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 The book was published in 2004, so is a bit out of date.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.

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.

C-Span recently ordered YouTube to take down copies of its coverage of the White House Correspondents Dinner, at which Stephen Colbert digs into the President mercilessly (the President is sitting to his right). Aside from proving that Colbert has huge balls, this is an instance of a company controlling the viral spread of their content.

NYTimes has an article. Thought people might find the video funny and the article interesting.

Yesterday Apple Computer announced that it will continue to charge 99 cents per song on its popular iTunes music-downloading service. Recently there has been talk that Apple, facing immense pressure from record companies, might move from a uniform pricing model to a variable one (i.e., charge different prices for different tracks). Leading the push for this change have been the music industry’s big four –- Universal, Warner Music, EMI, and Sony BMG –- which are doing virtually everything in their power to offset declining CD sales with new revenues from internet downloads. In particular, these companies want to be able to charge more for new songs from top-selling artists. However, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs argues that these companies are “getting greedy.” Furthermore, Jobs claims that higher prices will cause consumers to “go back to piracy.” The argument is that prices must be low enough to deter consumers from downloading songs illegally. Given that the iTunes Music Store commands a staggering market share of about 80 percent and thus has a significant amount of leverage over the music industry, it is no surprise that Apple came out of negotiations on top.

But while Apple’s announcement of no change in pricing is being portrayed in the press as a defeat for the music industry, it is not clear that this is so. In fact, the music industry may be benefiting more than it realizes. Jobs has a very good point: higher prices will incentivize consumers to download songs illegally, as opposed to doing so legally using services like iTunes. Therefore, it is possible that record companies might actually lose revenue by raising the price of a song, since many consumers might decide to stop paying for music when they can download it for free (albeit illegally). Plus, differential pricing schemes whereby hot songs cost more money might be considered unfair by consumers, and thus might cause them to download songs illegally in spite of the music industry.

Yesterday we briefly discussed a technology called ClearPlay, which enables highly customizable content filtering of DVDs. You buy a ClearPlay-enabled DVD player and download filters for your favorite movies from the ClearPlay website. These contain timestamps for 14 types of offending content and the DVD player uses this information to access the DVD and skip or mute the offending scene. You decide which content you want removed, and can change or remove settings at any time.

There are several interesting things about this technology, copyright battles aside. First, there are the obvious advantages it offers to parents. Not only are standard movie rating systems like the MPAA increasingly nonsensical, but they assume a uniform set of beliefs about what comprises offensive material. Most pro-regulation policymakers agree that such a judgement call is a parent’s job, and ClearPlay is the first solution I’ve heard that leaves room for distinguishing between content types. With MPAA ratings, the most a parent can do is shut a child off from an entire class of movies only because they contain several “inappropriate” scenes, which smacks of censorship. ClearPlay allows a much finer level of control.

The policy implications of ClearPlay are even more interesting. Attempts to regulate explicit content in television and the internet have been around as long as the inventions themselves, and most of them, notably the Communications Decency Act, have come to nought. It seems the general opinion that such problems can only be solved with regulation, since it would be impossible for the free market to provide any sort of incentive to keep people from posting offensive content. But ClearPlay discovered a thriving market of parents who felt, understandably, more tuned in than the government to what their children should or should not view. So while it may be hard to keep offensive content from being created, there are certainly very strong market incentives for the creation of such content-management solutions.

I think the whole minors and explicit content issue is best left to private innovations. Policy solutions are doomed from the start for several reasons, the most obvious that it’s difficult to get around the First Amendment when your aim is to keep certain people from being able to see certain things. Second, it is impossible to gain cooperation from all content producers (especially those outside the US) to follow uniform restrictions. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently proposed a mandatory web labeling law that would require websites to place “marks and notices” created by the FTC to indicate the presence of offensive content. This measure, the Child Pornography and Obscenity Prevention Amendments of 2006, would also threaten with imprisonment anyone whose explicit website comes up in searches for innocent phrases, and would prohibit commercial websites from posting explicit content on their websites. It would be impossible, in one post, to list the numerous constitutional, technical, and regulatory problems with this. In brief, it would be a nightmare to implement, generate a surfeit of lawsuits, and probably have no effect on websites outside the US.

