Whose bedtime is it? NBC has announced that it will hand Leno the 10pm time slot five nights a week. Not so long ago, that 10pm time slot was the one chance for the TV networks to offer dramas with adult themes and concerns, because the kids had been shuffled off to bed. ER, Law & Order, The West Wing, L.A. Law, Homicide, Hill Street Blues, even Miami Vice. Now, with the kids watching The Hills and Grey’s Anatomy online and on DVD, the 8pm shows more explicit and explosive than ever before, and the real drama being provided by HBO and AMC, the networks have nothing left to do but make the economic, rather than the creative decision: to offer up five more hours of cheap talk and celebrity chatter (and, honor their costly contract with Conan). Will the day come when the parents are nodding off to Leno’s monologue at 10, while their kids stay up late downloading True Blood? Or is this shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, the very idea of a TV schedule sinking fast?

LA Times report here; CEO Sam Zell’s letter to his employees here.

President-elect Obama has championed the creation of a more open, transparent, and participatory government. To that end, Change.gov adopted a new copyright policy this weekend. In an effort to create a vibrant and open public conversation about the Obama-Biden Transition Project, all website content now falls under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

This may be one of those moments where people will think I’m obsessing over small details, and to some extent its true. But this is a very important gesture, with real consequences. The Obama team has shown some real savvy about the opportunities and implications of new media. I was very glad to see that they plan to post their weekly address online and to their YouTube channel, making online video the 21st century replacement for the radio “fireside chats” of FDR. Opting to make these videos, and the other materials they post, open for redistribution and reuse opens up a wealth of material for citizen commentary. More than that, it indicates their commitment to transparency, free speech, and participation.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that publications of the federal government, like court decisions and Senate reports, are traditionally in the public domain, i.e. with no copyright at all. The whitehouse.gov site does not have a copyright statement that I could find, so its not clear what their policy is. One might argue that, with a CC license, the Obama campaign is being slightly more restrictive than should be expected. However, by posting the CC license, they make an explicit assurance to users that they my distribute and remix as they see fit, which is by far the bigger issue. The very absence of a copyright statement on the current White House site could leave re-users in a grey area, unsure of their rights. The Obama teams commitment goes further, in that the online videos will be accompanied by a link to a high-res Quicktime version, so those interested in excerpting and remixing will not have to make do with the low-res YouTube version.

This is also a substantial vote of confidence for Creative Commons, and yet another moment in the slow move towards the widespread recognition that copyright maximalism simply cannot persist online, and a more moderate balance of rights is required.

The first change is curious, but not surprising. The justification for the change is to signal that the US government is serious about piracy. But I think I agree with Patry, that the main thing it does is give the music and movie industries a phenomenally better position from which to pursue their tactic of punishing individual downloaders. In the one case that has been seen through to a monetary award, Capitol v. Thomas, the record labels received $222,000 for 24 songs that Jammie Thomas had made available on a peer-to-peer network. This kind of damages award helps a record label make the case to a downloader that they should “pre-settle” with them before a lawsuit ever occurs, for somewhere between $3000 and $5000. What will that pre-settlement number look like, now that the possible damages have increased 100-fold? What’s curious about this, in my mind, is that many have argued that the existing damages were too high — set to penalize traditional pirates, stamping CDs in a warehouse, they were too large for the case of online file-trading. Part of the question is what the damages represent, and how should they be set: some (i.e. the record labels) argue that the online fil-trader can do more damage, passing their song to millions with one click. The other way to look at it is that the punishment should fit the crime, and putting a few songs in your upload folder is a much smaller violation, in terms of criminal intent or effort, than setting up a street-corner piracy network.

As for an IP czar, I can only imagine. Maybe, in an Obama administration, it could be his friend Lawrence Lessig?

