Dana Blankenhorn

News Sites Play Hide the Pickle

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 16 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Throughout the Web, the information with the highest cost and lowest return is news.

For me to appear at an event in person, I have to get dressed, get there, stay there, and get back home. It's a full day production. It keeps me from doing anything else.

The problem is that all this effort doesn't bring me any more page views than I'd get from just picking the story off the wire and commenting on it. Less, because I'm not a major news player.

The problem I face is exponentially greater for the major news player. Everyone links to the first person with the story, sometimes with credit but more often not, and the number of page views the first-mover gets may be relatively small. This isn't all bad. Often, the best story is the one that is well-considered, that brings in other facts, that's researched with links and thought through before it's published.

As a result, news sites have been engaged in a growing game I call hide the pickle.

Round Two of the Copyright Wars

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have been following the copyright wars since their inception, in 1997. I watched the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, and the No Electronic Theft Act.

Both had a similar aim, to keep people from stealing making and re-selling copies of material subject to copyright, now that technology allowed for clean (or nearly clean) copies.

My sympathies here are purely with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and blogs like Boingboing, which hate these laws as attacks on freedom of speech, of association, and the free exchange of ideas.

If A Story Isn't Linked To Does It Make a Sound?

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 39 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Since joining TheStreet.com earlier this year, I have been struck by their 1990s' attitude toward links. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

The idea is that, when you link to something, you tell people in the text who you're linking to. Sounds fair, doesn't it?

But what if the story you found on Google News originated with, say, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times? Further, what if you found the story somewhere else, when it was republished by an affiliate?

Who do you link to?

Publishers Screw Google News, and Google News Screws You

Over the last few years I have come to rely on Google News. It provides the most links to every news story, and scanning the main page gives me a one-minute view of the headlines, not just globally but in my areas of interest.

But lately publishers have been screwing Google News with new policies, and Google News has in turn been screwing its readers.

The reason: paywalls. Publishers think you should pay for reading their stuff. Fine, I won't read my stuff.

But Google doesn't want to piss them off, and still links to it. Worse, it now links without identifying the paywall. This is sometimes because it has made deals with publishers for “publicity” purposes, giving those who link to stories through Google News some access to the actual stuff. (Although if you try to leave that particular page you quickly find you're out of luck.)

It's for this reason that I avoid The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I can find out what's going on without them, thank you very much. They are not as essential as they think. And if we're forced to pay separately for each newspaper we look at online, how many papers are we going to look at? Exactly.

The purpose of these paywalls isn't so much to make money as to eliminate competition. Make a successful paywall a requirement for competing and there will be a whole lot less competition. 

Worse is what Google is allowing The Financial Times to do. They offer a story on Google News, but if you click on it you don't go to the story. Instead you go to the paper's main page. This is a strategy right out of Murdoch, circa 1998, and it's stupid. I have sometimes found Google adding a preliminary page to this hosing, saying that you're going to some long URL (which savvy readers can identify as the home page, although it includes all sorts of cookie data in it) and you should click here to give permission for the move.

Not good enough.

The old policy made sense. Identify when there's a paywall, or a forced subscription wall. Let me make the choice whether to click or not.

Better yet. Don't offer a link to something you're not letting people link to. (Or charge for the link as you would for an ad, and identify it as such.)

Balance in Internet Law and Enforcement

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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For digital activists, the Obama Administration has proven a bitter disappointment.

Rather than seeing the growth possibilities in unfettered access to the Web, the Administration has focused instead on the national security threat, and has been captured in turn by copyright extremists.

It's a slippery slope, but it's one liberty must navigate. It's one America itself has been navigating, sometimes with mixed results, since its founding. With the rise of the Internet, and its global impact on growth in every country, it's one we all must navigate.

Let's be clear here, because I'm hearing a lot of whinging from my side of the aisle. Activists for an open Internet are not powerless in this fight. Far from it. Because in our hands is growth – economic growth, human growth, intellectual growth. When people are forced offline, when they merely feel less than free, that has a profound, negative impact on growth.

It doesn't take a formal boycott. The action against SOPA/PIPA was merely an overt example of what happens every day, in billions of places around the world. By simply refusing to submit, by withholding the weapon of growth from governments, people demonstrate real power.

