Lunch at the Labs

New MP3 Licensing.

Slashdot reports that the main owners of the MP3 audio patents, Fraunhofer and Thomson, have changed their licensing terms so that, in addition to encoders, decoders must also be licensed. The fee is $0.75 per decoder. Previously free decoders for personal use were exempt from licensing fees.

This seems to be part of a trend in subverting the patent system. Patents were originally intended to allow new products to come to market quickly by temporarily giving a monopoly to its creator. Now inventors (actually large corporations) are putting their (sometimes new :-) ideas into standards, real or de facto, or making them available for free. Then once everyone is using it they start requiring payment. Another example is the GIF patent. No one would have used gif or mp3 formats to begin with if there originally was a decoder fee. I think this is a dirty business practice and perhaps even an antitrust violation. It seems like it's a good time for everyone to switch to the free Ogg Vorbis audio format instead.

Addendum August 29, 2002. Thomson Multimedia is downplaying their change in licensing of patented MP3 technology. Apparently the only difference is they now omit the line "No license fee is expected for desktop software mp3 decoders/players that are distributed free-of-charge via the Internet for personal use of end-users." But they claim this does not represent a change in policy. If so, why don't they just put that line back in?

Addendum August 31, 2002. And here's another news story from The Register. Something seems fishy here. And here's yet another news story from The Register which refutes the previous one. Still something seems fishy here to me.

Homeland Insecurity.

There's an interesting article in the September 2002 The Atlantic Monthly entitled Homeland Insecurity which features the ideas of security expert Bruce Schneier. The point is made that when it comes to security, technology is not nearly as important as human factors. Just as strong cryptography is worthless if people choose bad passwords or someone installs a "keystroke logger" to capture what you type (like the FBI did to catch mobster Scarfo), Schneier claims the technology based measures taken to stop future terrorist attacks after 9/11 will not work. Most interesting from my point of view is that he echos what I said here August 9, 2002:

The federal government and the airlines are spending millions of dollars, Schneier points out, on systems that screen every passenger to keep knives and weapons out of planes. But what matters most is keeping dangerous passengers out of airline cockpits, which can be accomplished by reinforcing the door. Similarly, it is seldom necessary to gather large amounts of additional information, because in modern societies people leave wide audit trails. The problem is sifting through the already existing mountain of data.

and

Few of the new airport-security proposals address this problem. Instead, Schneier told me in Los Angeles, they address problems that don't exist. "The idea that to stop bombings cars have to park three hundred feet away from the terminal, but meanwhile they can drop off passengers right up front like they always have ..." He laughed. "The only ideas I've heard that make any sense are reinforcing the cockpit door and getting the passengers to fight back." Both measures test well against Kerckhoffs's principle: knowing ahead of time that law-abiding passengers may forcefully resist a hijacking en masse, for example, doesn't help hijackers to fend off their assault. Both are small-scale, compartmentalized measures that make the system more ductile, because no matter how hijackers get aboard, beefed-up doors and resistant passengers will make it harder for them to fly into a nuclear plant. And neither measure has any adverse effect on civil liberties.

Why are these points hardly ever (never?) discussed on television news and interviews?

Internet Legalities.

The rise of the WWW has raised some interesting legal issues, many of which are still unresolved. GigaLaw.com has an article by Doug Isenberg on Are Pop-Up Advertisements on the Web Illegal?.

Apparently a company named Gator Corp offers free software to automatically fill in WWW forms, but which also delivers pop-up ads tailored to the web site being viewed. (BTW Mozilla also has automatic filling in of previously visited forms, but without the ads.) Dow Jones & Co is suing Gator, arguing that a third party does not have the right to sell and display ads while users are viewing their web sites like the Wall Street Journal. Gator has a novel defense (IMO) claiming it's "akin to placing one's coffee cup on top of the morning newspaper -- the cup covers a portion of the newspaper page, which may be subject to copyright protection, but it does not alter the newspaper." I think the publisher will win on this one but who knows. But then what if the pop-up ad is changed to a pop-under one? This also raises the question, are image and ad blocking/filtering programs illegal because they infringe the publisher's copyright by changing the appearance of their web page(s). I think not in this case but again who knows. If it's legal to watch a TV program broadcast in color on a black and white TV set, why not this?

IMO, no one has benefited more from the rise of the WWW than the legal profession.

Terrorism using airplanes.

It seems to me that most of the measures being taken to thwart terrorism using airplanes are fighting yesterday's threats while greatly infringing the civil liberties of American citizens. IMO there is virtually no chance of a plane being hijacked and flown into a building again. This only worked the first time because all previous hijackers had just forced the plane down and held the passengers hostage. The fact that the crew and passengers on board the fourth plane on September 11 prevented it from crashing into a building (since some of the passengers already knew what the first three planes had done) implies to me that now that everyone knows about this, passengers and crew would act similarly again. Terrorists could still blow up an airplane, but this threat is a different order of magnitude and should not result in the same draconian infringement of civil liberties.

Furthermore the way to protect terrorists from taking control of a commercial airplane is to seal the cockpit doors so the bad guys cannot get in. Are there any valid arguments against this and why hasn't it been implemented? Why is there talk about arming pilots when this much simpler and less risky measure hasn't been done yet?

Oaths for Businessmen and Politicians.

Starting August 14, the chief executive and financial officer of the 900 or so largest companies (by sales) must state under oath that their quarterly reports contain no "untrue statement of a material fact" or "omitted to state a material fact" and certify that an independent audit committed reviewed the financial statement. However since they can also add "to the best of my knowledge", I'm not sure how much this will really help. For more details see the SEC Order and the list of companies with their statements as they are submitted.

Also in the news is that some members of a congressional inquiry into the September 11 attacks who had requested that the FBI investigate leaks from the panel are now balking at taking a lie detector test requested by the FBI. This got me to thinking that if CEOs and and CFOs have to vouch under oath for the integrity of their statements, why not have Member of Congress do the same. I am particularly thinking about matters concerning lobbyists and the money they give to politicians. When they vote for a bill, I think each legislator should be required to state under oath the names of any lobbyists with whom they discussed the matters being voted upon.