use case in the defendants’ favor, it will be interesting to see whether future courts will grant motions to dismiss where the fair use analysis is less obvious. In any event, copyright infringement plaintiffs should be aware that the road to discovery where a defendant raises a fair use defense is not be quite as smooth as it used to be.
As to judicial comedy, we express no opinion, but do like the district judge’s tact. “For as remarkable and fascinating the parties and issues surrounding this litigation are, this order, which will resolve a pending motion to dismiss will be, by comparison, frankly quite dry.”
The legal issues [in this case] are hardly the sort of subject that would create millions of fans, as the work of all of the parties before the court did. Nonetheless, while the court has a ‘tough job,’ ‘someone has to do it,’ and, ‘with shoulder to the wheel,’ this court ‘forge[s] on’ to resolve the pending motion. Janky v. Lake County Convention & Visitors Bureau, 576 F.3d 356, 358 (7th Cir. 2009).
Note: Originally written for and reposted with permission of my law firm’s Information Intersection blog.
Tags: copyright, courts, intellectual property, IPR, South Park, virality, WWITB
Many thanks to Doonesbury for the illustration and the late Hunter S. Thompson for the gonzo inspiration.
Web pioneer, tech lawyer, social media devotee, double-diamond skier, F1 aficionado, photography buff, bonsai master, iPad and Fantasy Football fan.
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