Month: July 2001

The Uproar over Dmitri Sklyarov’s Arrest

Last week, in an action instigated by Adobe, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Russian programmer Dmitri Skylarov. Skylarov is accused of violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Basically, Adobe has a copyprotection scheme which encrypts PDF files. The system has a number of weaknesses, however, and Sklarov wrote a program that can quickly remove such copy protection measures.

A lot of the debate over the arrest online focuses on the DMCA and the elimination of “fair use.” For example, there are a number of programs which read aloud the text of documents for blind people (or anyone else for that matter). The encryption system used by Adobe typically renders such programs useless, even though such use clearly falls within the fair use provision of traditional copyright law — proving the main point of DMCA critics, that the end result of the legislation will be to eliminate any sort of fair use.

What really concerns me, however, is an issue that I haven’t really seen discussed. This program was created in and is sold by a company based in Russia where the DMCA does not apply. American companies, U.S. citizens and many politicians have been concerned that countries with restrictive speech laws would go after Internet communications that originate in the United States where laws are generally more expansive.

But here the shoe is on the other foot — the United States is attempting to legally enforce its copyright laws on a product that is completely legal to produce and sell within the country it was created.

This is definitely not the road the United States should be going down. In fact, you have to wonder if prosecutors in France and Germany aren’t licking their chops. After all both countries have brought cases against American Internet-based companies such as Yahoo! and Amazon on the grounds that the companies weren’t doing an effective job of not selling illegal contraband (such as books) that are legal in the U.S. but illegal in Germany. Prosecuting Skylarov simply buttresses the legal arguments made by those governments that they can prosecute a business for engaging in activities that are completely legal within a company’s home country.

It will be interesting to see how the United States would react if, say, Jeff Bezos went on vacation to Saudi Arabia and was arrested for violating Saudi Arabian law. Or if some police agency in India set a similar trap for Yahoo!’s Terry Semel for real or imagined slights against Hindus on Yahoo!’s discussion boards.

Sklyarov’s arrest really sets a dangerous precedent in this area.

PETA: Eat The Whales

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals launched its latest campaign in London over the weekend, urging people to eat more whale meat.

PETA’s Bruce Friedrich showed up at the 23rd International Whaling Commission meeting, where the international ban on whaling was the topic of much heated discussion. Iceland, Japan and Norway want to abandon the ban and threatened to begin commercial whaling with or without international agreement.

Which would be fine with Friedrich who said he would prefer that people converted to vegetarianism, “but meat addicts who won’t try to kick their habit would cause a lot less misery by abandoning their cultural aversion to eating whales.”

According to Friedrich, “If you’re not vegetarian you are responsible for far more suffering and deaths than one Japanese or Norwegian whaler.” Friedrich also suggested that people should stop eating “chicken nuggets and haddock fillets in favor of whale whoppers.”

Anti-whaling groups weren’t amused, with The Times (London) quoting an unnamed whaling opponent as calling the PETA protest an “irresponsible publicity stunt” (which is the best three word summary of PETA I’ve seen yet).

No word on what whaling representatives from Iceland, Japan and Norway thought about PETA’s claims, but at least the Makah will now have PETA in its corner when animal rights activists try to disrupt their upcoming whale hunt.

Source:

Outrage at ‘eat whales’ campaign. Chris Bunting, The Times (London), July 23, 2001.

People urged to eat whale meat. Hugh Muir and Peter Gruner, This Is London, July 23, 2001.

Whaling ban under threat. CNN, July 23, 2001.

The Washington Post Finds NOW Television Analysis Mystifying (So Did I)

The National Organization for Women recently released its second annual look at major television networks which included some bizarre choices. NOW ranked programs based on their gender composition and diversity, level of violence, sexual exploitation, and social responsibility. But their recommendations don’t exactly sound like standard feminist fare. As Lisa de Moraes noted in an article for The Washington Post

The best of the bunch is “Gillmore GIrls,” that family-friendly WB drama series about a hot, young, intelligent, size 0 single mom and her hot, even younger, super-intelligent, size 0 daughter and what a totally more-like-girlfriends relationship they have.

…

On the other hand, NOW’s No. 3 most feminist-friendly show this year is WB’s “Felicity,” a program whose ratings rise or fall depending on the hair length of the lead character — a hot, young, intelligent, size 0 college coed who’s biggest dilemma in life seems to be choosing between cute Noel and cute Benjamin.