In contrast, let’s look at iShield, a filter that recognizes porn images based on characteristics of the image itself, instead of the text analysis most filters use. I can’t imagine the programming that went into this, but according to PC Mag it works quite well. Like ClearPlay it is highly user-customizable, allowing a parent to control what the they want the browser to do with pages containing offensive images, and to whitelist certain sites. It costs $24.95, and (this should be in the marketing materials) is 100% constitutional issue free! In general, I believe innovative solutions like this put the control where it should be - in the hands of the parents.

On a related and hilarous note, a Utah man recently pushed for legislation restricting porn sites to certain ports in the TCP/IP protocol. The self-described “hard core technology businessman” bemoans the fact that all content viewed over a browser uses port 80. His nonprofit organization “CP80″ (for “Clean Port 80″) wants “adult materials to have their own channel.” Wow, gotta love Utah.

            There is more than one way to set policy.  One way is to have congress or a governmental agency create a set of rules or laws.  The other way is to carefully craft a case that will provide a precedent.  The makers of Slingbox seem to have worked hard to carefully construct their product to push the limits of the law only far enough to force the law to bend, not break.  In many ways it seems that they learned a lesson from many of the failed file-sharing networks.  Companies like Napster created software that blatantly advertised infringing uses.  These companies seemed to operate on the assumption that p2p file sharing networks were legal despite their infringing uses.  Rather than trying to slowly build towards such a precedent they confronted it head on without any good faith efforts.  Slingbox seems to be making a good faith effort to find itself a niche within Sony v. Betamax.  In many ways a court case brought against them might do more good than harm for them. 

            The makers of Slingbox made design decisions that make Slingbox as neutral as possible.  They limited all sorts of potential features that could make Slingbox more attractive for no real compelling technical reasons.  For example, whatever someone is watching through a Slingbox will also be displayed on the local television set the Slingbox is attached to.  Additionally only one user can receive streaming media from the Slingbox at a time.  These limitations really emphasize the technology’s main purpose of place shifting.  One can make a strong argument that place shifting in this manner should be legal.  A person pays for their television service and through it their right to watch certain shows.  If they are away on a holiday or business trip why should they not be allowed to still view their favorite programming that they are paying for?  Time shifting is considered fair use despite the fact that networks target certain audiences based upon the time they put that show on.  If time shifting is legal it would seem natural to allow place shifting.  Slingbox has implemented place shifting in the least offensive way possible. 

           If and when place shifting is made legal Slingbox can begin to push the precedent further.  For example, if five people share a residence and the subscription costs to cable why should they all not be allowed to watch the same programming from different locations when they are on a short trip?  It would not seem reasonable to allow a small number of people (larger than one) to receive the stream if it is already allowed for one person to; especially if they are all still watching the same thing.  The technology could still require a login and password to receive the stream.  Now take things a step further.  People might have a TV in each person’s bedroom in a residence.  Each TV can watch different programming.  So if each of these people can watch separate programming within their house why shouldn’t they each be allowed to watch separate programming from outside their house? 

           Of course some or even many people might abuse this technology.  However, according to Sony v. Betamax there need merely be a significant amount of fair use involved in order for a product to be considered ok.  Even if illegal use runs rampant chances are there would also be a large amount of fair use.  To call place shifting unfair use would seem to create a precedent to reopen the case about time shifting.  If time shifting were disallowed VCRs, Tivos and all other recording devices would be made illegal.  The utility of a cable subscription would go down.  It would seem very difficult for a court to rule against Slingbox.  Their business strategy has opened the door for Slingbox to slowly shift the norm into accepting space shifting.  If and when it reaches wide spread use it will become very difficult to shut it back down.  With this in mind it would seem the only thing that can stop space shifting is a lack of user demand.