The flaw in the Berman P2P bill - is not that it is ill-intentioned, says Professor Ed Felten in written testimony to the House Subcommittee. One major problem is its attempt to allow self-help by copyright holders over the Internet through a flawed definition of "peer-to-peer." And the bill, as currently written, authorizes self-help attacks on the World Wide Web itself, and not just illegal music file sharers who use services like KaZaa and Gnutella:
"It seems difficult to redraft the bill to carve out the Web and other legitimate network services, without creating an escape hatch for the types of peer-to-peer networks that the bill’s supporters would like to see covered. The reason for this difficulty is simple: there is really little difference at a technical level between the Web and peer-to-peer systems like KaZaa and Gnutella."
Of course, circumspection suggests that we should avoid regulating an environment that is developing rapidly and is becoming a pervasive influence in everyday life. But cautious wisdom is not the way of the legislator. On the other hand, I think at some point the repeated efforts of well-lobbied lawmakers to shape the Internet, not for the greater good, but purely to help the entertainment industry will complete its Karmic circle and wind up biting them in the ass.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be worried about laws like the Berman bill (we should, because these lawmakers are obviously quicker to accept the views of Michael Eisner than they are to contemplate the technical concerns of Ed Felten), but as the Web's populace of users grows it will be much harder for these politicians to hide their agendas. It's one thing to pass a bill that adds a tax to the sale of home audio recording devices (no one is likely to notice the effect of suchlegislation), but when the Internet starts experiencing problems that can be traced to Content King's trying to use self-help to protect their venal interests you are going to see politicians become much more wary of passing laws just to help Disney boost profits a tad more.
10:05:33 PM
Life without a News Aggregator - the thing I really missed the most in the 10 days after my hard drive crash was the News Aggregator. In fact, I really didn't miss posting at all (in a few days I'll try to describe the wonderfully liberating feeling of not being able to post to the weblog). But, losing the News Aggregator was a total catastrophe. At first I tried to manually visit some of the weblogs that I used to subscribe to, but it was too hard, and too time consuming. So I completely lost track of what was going on in the old cyber-haunts. That was not liberating. It was downright frustrating.
After I got a new hard drive and started loading software I was hesitant to use Radio, even the News Aggregator part, because I knew that I would need to somehow resynchronize my local stuff with the stuff out there on the Userland server. I didn't want to use Radio at all until I knew that I wasn't going to wreak more havoc upon my weblog. But then I remembered reading a review of Amphetadesk, so I downloaded a copy of that and give it a whirl. It was okay, but nothing like the News Aggregator in Radio so I quickly got discouraged and gave up. One major problem is that you can't delete individual posts that you have already read, and there is no add on tool like rssDistiller for Amphetadesk. And it doesn't run in the background gathering news automatically. You have to tell it to do a scan. I know. Perhaps that doesn't seem like such a big deal, but, having been weened on the Radio News Aggregator, it was a major inconvenience to me. I concluded right away that, even though I didn't really care so much about posting, I had to get my Radio News Aggregator to function again.
So now I'm back in the saddle, and thanks to Lawrence Lee I have my old suscriptions restored and I'm at peace. In fact just a few minutes ago I read my rss feed of new syndicated news feeds and found two new ones on Law that I followed here and here. All I had to do was simply click on the Radio Coffee Mug button and add them to my suscriptions...just as easy as pie. Now this is Heaven...
Later... I heard from the Morbus Iff, who is the creator of Amphetadesk, and he points out that I have some of my facts wrong about what that product can do. I am going to give the product a whirl this weekend and post a new assessment. I was wrong about it not running in the background, for example. You can configure it to scan at regular intervals. Anyway, more about this later, after I have had a chance to play with it.
