InfoTech & Public Policy

Professor Felten asked for some feedback about the class so I wanted to make my last post about a topic that was not covered. We covered a wide range of topics in this course, but one of the ones left out was electronic voting. I’m not exactly sure how it ranks with respect to the other topics, but just like the other, it is currently a very hot issue.

I tried to figure out what would be a good reading list for a discussion about electronic voting and quickly became overwhelmed with the amount that was out there. I think it could be a very interesting discussion since there are a number of recently passed and pending legislation in this area. Some focus strictly on paper voting records for electronic voting machines but others are much broader.

The Black Box Voting website keeps an up-to-date collection of news events regarding electronic voting issues. The corresponding book gives a pretty good overview of some of the issues and PDF files of the chapters are available for free download. The book was published in 2004, so is a bit out of date. Chapter 2 and the appendix contain a listing of e-voting problems throughout the country. It is a bit scary to read about all of those machine problems and I think Chapter 2 would be a good read for the class (it’s a very easy 22 pages)

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

Verified Voting is another good website for e-voting. It keeps track of the legislation (in all stages) regarding e-voting.

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/

NJ has a e-voting bill that requires a permanent paper record that can be verified and kept for audits (by 2008). Most states have new legislation with various requirements with regards to e-voting machines. There are also a variety of federal e-voting laws that are in Congress. The class should read the current NJ bill (which is very short) and some of the federal legislation.

One of the more aggressive paper verified e-voting bills, H.R.550, the “Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005″ was introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (the House representative for Princeton) Maybe he could even come to speak about the bill (in a class specific session or a more general setting). It would also be a nice touch to schedule this week in November if this class is offered during the fall semester.

I’m not sure if this would combine too many issues, but this topic could be done right after the week on copyright and the class could do a reading about Diebold and DMCA takedown notices. In 2003, Diebold, one of the larger e-voting machine manufactures, was sending DMCA notices of copyright violation to website posting Diebold corporate documents. The documents suggested that the company knew about security problems with the machines before they were sold. Diebold was asserting that the documents had copyright and the posting of that material was in violation.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation also has a large collection of e-voting documents. http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/

The French Government is currently considering controversial new legislation that may cause Apple to remove its iTunes service from the country.

Last month, the French National Assemble passed legislation that was meant to prevent one company, via Digital Rights Management (DRM), from dominating the online music market. The legislation would force Apple, Sony, Audible.com and other companies offering DRM music to share their DRM technologies so competitors can offer music playback devices and online music stores that worked with the DRM software. The bill requires providing the DRM source code to allow conversion from one form to another.

Apple was very concerned with the new legislation, calling the bill “state-sponsored piracy.”

“The French implementation of the EU Copyright Directive will result in state-sponsored piracy. If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers. iPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with ‘interoperable’ music which cannot be adequately protected. “

Apple does not want to provide its DRM technology and is threatening to vacate the French market with its iTunes and iPod products if the bill is passed in this form.

I can see inter-operability as a valid objective. Companies often use DRM as a way to lock consumers into a specific line of products, like iTunes music store and iPod music player. DRM increases the cost of switching to another music player because the new music player will unlikely play the music purchased from iTunes. Also, the iPod will be unlikely to play music purchased from other online music sites with DRM.

Conversion between different DRM technologies is a difficult (if not impossible) process. Putting aside the technical difficulties, different DRM technologies may provide different features. If one version (A) does not allow copying, but version B allows copying the file 3 times and version C allows unlimited copying within 2 weeks, how should copying be managed when converting between A, B, and C?

Just last week, in the French Senate, a similar bill was proposed. This new bill would require basically the same sharing of DRM compatibility, but has a significant clause that would allow companies to avoid sharing.

The new bill would create a new French authority to handle compatibility disputes. This agency would have the ability to enforce compatibility between specific DRM music formats. The significant change is that the agency would only do so if the DRM causes operational issues “additional to, or independent of, those explicitly decided by the copyright holders.”

Basically, Apple (and others) can alter the contract with the copyright holders of the music to specifically state that the DRM and corresponding compatibility issues are acceptable to the copyright holders. I’m not sure how difficult it will be to amend the contracts of online music sold to the French iTunes, but it seems that if this version passes, additional paperwork would be better then vacating the market.

Just today, the Senate passed its version of the DRM compatibility bill. Now, representatives from the two houses of government will meet to compromise on the differences between the bills.

