For a tech-savvy president, Obama doesn't get it

Today the Obama administration's Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, put Canada on the U.S. "Priority Watch List" of nations in need of copyright reform as the administration sees it.

It's been troubling to see a president who claims to "get it", who is addicted to his Blackberry, and who has harnessed the power of the Internet and free services such as Twitter to win a campaign turn around and appoint not one or two, but five Department of Justice positions to RIAA-friendly lawyers. He has also sided with the RIAA in upholding the notion that $150,000 penalty per infringement is not an excessive penalty....for a $1 song.....right.

My initial enthusiasm for candidate and president-elect Obama to create and appoint the nation's first Technology secretary cabinet position has now turned to horror. While Obama's choice for CTO of the nation was lauded by some I remain leery, especially given his choice in technology-related lawyers.

For a man surrounded in tech he's surprisingly ignorant of the futility of "intellectual property" (IP) and its enforcement. Do people have a right to their work? Absolutely. Should IP be protected and enforced? Sure, why not? Are we doing it right? NO WAY!

IP is a fancy way of saying "something I thought up that I don't want you to copy." We already have laws in place governing copying written works known as copyright laws. Some, including myself, think they are overly generous for the copyright owner and do not encourage ongoing creativity because a single solid gold idea that is copyrightable can become a cash cow for the rest of one's life (or longer). Additionally thanks to current copyright laws, that material will likely never make it into the public domain for future generations to enjoy once it is no longer profitable.

The biggest problem with IP as I see it in the U.S. is that there are generally two ways to protect it: copyright and patents. For the purposes of this article, I'm going to focus on copyright.

These days in the U.S. copyright is given to everyone and anyone the instant they put a thought into a medium, such as paper, canvas, marble, or a computer file. Copyright can also be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) which provides a little better leverage in a dispute between two copyright holders about who came up with what first.

Originally copyright was not automatically granted and you had to pay for it annually with a limit on the number of years you could renew the copyright protection. The purpose of copyright as stated in the U.S. constitution is:

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

Key in that passage are the words "promote" and "limited". Since those words were penned the United States Code including the Copyright Act of 1976 which laid the foundation for today's laws has been modified dozens of times. The current incarnation of the copyright portions of the United States Code include the following:

• piracy and counterfeiting provisions
• provisions for computer code
• protections for records (music recordings)
  
• protections for semiconductor chip designs
• protections for vessel hull designs
• extensions of protection both in scope and duration (such as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act or CTEA which extends copyright to the artists lifetime plus 70 years)
  
• perpetually auto-renewing registrations
• transfer of copyright, involuntarily in some cases
• protections for tv programming transmissions
• provisions for satellite providers
• large monetary remedies for infractions
• computer software rental protections
• criminal punishment for gross violations of an otherwise civil nature
• exemptions for dining establishments
• provisions making circumvention of copyright protection devices illegal (Digital Millennium Copyright Act - DMCA)
• protections for business who hire for creative works
• protections for movies and rentals

It's clear that copyright has grown wild and unwieldy since its inception. Unfortunately as we have progressed through the years we have not progressed our common sense.

What purpose does an extensive copyright provide for the copyright owner? It seems it may provide unending wealth. While this may be good for the owner, is it good for our culture? If culture does not have access to these collected works over time our culture is lost in cobwebs and dimly lit corners of warehouses and collector's cellars.

Long copyright extensions do not promote creation of more than a few financially rewarding works. What it does promote is a lot of legal wrangling over who created something first and who copies whom. It neither promotes science or the useful arts nor is a limited amount of time.

Some argue that life plus 70 years is a limited amount of time for a copyright until you realize that the copyright can be transfered and renewed from the author's death to descendants or to his estate which may not end.

Where would we be today if we did not have any of the works of Shakespere, Bach, Bethooven, DaVinci, or any number of other artists and creative people whose works have moved into the public domain? No one person or entity owns all the rights to those works, and because of it everyone is free to use them to create new works (called derivitive works).

What does all this have to do with Obama? With his actions and with his support of the RIAA and all they stand for, President Obama is making a statement that the profits and interests of a few individuals are more valuable than the collected American culture. His actions show that he believes capitalism and profit come before heritage and creation of new works based on old.

I recommend reading more on copyright at the Creative Commons website - a website devoted to only restricting creative works to the minimum amount necessary to protect the author from financial harm without all the heavy restrictions of U.S. copyright law. Just for fun, here's a really good winning video in a competition Creative Commons held to promote the site and the idea.