The recent events on Wall Street have changed this election — we thought we’d be debating the future of the Iraq War, the pursuit of sustainable energy, the collapsing health care system. Then, we spent a bunch of time discussing whether someone’s an elitist for sounding smart or for owning seven houses, and what animals it’s okay to put lipstick on. But it’s clear now that we’re looking at an emerging financial disaster in this country, and we are and will continue to be making vitally important decisions about it in the coming months. Some will be made by the Bush administration, another chance for them to shred our economy and society But the rest will be made under the next administration, which ever it may be.

McCain has said he is the experienced candidate, and it’s true that he has spent more time in federal government than Obama. But what is experience? Is it simply a time spent? Or is it spending that time learning the right things, doing the right things?

Its now a question of the economy, and the Republican candidate, with thirty years of experience in public office, has admitted that he doesn’t know enough about the economy. And he’s proving that, with statements like “the fundamentals of the economy remain strong” in the same week that the federal government has to nationalize the mortgage industry and prop up the biggest insurance company with tax dollars. McCain is a warrior, not a president.

Oh, and he also told the New York Times that he would choose a vice-presidential candidate who would complement his skills. When asked what those qualities would be, he answered: “maybe I shouldn’t say this, but, somebody who’s really well grounded in economics.” This was, obviously, before he picked Sarah Palin. Is she his new, trusted economic advisor? Hardly.

“I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”

McCain says he’s not ready. I think we should believe him. He’s always been a straight talker.

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‘Reform. Reform. Reform.’ John McCain explains his eclectic–and troubling–economic philosophy.
Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2005
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007600

McCain tested on economy, Defends his credibility and experience
Sasha Issenberg, Boston Globe, Sasha Issenberg
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/26/mccain_tested_on_economy/

image taken from “McCain’s YouTube problem Just became a Nightmare,” Brave New Films
http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/39179-mccain-s-youtube-problem-just-became-a-nightmare
(umm… thanks!)

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please, send this, forward this, link this, print this…

There was a moment that I thought was telling in the event where Obama and McCain spoke with Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback church last month. Warren asked them each the same question: “Does evil exist, and if it does, do we ignore it, negotiate with it contain it, or do we defeat it?” Obama answered in a way I more or less liked, that we have to be soldiers in the fight against evil, but with a little humility about it, an awareness that much evil has been perpetrated in the name of good. McCain simply said “defeat it” - and the audience roared. Now, it was his audience more than Obama’s, for sure. But McCain’s is the wrong answer, and it’s the seductive answer. What I wanted Obama to say, and McCain for that matter, is “Are you kidding? You do everything you can. Why would you choose one tool for the greatest challenge in human existence? The reality is, you negotiate with it, you contain it, and you defeat it, and the wise man knows which when.” But right now, we still want the kneejerk reaction that we’re going to go out there and kill all the bad guys, Its so stupid, so regressive, so naive, so dangerous.

We’re at such a desperate time, economically, internationally, culturally. I think we need someone who really understands the complexity of what the world is right now, and what America needs to be doing. I think Obama has that - its not about experience, as in years served, its a combination of (a) years served, (b) the world in which those years were served, and (c) insight. I think Obama has emerged in and of a political time in which new lessons are just beginning to be learned. And I think he has the insight to see how things are complicated, to make some important choices. Biden seems to be that as well, despite how much of his career was in an earlier political era.

I thought McCain had it too, once, I really did; but he has spun out in the last two years as a reactionary dressed as a stern realist, with a worldview that has become entirely militarized. He used to be a smart politician, with his focus on making government better, and I admired him for it. But now, and I feel bad saying this, I think the current political climate summons up his POW mindset, where the world seems an essentially dangerous place. (It is, but you can’t let that become fear or hubris or demagoguery.) Palin’s worse. She’s a product of her time, which is even more recent: a panicky, fundamentalist post-9/11 moment that lets her lean on the fear that the terrorist attacks produced and use it to trade complexity for moral certitude, even when the world speaks otherwise. She’s an unprepared, evangelical, anti-science, hyperconservative, deceitful fundamentalist. Really, how dare he — McCain has thirty years in goverment, plenty of time to really know who among his colleagues would be a great leader — even from his side of the aisle.