On the other hand, government must play a role as both guarantor of liberty and maintainer of order. We can't let the Internet be so open that a foreign government can hack it down. We can't let people steal from our own people and hide from justice. That's anarchy, not liberty. It may seem like a Randian paradise, but it will quickly end as all such paradises end, either in the dictatorship of the Moneytariat or a Somali wasteland.

Both sides must admit that there is a balance to be struck, but right now no one is standing in the middle and saying so. Thus we blunder on.

So let me stand in the middle and say so.

SOPA, Speed and Recourse

Democracy won the Cold War because it could adapt more quickly to change than communism.

But it doesn't adapt as quickly as the Internet. No system of government can. (To the right, Hasbro's "Monopoly man" trademark.)

Markets can. Sort of. Markets have taken advantage of Internet technology to move very quickly in the Internet age. Too quickly. What has happened is an arms race, in which those with the best technology, the classiest algorithms, and the fastest executions skim the cream of every trend.

Free as in Fake, Fake as in Controversy

Karl Fogel of QuestionCopyright recently played “gotcha” with Richard Stallman and Glyn Moody – whom I hold in the same favor he holds Stallman – then steps up in Techdirt and plays the false equivalency game.

Fogel himself has an axe to grind here, so this is not an “interview.” Not that there's anything wrong with his axe. “Our projects highlight the restrictive effects of distribution monopolies,” he writes. “We're trying to change the terms of the debate, so that copyright reform efforts aren't stuck always reacting to industry rhetoric that equates copying with theft, plagiarism, and the abuse or destruction of the original work.”

Right.

Skype Makes Its Software Insecure

Bans against reverse engineering, like the one recently announced by Microsoft's Skype unit,  are the latest front in the open source vs. proprietary war.

There is little doubt that the law is on Skype's side. As with the whole question of business patents, this is court-made law that legislators are unlikely to overturn. The case is Bowers vs. Baystate Technologies, and it used Massachusetts law to create something like the failed UCITA, legalizing bans.

UCITA, for those who don't remember, was an effort early in this century to impose bans on reverse-engineering under state laws across the country. Activists fought it back. But before they could celebrate their victory, the Court of Appeals for the Federal District, which is generally the high court for patent cases, lowered the boom on everyone. 

When you keep people from reverse-engineering something, you are explicitly preventing them from looking at how it works. You are explicitly preventing them from inventing a way around it.

The Free Software Foundation regularly puts out calls for reverse engineering  and even Linus Torvalds got slapped down when he protested Andrew Tridgell's use of the technique on Bitkeeper. 

But here's the real problem I have with Skype's decision, or any such decision banning reverse engineering of code.

It's a security risk.

Caesar Was the Bad Man

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

Mark Antony's funeral oration in Julius Caesar (whoever wrote it) is one of the great speeches in all of literature. It's designed to twist a crowd against their best interests, to win them to an empire against the republic, by laying a great man's acts for the common weal against the mere “principles” espoused by Brutus and Caesar's other killers.

Julius Caesar was the villain. Antony's speech is a lie. The tragedy of the play is the destruction of democracy at the hands of Antony and Octavius, who would become Caesar Augustus.

So now let me come to the late Steve Jobs, and patents. 

Apple's latest patent, and the words of Jobs in his autobiography, make clear that his corporate aim is to own the smartphone market, through the legal system, for as long as demand for smartphones exists. What Microsoft took from him, through Windows, he bent his last energy to overthrow by having all Android phones ruled illegal, by taking them from the marketplace.

It's a direct assault against the heart of open source. And, I believe, a direct assault against the intent of patent and copyright.

Diminishing Patent Returns in Age of Software

Florian Mueller feels like he's in his glory.

Lawyers from Apple have been on a global winning streak against Samsung's Galaxy tablet. The latest win came in Australia, where a judge stopped the product's import over a patent personally filed by the late Steve Jobs. 

To Florian this is a really big deal.

After today's decision, I believe no company in the industry be able to launch any new Android-based touchscreen product in Australia anytime soon without incurring a high risk of another interim injunction. The two patents on which today's ruling is based aren't Galaxy Tab 10.1-specific at all. They will affect all Android-based smartphones and tablet computers, across all vendors.

If Apple wins the Australian case at the end of the main proceeding, all Android-based products will effectively be shut out of the Australian market forever, unless Google or its device maker partners settle with Apple.

Bunk.