American Cable Association says tier broadband is the future

Surprised? I'm not. The American Cable Association (ACA) is as you expect a cable industry group that supports the notion of tiered, consumption-based broadband billing.

The article written on Tuesday doesn't really give any facts or metrics upon which to base such a claim and they used the tired and false analogy of utilities to get their point across.

[I] would like to pay the same price for heating bills all year round, but [I have] to pay more in those Pittsburgh winters when [I use] more. -- AC President Matt Polka

Do we really have to go over this again? Fine.

If my water service were like my Internet service, every time I turned on a faucet or took a shower or washed my clothes my water meter would leak a little bit of water that would be counted toward my usage. Also my meter would leak (from my 'used' side, not the supply side) constantly and slowly every day.

Why is my water meter leaking you say? Why can't I fix it? Because that's how my Internet usage behaves today, and we're modeling my water usage after my Internet usage. Even when I'm not online, my modem flashes and flickers away constantly talking with Time Warner and constantly being barraged by network bots and viruses trying to break into my system. This is real traffic even though I have no control over it. Additionally, when I do use the Internet for web browsing I get pop-up ads, flashing ads, streaming music and video ads -- none of which I want but all of which incur additional usage. That's why my meter leaks and I can't stop it -- I'm being charged for things I have no control over.

This is why Internet cannot be metered, at least not until there's a way for me to absolutely control my usage. At home, I can turn off every water-using device, every electrical device not on batteries, and every gas-using device and I won't get charged. I cannot do that with the Internet short of unplugging the cable modem every time I stop using the Internet (which is a ludicrous proposal for anyone, especially people with a family in case you're wondering).

I'm still waiting to hear from anyone in the industry as to what is so untenable about the current model. Given that rates always increase, why can't the cost of upgrade simply be included in the standard rate increases?

Why can't users pay for the speeds they want without having a limit on the data they transfer?

Why aren't businesses (one of the heaviest users of bandwidth) subject to this metered model?

Why must residential subscribers subsidize the business pricing model of all-you-can-eat?

Until these questions are thoroughly answered I will be a strong and vocal opponent of any metered data billing plan for Internet use.

Monday morning picture time

At first, this weekend's outage had me thinking they shut me off for "abuse" of their network primarily because of a lot of uploading I had done on one particular day - the Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope Linux release. So I took a snapshot of my usage graph courtesy of DD-WRT and marked it up with descriptions of my spikes in usage. I thought you might appreciate what "moderate" usage looks like.


As you can see, for not even the full month of April I've used about 23 GB of downloaded content including:

• watching 2 hours of TV online a few times
• downloading a couple Linux ISOs
• uploading those ISOs via BitTorrent for 1 day
• downloading software updates after installing the new Linux version

The rest of the days represent normal day-to-day usage:

• VoIP phone calls (sent and received)
• Web browsing (facebook, Stop the Cap!, Google Reader, etc.)
• Watching online videos (YouTube.com, break.com, collegehumor.com)
• Sending / receiving emails

While 23 GB is under Time Warner's proposed caps, it's easy to see that with a full month's worth of activity I could easily reach 30 GB under normal usage. I know what you're thinking, Linux releases aren't normal and don't happen every month, and you're right. But they are part of my normal online behavior and there will always been days now and again when I download and/or upload a lot of data. In networking terms it's a burst of usage over the month and residental customers don't usually pay for bursts, only sustained usage (actually they don't pay for usage at all and that's the point of Stop the Cap!).

This graph does not include any online gaming, serious amounts of downloading or frequent online TV / movie watching. The video streaming will probably eat up data faster than any other activity online short of downloading games from online stores like Valve's Steam.

Consider my usage if I watched 2 hours of TV online a day for a month. That means the video alone would be 60 GB of usage (1 GB /hour * 2 hrs / day * 30 days). Added to my other usage would put me (this month) at almost 80 GB of data usage.

Under Time Warner's plan that gives me two options: pay $75/month for the 100 GB tier, or pay what I do now ($55/month) and get charged an additional $20 in overage fees (bringing me back up to $75/month). So clearly, I have no choice under the new tier and it would cost me an additional $20/month from what I pay now (which is $20 more than standard service because I don't have cable and I have Turbo).

Just some food for thought. Compare your usage to mine and you'll get an idea of how you fare even without a "gas gauge".

