[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) RFC: copy protection report

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> On Dec 4, 2005, at 9:43 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote:
> > --- Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> >> The FCC should be disbanded as utterly useless and in the way. 
> Their
> >>
> >> "powers" are arbitrary and pernicious.    What exactly do they do
> >> that needs doing and that wouldn't be done better by a free
> market?
> >
> > Make sure no one corporation owns all the TV stations or similar
> > media outlets in any area with more than a few of them (which
> > would let them impose legal censorship - corporations not being
> > governed by the First Amendment).
> 
> hehehehe.  This is the internet age.

True, but quite a few people do still rely on TVs, radios, and
dead tree edition newspapers for their media.  It may be a market
of increasingly less significance, but it continues to exist.

Until TV et al completely go away, for even the most Luddite
citizen - and they probably never will, for that reason alone -
the "physics" of their world will continue to exist in a
meaningful context (even if one of meaning to fewer people as
time goes on), and continue to imply the necessity for a federal
beauracracy to manage them.

The question is whether the FCC has or should have any relevance
to the Internet.  The FCC of course wants the answer to be "yes",
but so far it's been mostly confined to fairly mundane parts of
it - like making sure one ISP can't get away with arbitrarily
blocking content provided by partners of a rival ISP, and trying
to make sure that multiple ISPs can compete to provide service to
any given major market (so we don't run into the problems where
one company owns all the 'Net pipes in a certain large city, and
can effectively censor the 'Net for that city - and as China
proves, less-than-perfect-but-still-enough-to-heavily-damage
censorship is technically possible if you do own all the pipes).

> > Keeps people from jamming various frequencies, intentionally or
> > unintentionally, so that certain forms of wireless communication
> > don't work.
> 
> It is trivially to track jammers and does not require a federal  
> bureaucracy to do so.

But it does require someone to set the rules as to what legally
counts as "jamming".  If two radio stations broadcast on the same
frequency, and are not obviously just trying to stomp out each
others' content, someone has to decide how far apart they must be
and how much overlap of their signals will be tolerated.  Given
that radio waves don't respect state boundaries, this was tossed
up to the federal level.  Again, this applies more to old-style
media than the Internet, but again, the old-style media are still
relevant today.

> > And that's just off the top of my head.  One might wonder if
> > their mission, justified by the scarcity of resources in any
> > communications medium, is obsolete with respect to the Internet,
> > but radio, TV, and newspapers do still exist offline.
> 
> Wireless technology has improved to the point where there is no  
> longer a very compelling reason to sell broadcasters fixed slices of 
> 
> the spectrum.  Of course for a little while the required transmitter/
> 
> receiver tech is not common and available at a reasonable price.  But
>  
> the FCC stands in the way of some of that instead of helping it
> along.

Actually, the FCC has been trying to help that along, and has
been facing major resistance (lethargy/"Idunwannas" from lack of
immediate profit to all concerned, mainly) from those who would
transmit and, to some extent, from those who would receive.  The
transition to HDTV alone has had much written about it, and
that's merely one particular example of trying to optimize use
of a certain slice of the spectrum.

There's also the fact that very few TV stations have, so far,
willingly put their feeds up for people to access over the
Internet, and some have even taken legal action against those who
try to do so for the benefit of their viewers.  Just because you
and I know that it helps them, does not mean they do not view it
as a threat to their existence.  We're still in transition, and
will be for a long time, so we can't yet completely abandon the
old support structures.