ARTS & FARCES internet

Imagine if you paid for your home’s plumbing by the type of waste transported through the system. You’d pay one rate for solid waste, another rate for liquid, and yet another for any, um, mysterious blends. The billing would be a confusing nightmare and specially designed waste monitors would have to be implemented to virtually “sort” the various waste types.

Now imagine paying for your Internet connectivity in the same manner, based on the type of content you produce and consume. The current connectivity model of paying by the diameter of the pipe would be replaced by a model where specialized content monitors would tally your monthly bill based on the type and amount of content you consume. The same monitoring system would apply to anything you produced and distributed via the net. It’s called content-based billing and it’s the wet dream of the new economy carpetbaggers:

“Content-based billing will allow carriers, cable operators, and Internet service providers to bill for basic access and for the varying types of content and content-based services delivered over their networks. It will allow everyone to generate more revenue from existing bandwidth. Most importantly, it will pave the way for a move from revenue models built on legacy systems and bulk bandwidth to models built on differentiated content-based services for individual market segments.”

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Jack Valenti, president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), has been railing against technology since at least the early-1980s. His Chicken Little act has always been as overproduced as a Busby Berkeley musical.

In 1982, Valenti likened the then-cutting edge VCR to the Boston Strangler: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

Back then, Sony was evil incarnate. Now Sony pays a goodly portion of Valenti’s salary, so the new enemy has to be… you guessed it: the Internet. Except Sony makes evil tools of infringement. Ho-hum, or rather, Hi-ho.

Jack Valenti is among the strongest human reasons I can think of to prohibit corporate lobbying. It’s especially irksome when it’s done in the name of “consumer protection.”

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Matthew Ruben has authored an excellent article on audio CD copy protection.

This is the most cogent explanation I’ve seen of how and why copy-protected CDs can crash and even damage your computer.

Ruben takes the time to provide excellent, in-depth analysis of the two audio CD formats and explains why the protected discs “are not out-of-spec but rather are defective, and have intentionally been made defective, using the Blue Book format as a trojan horse to disable the user’s hardware when that hardware is a computer.”

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Earlier this week, a three-judge panel led by Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit overturned the law requiring libraries to filter Internet content for material harmful to minors. Judge Becker, a Reagan appointee, found that the filtering technology blocks so much unobjectionable material so as to violate the First Amendment rights of library patrons.

The law that was overturned, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2001 (CIPA), was the third effort by U.S. legislators to prevent children from viewing pornography and other harmful material on the Internet. Libraries and schools that failed to comply with the filtering law would lose federal subsidies used to finance Internet access.

Too bad there’s not a three-strikes provision for censorship laws in the United States.

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Hey, here’s an idea: our domestic spooks are incompetent when it comes to getting their electronic surveillance gizmo working, so let’s give them even broader authority to monitor us.

In late May, the U.S. Justice Department did just that when it relaxed restrictions on the FBI. The previous restrictions prevented FBI agents from searching the Internet and other public information sources for criminal activity and from entering public events.

Those of us who have been politically active in the past will find claims that there were ever restrictions on the FBI with regard to entering public events amazing, even hard to believe. But that’s exactly what Attorney General John Ashcroft is now allowing: “Our new guideline reads, ‘For the purpose of detecting or preventing terrorist activities, the FBI is authorized to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public, on the same terms and conditions as members of the public generally.”

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