Time Warner outage not a conspiracy

There are some who want to believe that the sweeping outage of Internet and Digital Phone for Time Warner customers this weekend was part of a purposeful "demonstration" of a so-called "Internet brown-out" due to overused capacity. This however, is just a conspiracy theory and holds no water.

Things break. Shit happens. Not everything Time Warner does is fully under their control and not everything they don't do -- such as put up some sort of notice about the outage on their cable TV stations such as RNews -- is necessarily attributable to malice, ignorance will suffice.

However, this weekends outage should be a wake-up call to anyone using the all-in-one Time Warner packages (Internet, Cable, Digital Phone) that perhaps a bit of diversity would be well-advised. Digital Phone subscribers were left without a phone and without access to 911 from 10 AM to approximately 1:15 PM on Sunday and I imagine a good portion of those people did not have an alternate phone line such as a cell phone or land line through another company.

I do not believe it's fair to pick on Digital Phone or Voice over IP (VoIP) in general as less reliable than a traditional phone line. Traditional phone lines have some benefits it's true. In a power-outage situation traditional phone lines are powered by generators usually and that low voltage power is carried over the phone line. Only wireless phones don't work in that situation (which is probably most people these days anyway). But land lines are susceptible to lightning strikes, trees and branches falling, switching station failures, and any number of other problems that can wipe out service to a large number of people. Additionally, during emergencies land line switching stations tend to get overwhelmed with calls and you start getting the "all circuits are busy" messages.

VoIP can often handle emergency situations slightly better because all voice traffic is just IP traffic and as long as the network has capacity (a problem for Time Warner according to them) and everyone isn't calling the same location, the problem is partially alleviated. Though at some point the VoIP service usually goes to a switching station and gets connected to a regular POTS PBX which can still be tied up.

VoIP also has many other benefits over traditional land lines. First off, it's usually cheaper (and I stress usually). Second, it often comes with many voice features for free that the phone company charges extra such as voicemail, caller ID, and call waiting. Third, the call quality usually does not change significantly between local and long distance calls. Again, this has more to do with the POTS switching stations that are involved on the far end, but on a complete digital connection, where the other party is also using VoIP, the call quality can far exceed traditional phone lines. And finally, most VoIP services now offer enhanced 911 (E911) services as part of their service which generally requires you to enter your home location information into their system since IP addresses are not tied to a geographic location as a traditional phone line is.

So, what are your VoIP options if not Time Warner? Glad you asked. Here's a list of several services available in the New York area and some nationwide:

• Vonage - One of the first VoIP services and probably one of the more popular ones. This service provides a small device you plug into your computer network (modem or router) and your phone into the device. Does not require a computer to use.
  
• Skype - Offers free computer-to-computer calls and low-cost VoIP calls to land lines and cell phones. Also sells phones and devices to use Skype without a computer.
  
• MagicJack - Requires a computer, this is a USB device that plugs into your computer and your phone.
  
• ViaTalk - NY-based web hosting company who provides excellent VoIP service (the author uses this company's VoIP services).

You can find many other service providers and reviews on this site: http://www.voipreview.org/ I'm not sure why ViaTalk gets such a bad rating on that site, but my experience has been quite stellar compared to my previous VoIP services (Vonage and SunRocket - now out of business). ViaTalk does charge monthly E911 and recovery fees for a couple bucks each monthly even with the yearly pre-paid plan.

I recommend comparing the features of each VoIP provider you consider with Time Warner's Digital Phone as well as just the price. For example, several providers offer a call forwarding service for free when your home network cannot be reached (because you've lost power, or because Time Warner's network is down - sometimes called Network Unavailable Forward) and will send all calls to a phone number of your choosing or to voicemail. I have calls forwarded to my cell phone so I don't miss any calls during a network or power outage. I don't believe Time Warner's Digital Phone offers such a feature.

As usual, it's not wise to put all your eggs in one basket.

A New Pricing Scheme Suggestion

http://a.longreply.com/130507

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A response to "Brian Boyko’s Alternative Plan for “Top-Up” billing" by Brion Swanson

@BrionS on Twitter

There are several good ideas brought up in this alternative, but as a user I'm left with a feeling of the Internet becoming one of those steel national park binoculars that require me to keep pumping coins into it to keep the shutter open.

While Brian's proposal is much more equitable than Time Warner's proposals thus far, it still falls short because it's addressing the symptom of a problem not the cause of it.