As we discussed in class a month or so ago, the first Microsoft anti-trust case in the US involved Microsoft’s alleged unfair use of its operating system monopoly to push the use of Microsoft’s internet browser Internet Explorer. The second Microsoft anti-trust case was in the Europe Union and involved Microsoft’s alleged unfair use of its operating system monopoly to push its own brand of video player Microsoft Media Player. The EU forced Microsoft to offer a version of its operating system without the Microsoft player. They also fined Microsoft for its behavior, and that fine is currently under appeal.

I want to talk about the recent Google complaint that Microsoft is bundling its MSN search engine as the default search engine in the new version if Internet Explorer (IE7). Google complained :

“We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN on install,” Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience at Google, said then.

This may start to sound like the previous two antitrust cases, but there are a few key differences. Google is complaining about the default setting in the internet browser, not the Windows operating system. While IE is the most popular browser, Microsoft does not have as strong a monopoly in the internet browser market as it does in the operating system market. Aside from pure market share, the burden to users switching browsers is much lower. This weakens the monopoly claims because users are not locked into just one browser.

The Department of Justice looked into the claims of unfairness with regards to the default search engine. Just recently the DOJ concluded that the default search engine is easy to change, so does not represent a problem.

The court document noted that personal computer makers are free to set the default search engine to any service they choose. …[the browser] included “a relatively straightforward method for the user to select a different search engine from the initial default.”

To me, this seems like the right decision. Google, however, is still unsatisfied and commented that if Microsoft wanted to make it easy for users to switch, they could have made the default search box configurable with just one click.

It isn’t exactly the internet-television that most people imagine, but YouTube and Google Video do enable videos to be easily propagated. Anyone can upload a video and these sites will provide the bandwidth to serve up the file. These are extremely popular because they remove the sophistication needed to publish a video on the internet.

Videos can be can uploaded in a variety of formats. For example, Google Video currently accepts

AVI, ASF, QuickTime, Windows Media and MPEG formats … Specific video codecs we accept include H.264, H.263, MPEG 1/2/4 and motion JPEG. [cite]

YouTube is a bit less specific, but does accept the same file types. Once uploaded, the video is converted into a Macromedia Flash video. This conversion, I believe, was a key component of the popularity of these sites. Most web browsers have the Flash plug-in and providing the video in this format decreases the hurdles to watching a video. They could have streamed the video via a Windows Media player or Quicktime Media player, but the Flash version allows for a wider audience base. The quality of the video is not very good, but it seems like a nice compromise of bandwidth and quality since the costs are all paid for by the companies (it does not cost anything to the user to upload a video). For those who have never used YouTube or Google Video, here is a video I found of the Princeton University marching band on Google Video.

Now, as I’m sure you can imagine, this type of service attracts a large number copyright violations. Google Video has all of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) rules on their FAQ site and requires uploaded video to be “verified” before it posted. YouTube also has a copyright and DMCA section in their help, but they do not require a verification process.

Google says the verification is for technical and policy reasons, but I imagine it is more for the first. There are a large number of uploaded videos each day so it seems infeasible that a human would go through and watch each video for copyright violations. There are a number of pirated videos on these sites and that also suggests that each video is not watched before posted. These sites have been quick to obey DMCA takedown notification for copyright violations and remove the offending content.

YouTube recently put a limitation on the size of the videos that can be uploaded. They began a 10-minute limitation (unless you have a Director Account) to curb the copyright violations. The thinking was that real user-created video is usually small, but professionally created (where the owner would not want the video distributed for free) was large. I think they were specifically targeting television episodes (which are about 20 minutes for a half-hour show without commercials). YouTube hasn’t posted evidence either way, but I imagine this restraint did not do much to stop the actual violations, because now the shows are split into multiple uploads. It may have been more of a public image motivation. As long as these companies continue to remove the offending content upon notification from the copyright owner, they should be safe from lawsuits.

I want to talk about the new Sprint Nextel cell phone tracking and alert system. Just recently Sprint began offering their new Family Locator Service for a certain set of Motorola/Samsung/Sanyo phones. If you have one of these phone and a Sprint service (or you can just sign up for a new contract), for an additional $9.99 parents can get detailed location information about where their children are.

The service allows one “parent” phone to make requests for four “children” phones. To setup tracking on the children phones, a request is sent to the phone notifying the user that this phone will be setup with this tracking service. The user has to confirm the request (with a confirmation number). I’m guessing that most parents who subscribe for this service would do this setup by themselves before handing over the cell phone to the child.

After the initial setup, the parent account can make a request to the service and view on a map the location of all four cell phones. This can either be viewed via a regular computer the Sprint website, or for certain phones, can be viewed directly on the parent cell phone.