One thing we can be very glad about is that nobody writes programs to fit NOW’s guidelines. For example, they give a show like The Weakest Link high marks for treating men and women the same, but then severely mark it down for its hosts “nasty demeanor.” Similarly, one of my favorite shows, Star Trek: Voyager gets high marks for having a diverse range of actors and a woman in charge, but gets marked down for being part of the “typically male world of action and violence.”

Any list that recommends “Felicity” while ignoring “Star Trek: Voyager” has some serious problems in my book. I suspect a show that met all of NOW’s criteria would be so boring that it would quickly get cancelled by network executives.

Sources:

NOW’s bewildering picks and pans. Lisa de Moraes, The Washington Post, July 2, 2001.

Watchout, Listen Up! Feminist Primetime Report, Update 2000-2001. National Organization for Women, July 2001.

The Goals of Anti-Globalization Protesters

Dave Winer couldn’t figure out what the goals of the anti-globalization folks were (they seem pretty obvious to me), but linked to this unintentionally hilarious article trying to explain the goals. According to the article,

The majority of the world consists of small countries with small economies full of small enterprises, exactly like your independent developers. But what increasingly happens is that the umberella organizations of globalization : the World Bank, WTO and IMF have policies, which in the name of Free Trade throw these people to the wolves.

This has to be one of the single stupidest anti-globalization claims I’ve seen so far.

You’d probably think that given the high labor costs and extensive regulations that it would be more expensive to start a small business in a country like the United States or somewhere in Europe. But the reality is that the most expensive places in the world to start new businesses are in developing countries.

Why? Because of layers and layers of protectionist policies which are designed to protect entrenched interests at the expense of innovation and new businesses. Add to that the endemic corruption, and it is hardly surprising that the only serious capital accumulation in such countries is driven by large international corporations.

The obvious thing to do would be to get rid of the protectionist policies and stop giving favors to special interests, but anti-globalization folks have a fit whenever the World Bank or International Monetary Fund tries to do this (their critiques of the pointlessness of IMF and World Bank loans are accurate, however).

Are Female Tennis Players Being Shortchanged?

Sports Illustrated‘s Rick Reilly was outraged last week at Venus Williams being shortchanged after winning Wimbeldon. While men’s champion Goran Ivanisevic walked away with a $705,109 purse while Williams received only $652,186 (as Reilly puts it, “she earned about a Lexus less.”

Reilly goes on to badmouth the mens’ tennis game which many people perceive as dull because of the incredible athleticism of the players. “The men hit 140-mph aces nobody can see, and then ask for a towel,” Reilly writes, “Everything is serve and towel, serve and towel.”

But that athleticism also explains, in part, the pay differential. It is a legacy of the period before the rise of the Williams sisters and today’s group of women’s tennis players when athletic conditioning was simply not a priority for female tennis players. Even today, almost all women’s professional tennis tournaments rely on 3-set matches rather than the men’s more demanding 5-set matches.

At Wimbeldon, for example, Ivanisevic played 28 sets of tennis while Williams played only 14. While Ivanisevic was compensated about $25,000 per set, Williams earned more than $46,000 per set of tennis she played.

So when Reilly and others complain that the ratings for women’s tennis is higher than men’s tennis, he forgets that there are far more hours of men’s tennis to broadcast than women’s tennis.

That being said, however, as John McEnroe has already predicted, women’s salaries in tennis are likely to eclipse men’s salaries soon based largely on the dictates of the market — women’s tennis is a better product at the moment and women’s compensation has been increasing accordingly.

On top of that, the women tennis players are cleaning up when it comes to endorsement deals. Williams recently signed a five-year, $40 million endorsement deal with Reebok. Compare that to men’s superstar Andre Agassi who was only able to wrangle $10 million, 10-year deal from Nike a few years back.

Source:

Disadvantage, Women. Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated, July 10, 2001.

Beauty and the Bucks: Do Looks Lure Endorsement Dollars in Women’s Tennis? Catherine Valenti, ABCNews.Com, July 13, 2001.

For Once, I Agree With Dan Rather

USA Today had a small little summary of this “controversy” today: until yesterday, CBS Evening News hadn’t broadcast a single story about the disappearance of Chandra Levy. Newsmax goes off on Dan Rather, who apparently objected to stories about Levy.

This is one of the few times I find myself agreeing with Dan Rather — the Chandra Levy story simply isn’t a worthwhile news story. I usually watch NBC News which has gradually transformed itself into “The Chandra Levy Update.”

The other day I was working out during lunch and was reminded of just how shallow broadcast news can be — CNN interrupted their Chandra Levy coverage to go live to Robert Downey Jr.’s sentencing.

Sometimes I get the feeling that E! now owns all the non-business cable news channels.