The problem in this case is that Time Warner's business is involved both in access to the Internet and in providing products and services that use the Internet. Those two sides of their business are at odds with one another.

If Time Warner Cable were a wholly separate company in every sense from Time Warner and its subsidiary Time Warner Entertainment such that Time Warner Cable's only business was selling access to the Internet, then this would be a much different discussion.

Time Warner Entertainment and the media services side of the company would be competing on equal footing with Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV, and others.

Given the above backdrop we are still left with the problem of how can Time Warner the media services and Internet access company make money in a manner acceptable to their customers?

I propose another alternative approach to pricing Internet access as primarily a speed based approach with incentives at every level to use less data. It goes something like this:

• Internet access is provided in multiple tiers based solely on speed of access (50 Mpbs, 30 Mbps, 15 Mbps, 10 Mpbs, 5 Mbps, 1 Mbps -- for example)

• Pricing is set appropriately to each speed level to help offset Time Warner's build-out costs. Perhaps the top tier is $150/mo for 50 Mbps.

• Each tier provides an incremental discount for amounts of bandwidth below a specific threshold. (50 Mpbs tier has a 150GB usage threshold below which incentive discounts apply to your monthly bill.) This may be a one-time incentive to get below a specific threshold or a graduated set of incentive levels - lower usage offering more credit.

In this way, the pricing model is very simple: higher speeds cost more money, low usage can reduce customer costs further.

This plan shares many of the same benefits as Brian's plan and have a few additional:

• Customers are not surprised with overage charges...ever. At best they will receive a credit on their next month's bill.

• Heavy users are much more likely to be the ones who want the faster speeds and will pay more to get it without any data caps. This is true for upstream speeds as well - maybe especially.

• Each user's network connection is speed limited so they will never use more bandwidth than they've paid for during peak usage times. That is, a user paying for the 1 Mbps tier will never be able to download at 5 Mbps during peak hours (when there is excess bandwidth available this is not necessarily true) thus limiting the bandwidth they can use at any time, but not the data.

• No need to keep track of anything from the customer end: no gas gauges or "roll overs", just use the Internet when you want and pay for your connection speed.

As an added benefit, these new billing practices could go into effect almost immediately without having to wait for the DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades. When those are available customers can be notified of the new pricing options.

In this plan Time Warner reaps the benefits of customers paying monthly rates for the peak bandwidth usage that they will want on the infrequent occasions they actually use their full bandwidth.

This plan also takes a lot of the guesswork out of how much capacity will be demanded of the network at any given time since a user cannot go over their chosen bandwidth. In calculations of peak network usage customers can be assumed to be using no more than their subscribed amount.

Right now everyone uses the same (fluctuating) access speeds, but one person may be checking email while another is streaming a movie.

With fixed speeds, Time Warner knows that one person cannot use more than x Mbps while it's possible they're using even less bandwidth than they pay for.

Mini Exposé - The American Consumer Institute: Center for Citizen Research

You may not have heard of this organization before, but it's called the American Consumer Institute: Center for Citizen Research and it came into existence around June 2005.

The organization is the creation of Mr. Stephen B. Pociask a frequent consultant for the telecommunications industry who spoke out against Net Neutrality in August 2006 and whose team of "experts" is now speaking out in favor of broadband usage caps as a benefit to consumers.

Here is the full text of the ACI About page for your reference:

The American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational and research institute founded on the belief that consumers’ interests are not satisfactorily represented the wide variety of advocacy and consumer organizations that often represent small subsets of consumers and special interests; ignore distant, collateral and unintended consequences of importance to consumers; and too often mirror advocates’ political views rather than an empirical analysis of consumers’ economic welfare.

The Institute focuses on economic policy issues that affect society as a whole, and we seek to be a better and more reasoned voice for consumers by using economic tools and principles to show that markets work best for the benefit for consumers. We are committed to use of generally accepted quantitative, cost-benefit analyses of policy alternatives and their transparent application to assure that our methods can fully and fairly evaluated on their own terms by those who may disagree with our conclusions. We use economic analysis to empirically measure “consumer welfare,” rather than relying on conjecture, opinion or political leaning to judge what benefits or harms consumers.

Mr. Pociask is a rather inconsistent fellow it seems. Below is a timeline of his activities and those of his organization(s). See if you can spot the inconsistencies of his stance on the Internet and telecommunications in general:

• October 2005 - Pociask and the ACI report their findings that older Americans are overpaying for their cable TV bills because of lack of competition.
  