Sprint made an interesting design choice to reduce some of the intra-family privacy issues when a request is made. If the Family Locator service can successful locate a child’s cell phone, that phone is sent a message notifying it that the parent phone has requested its location. This seems like it will at least prevent parents from secretly monitoring their children (I don’t have the service, but it does not look like it can be disabled). I imagine this kind of technology can cause a whole host of trust problems between the parents and children, but at least the tracking will be done openly.

Sprint also offers a Saftey Check feature. From the Sprint website, the parent account can setup a periodic tracking request to the children phones. If the phone is not within a specific area when the request is made, an alert is sent to the parent’s phone. This Safety Check is setup for situations like arriving at school safely or being home before curfew. I find it funny that Sprint FAQ recommend keeping the child’s phone on vibrate during the Safety Check times so the constant tracking notification does not interrupt classroom activities.

The Safety Check works with positive logic – ensuring that a child is within a certain area at a certain time. I think it would be easy to implement a feature that would check and only alert a parent if the phone is within one of the forbidden zones. I bet some parents would pay for the ability to setup a registered-sex offender or bad-influence-friend alert.

Sprint does specifically remind parents that the tracking only works when the phone is on. I think Sprint should also remind parents that this is only tracking the cell phone, not the child. It is very easy for the child to leave the tracking cell phone in school when he/she decides to cut class. The underlying technology is GPS when available and then cell phone tower locations. It is only as accurate as the technology it is using (from a few yards to a few hundred yards). This type of variation may make the houses nearest to the school the hottest party spots.

During the in-class discussion of the future of television, Professor Felten briefly mentioned the lawsuit brought against ClearPlay by the Directors Guild of America. ClearPlay enables certain DVD players to be customized with specific rating criteria (like nudity or violence levels) by the users so the playback of a DVD will skip or mute certain segments to conform to the rules setup by the users. The Directors Guild charged ClearPlay with copyright infringement for creating an unauthorized derivative work. I was looking for more details about the case and found it to be pretty interesting.

As I stated before, ClearPlay allows for users to setup their DVD player to filter certain content during the playback of the DVD. Users must purchase a DVD player with filtering capabilities (such as this one from amazon.com) and subscribe to ClearPlay to receive new filters. The information about how to filter each particular DVD can be obtained from ClearPlay (via various subscription models). They do a pretty good job of offering filtering for new releases and have a list of over 1900 movies. Once the specific filtering information is obtained by the DVD player, users can configure a filtering menu to specify the type of content that can and cannot be seen. There are four main categories: violence, sex and nudity, language, and other (which, for example, include certain types of drug use). Each category can also be further configured:

Under language, for instance, viewers can filter for six levels, including “vain reference to the deity” or “strong profanity.” [1]

I have never watched a ClearPlay filtered DVD, but here is a nice excerpt from a PC Magazine review :

Spiderman has, I’d say, one truly worrisome or suggestive scene for kids under 13. Mary Jane Watson is walking home alone in the rain when she’s accosted by a bunch of hooligans who, as the scene progresses, appear to want to rob or rape her. Spiderman arrives in the nick of time to save the day in pretty violent fashion. There’s punching, kicking, and more, but no blood. With the bad guys vanquished, Spiderman steals away into an alley. Mary follows him. She’s dripping wet. So wet in fact, that her top is virtually see-through. She and Spiderman engage in a steamy, prolonged kiss, and then he takes off.

Here’s how the same scene played out with the filter on. The guys still chase Mary, but the intensity of the scene is muted because it’s been cut down a bit. Spiderman arrives and beats the guys up, but this scene is also somewhat shorter, with some of the most bone-crunching blows removed—oddly, both versions did include Mary delivering a kick to the crotch to one of the attackers. The scene in the alley receives some serious tightening, and any glimpse of Mary’s see-through blouse has been excised.

The nice thing about all this is that you could never tell when the cuts were happening. There was no delay, no hiccup in playback. I would imagine that trying to maintain some semblance of continuity in a profanity-laced scene could prove more challenging.

This technology seems like a natural replacement for manually pausing or fast-forwarding through certain scenes that parents do not wish their children to view. The Directors Guild of America, however, does not believe that and in 2002 brought a lawsuit against ClearPlay. They claimed that the ClearPlay technology was creating an unauthorized derivative work of the content and this was in violation of copyright law.

“ClearPlay software edits movies to conform to ClearPlay’s vision of a movie instead of letting audiences see, and judge for themselves, what writers wrote, what actors said and what directors envisioned,” The Directors Guild of America said in a statement.