I feel like its long overdue for the US to take a deep breath, and accept the following facts. (a) It’s a violent world, where our enemies are elusive and dangerous, (b) it’s a complex world, where our actions, however justified, have ripple effects, (c) it’s a messy world, where there simply are no easy solutions, and (d) it’s a world-in-progress, where we can’t just drop everything and go on a revenge crusade, and forget that we’ve got to keep our society running, our economy functioning, our children learning, our society healthy, our knowledge growing, and our eyes open. McCain and Palin are exactly the two wrong answers for this moment: he’s a well-informed but unyielding Cold Warrior who urges us unrealistically to simply extinguish our foes, and recently wrapped in the icky neo-con self-assuredness about good and evil; she’s a uninformed zealot who hides her extremism under an aw-shucks small-town America values pitch.
McCain-Palin is a reversal of the last ticket; it’s Cheney-Bush.

(Thanks to Gary Kamiya’s terrific Salon article for noting the Palin = Bush equation so forcefully.)

So I wanted to highlight some recent discussion of McCain’s missing technology policy statement. Obama released his several months ago, and it hits the mark on most issues, if perhaps it lacks some specifity and hews to a gentle line of progress and not a bolder one. But McCain has not released any official campaign statement about technology yet, and many have connected this both to the Bush administration’s severe and devastating disinterest in promoting scientific and technological innovation towards progressive ends, and to McCain’s campaign trail admission that he’s an Internet “illiterate,” has never emailed, and relies on his wife when they need online information. This is simply reprehensible, though again not exactly of the same scope of other crucial campaign issues. There are lots of people who do not and cannot use the Internet, of course, in this country and elsewhere. But it is primarily because they cannot afford the tools or the process of developing the skills, and/or they work in jobs that do not depend on computing. Neither of these is true for a U.S. Senator. And, as today’s Salon piece on this issue notes, it is not simply that he is older; they cite a recent Pew report that 3/4 of Americans 65 and older are on online. I think its striking that former FCC Chairman (and Obama supporter) Reed Hundt has said “Basically, John is a technological troglodyte, and proud of it.”

The Salon piece goes on to discuss McCain’s role in Congress over the last decade and a half, regarding policies relating to the Internet. Their emphasis is on the fact that McCain voted against the Telecommunications Act of 1996 because it was too regulatory — a bill that, in my opinion, has been more harmful than good because it handed too much of the shaping of the Internet over to private companies, i.e. was too deregulatory — that he worked against the “E-rate” elements of that bill, that gave federal breaks to public schools to help them establish Internet access, and most of all for co-sponsoring the Internet School Filtering Act in 1998. This one is, in my mind, the most egregious. It was co-sponsored with Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, who tech and law enthusiasts will know as one of the worst offenders in the digital copyright world, proposing bills that would have required all digital devices to incorporate DRM, at the behest of the entertainment industries. The bill required schools receiving the E-rate funding to install filtering software on their school computers, at a time when filtering software was proving to be deeply flawed, easy to circumvent, and most importantly, an easy means to censor vital online speech. And, it would have given the responsibility for imposing this rule to the FCC, a vast expansion of their jurisdiction. As Salon noted, even conservative tool Rick Santorum disagreed, and threw his support behind a gentler version of the bill — that still obligated public schools to invest in filtering software, pointlessly, at their own cost.

Whether or not McCain has personal familiarity with the Internet is less the issue here. Because you can be an Internet user and still see it as a devil’s playground full of porn and baddies, or as an pristine field perfect for the construction of a corporate shopping mall. My greater concern is the parallel with the Bush administration’s approach. Whatever McCain doesn’t know about the Internet is counterbalanced by his apparent commitment to hand over the task of guiding the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to private corporations, and then allowing government to simply ignore the issue altogether.

Update: McCain has posted his technology policy. Lessig dissects it and finds it wanting here.