• August 2006 - Pociask and the ACI report their findings to Congress that Net Neutrality is only being pushed by the "financially powerful [who] earn supracompetitive returns and have significant market power" to the detriment of the consumer and the poor telcos.
  
• October 2008 - Pociask advocates his 'study' findings that telecommuting and other Internet-based activities (such as email and downloading movies) is a benefit to the economy and the environment:
  
  


• April 2009 - Larry F. Darby, an 'expert' at ACI, states that usage-based caps are beneficial to the consumer.
  

Despite his varied history and the eclectic suggestions of the ACI several sites suggest that the ACI has become a source of astroturfing for the telecommunications industry.

Astroturfing refers to political, commercial, or public relations campaigns that feign grassroots behaviors to promote a specific view. However, since it is deliberate and is essentially "faking" being grassroots, it got the name "astroturfing" after the artificial grass, AstroTurf.

When ACI came onto the scene against Net Neutrality (NN) all the cable operators and NN opponents jumped on board the ACI bandwagon and used it successfully to derail any NN legislation.

Once again the ACI is popping onto the scene conveninently just when Time Warner backs away from consumer uprising over its usage cap plan and waving a "study" that finds usage caps to be beneficial to consumers.

The statement from the ACI was made by Larry F. Darby, one of their residents "experts" - an economist who once was a vice president in Lehman Brothers - that shows a woefully inadequate understanding of what bandwidth and capacity mean in relation to usage. Even in his statement he fails to make a conclusive connection between capping usage and solving this alleged bandwidth problem.

As we've discussed before, usage caps do not fix a capacity problem.

It's left as an exercise to the reader to decide whether or not the ACI is to be believed as a credible group focused on the best interests of the consumer.

Open Letter to Larry F. Darby of the American Consumer Institute

This letter is in reply to an Open Letter to Senator John F. Kerry by Larry F. Darby of the Amercian Consumer Institute

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Mr. Darby,

I appreciate your concerns and agree with several of your points in your letter, however I am concerned that you may be taking Time Warner Cable's word from their press releases as solid fact including their own confusion about bandwidth capacity versus Internet data consumption.

Please allow me to offer a simple comparison to help illustrate the difference between capacity and usage.

Webster's dictionary gives one definition of capacity as:

"the maximum amount or number that can be contained or accommodated <a jug with a gallon capacity> <the auditorium was filled to capacity>."[1]

Using this definition as it relates to the Internet and data, we say that the capacity of a network connection is equal to it's bandwidth, for example 10 megabits per second (Mbps). Likewise Webster defines bandwidth as:

"the capacity for data transfer of an electronic communications system."[2]

Please note, I take exception to their example as it is contrary to the definition.

Other things we are familiar with that have capacities are rooms (maximum capacity), highways (maximum number of cars at a time), and pipes (maximum amount of fluid that may pass per second). All of these capacities refer to simultaneous usage, not total usage.

The capacity of a room is not diminished when one person enters and subsequently leaves. It is only reached as they remain in the room. Likewise a highway's capacity for traffic is not reduced as cars enter AND leave, rather it's reached only when cars enter and remain.

So-called bandwidth caps as proposed by Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Comcast and others are actually not related to bandwidth at all. They do not limit the speed of your network connection - the maximum simultaneous data transfer - they limit the total amount of data.

That limit is akin to specifying a room has a maximum capacity of 1,000 people and after 1,000 people have entered (and left) the room no more may do so. Or in the case of Time Warner, any additional people to enter the room will pay an additional fee.

This extra fee does not do anything to alleviate the problem of having too many people in the room at once. It only discourages people from going into the room in the first place for fear of being the one that goes over the 1,000th person limit.

I hope this illustrates for you how "bandwidth" caps as proposed are not a solution to a capacity problem.

I agree that perhaps an emergency allotment of bandwidth should be set aside for highly time-sensitive information and services such as medical records or emergency services such as 911, but I strongly disagree with the notion that the access you pay for is somehow related to the amount of data you receive or send with that access. Additionally I strongly disagree that one subset of users are subsidizing another subset's usage.

I request that you publish the raw data used in the studies to which you refer so they may be reviewed publicly as a scientific paper would be reviewed by others in the field before it is accepted as credible and realistic.

Thank you,
Brion Swanson

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capacity%5B1%5D
[2] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bandwidth