“Ultimately, it is a violation of law and just wrong to profit from selling software that changes the intent of movies you didn’t create and don’t own,” the statement said. [1]

The lawsuit was filed against ClearPlay and other companies that offer similar filtering and is still pending in U.S. District Court for Colorado. Here are the EFF links to the case documentation.

Since the case has been filed, new legislation has been enacted to specifically address some of these issues. Now this is where things get interesting. In 2005, Congress passed S. 167: The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005. The relevant section of this bill specifically enables technology that allows :

the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a member of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture, during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing, from an authorized copy of the motion picture

This bill specifically allows filtering technology such as ClearPlay. It is currently unclear if the lawsuit will continue given this new legislation. S.167 answers the question about this specific type of filtering technology, but did not give a conclusion of the scope of the derivative work restrictions on copyright.

One of the reasons, I believe, the lawsuit may still continue is CleanFlicks. I mentioned before that the lawsuit was brought against ClearPlay and other filtering companies; CleanFlicks is one of the others. The CleanFlicks model is to make a one-time filtering of the DVD content from an authorized (rental) copy and create a new DVD. This filtered DVD is then rented or sold to subscribers. The filtered content is not removed during playback, but rather permanently removed from the media. I don’t believe that this scenario is specifically allowed from S.167, so we are now back to the question of derivative work. I think it will be very interesting if this case continues through the courts.

I want to talk a bit about the television advertisements. It seems to be a very popular in posts over the past few weeks – debating if the 30-second advertisement is dead or if in-show placements are the future. I want to focus on actually measuring viewer and the predominant company behind making those measurements: Nielsen Media Research.

Nielsen was founded in 1926 by Author Nielsen, first doing product testing and later moving into market research as a way to determine how products were selling. In 1936, it purchased the technology for an “Audimeter:”

the machine was capable of making a minute-by-minute record of when a radio was on and where the dial was set.

Does that device sound familiar? In 1942, Nielsen launched the Nielsen Radio Index based on data collected from Audiometers placed nationwide in 800 homes. Flash forward three decades, and in 1973, Nielsen Media Research launched

a new metering technology called “Storage Instantaneous Audimeter” for nationwide service. The new Audimeter automatically recorded and stored minute-by-minute tuning records for channel, time of day, and duration of tuning.

Currently, Nielsen uses a combination of user diaries (where the members of a household record what and when they watch television) and these home set top boxes. Recently, there have been a few new methods to monitor the way in which people are watching television, and I’ll explain those in a bit. I was amazed that until a few years ago, the technology and methodology used to measure television viewers, which in turn is used to determine advertising costs (a $70 billion industry), was essentially developed in 1926.

It was just last year (in 2005) that Nielsen began taking DVRs into account when tracking television viewers. They began to break down the viewers into “Live” and “Live Plus Same Day” and “Live Plus Seven Days.” As Andrew pointed out in his post, 70% of viewers are still viewing live TV, but what does that really mean in terms of advertisement viewers?

Also in 2005, Nielsen began releasing the minute-by-minute viewing habits of its samples which allows for analysis of specific commercials in specific programs. The minute-by-minute analysis has been collected since the first Audimeter in 1926, yet it was only released (or able to be purchased) beginning last year.

Nielsen also has been reluctant to offer “commercial ratings.” These ratings would show the effectiveness of commercials and have a huge impact on advertisement pricings (they would take into affect the DVR aspects and aggregated minute-by-minute viewings). The current thought is that these commercial ratings will be released by for the beginning of next season’s television.

Nielsen is also looking at other ways of monitoring viewers, including programming on cellphones, iPods, or via internet broadcasting. They are also looking at a measurement of “engagement.” This would account for how much attention a viewer paid to the show/commercial rather than solely if the television was on. Although an advertisement may be on television, if nobody is actually watching it or retaining information about it, it is not as useful.

It seems that Nielson, so essentially the entire industry, is way behind in being able to measure these new methods of television viewing. Although the DVR technology is only a decade old, minute-by-minute analysis and the corresponding “commercial ratings” could have been released much earlier than last year. Nielsen essentially has a monopoly on the television ratings (when was the last time you heard something other than the Nielsen ratings related to TV?) and that seems to be slowing innovation. In late 2005, erinMedia brought an anti-trust case again Nielsen citing anticompetitive practices to impede innovation, although the case has not gotten very far. Nielsen is under the threat of government scrutiny (see Senate FAIR Ratings Act), although nothing has come from that either. It seems that the introduction of new ways to view television may be threatening the Nielsen monopoly as advertisers are becoming more unhappy (and vocal) about the lack of ratings information, but so far, there have been no significant challengers to the Nielsen monopoly.