Gareth Stack
So I'm outside the Apple Store once again with Jay Sulzberger from New Yorkers For Fair Use. I know there're an antiDRM organization.
Jay Sulzberger
Yes. Hi. New Yorkers For Fair Use. Our motto is we support traditional copyright.
The issue of DRM in the news has been presented largely as an issue of convenience. And that's not the position of New Yorkers For Fair Use. We think the issue is much larger. We think what's at stake is the right of private ownership of a computer.
Because DRM... Well, somebody sells me a device and it doesn't do what I want. Okay, I don't think there's any remedy in law unless the thing is actually physically dangerous if it doesn't do what I want. However, there cannot be a legal right of the manufacturer or the vendor to sell me the device and claim they have the right to come into the device, say a personal computer, and look around inside and see if I'm doing something they don't like.
As long as I'm doing it in the privacy of my own house, my right of private property is a defense at law against their invasion of my house. Now this is recognized in United States copyright law. Copyright law... there's many issues that come together here. Copyright law obviously and is recognized as such in American law is actually clearly absolutely a special exception to the general right of free speech. If there were an absolutely perfect universal and simple minded rule of free speech then clearly I should get a copy of somebody else's novel, and I happen to have a cheap effective printing press as anybody who has a computer and is connected to the net now has, and I should just be able to make copies and give them away.
As a matter of fact that is illegal but courts are sensitive to the issue there. The courts have not yet very much engaged with another place where nowadays copyright touches another fundamental right, the right of private ownership of a printing press.
Now I've just connected them. I want to disconnect them. If I'm just using my machine for stuff in my house, by gosh there's nothing that Microsoft should be able to say to me, there's nothing that RIAA the MPAA or indeed Apple. One of the moves that's made legally is to claim and there hasn't been sufficient opposition to this that when you download from some large music seller a piece of music under copyright you don't actually own it. As a matter of fact this has long been settled. Around 1900 if you buy an old book from say between 1880 and 1900 you'll sometimes see, if it's an American book, they'll sometimes have a little claim that you can't resell it. As a matter of fact people went to law, went to court and the U.S. Supreme Court said oh no, oh no, copyright doesn't extend that far.
So what's happened is we're seeing a rollback of already established, already litigated, already settled principles. Principles of personal freedom. There's a connection by the way with DRM and the issue of network neutrality. The issue of network neutrality is the issue of once I have a computer and I paid for an internet connection, what does that get me? Once upon a time when people had telephones using, going over old slow 1926 defined, as it called, plain old telephone service. This was also litigated. I remember in the late '80s and the early '90s in New York State, the... excuse me am I running to far, excuse me I'm coughing here, so there're actually what happened is the telephone companies claimed... a friend of mine got an internet connection I've forgotten what date it was and suddenly you know he was told that he couldn't run a modem on the line because they that was a separate service for which they charge extra. And he said what are you, crazy? This is a telephone line. I can make any noises I want. The public service commission and indeed eventually the Congress ruled that was true. The issue of network neutrality... it's not Verizon versus Google. Or if it is that's a small corollary part of a larger issue. I'll tell you what the issue of network neutrality is... a friend of mine's mother lives far out in Western Pennsylvania. She has only one way of getting an internet connection, a satellite dish. And she's not a computer expert. Her son is. So he gave her a computer and he said Mom, if you have any trouble just click on here and if I'm at my desk we'll both be looking at the same thing. He set up a so called VPN a Virtual Private Network whereby they could share the mouse, the keyboard. You could have two computers far apart. Okay, now, he bought something called internet service. Internet service is well defined. It may not be defined at law. And, yes, there're a lot of ticklish issues. Do we want the FCC and the FTC sticking their noses too far into this? But certainly if internet service were under the laws of common carriage then the company providing the internet service couldn't do what it did. It said Oh we looked. Look, the VPL ran for a few minutes and it went out. so he said well something happened. Maybe it's not setup right. He's a sysadmin. He knows what he's doing. So, he looked at it and he saw they were just cutting out VPN packets. He called them. Are you?... He didn't start that way. That's me right now. I'm... there's confusion here of characters. So he said Could, sir could you tell me, when he got the help guy desk. Oh that's a we saw you were doing VPN and you have to buy a box from us and we'll handle all your VPN. And he said Wait a second. I thought I had internet connection. And they said Ah, have you read your terms of service. And terms of service are a serious issue. And this is a... it's not directly I think classically I'm not a lawyer expert on this a freedom of speech issue. This is an issue of private communications being interfered with... I got it too. Thanks. being interfered with by a carrier on the basis of well the same reason a dog licks its balls. Because they can unless they're legally prevented from doing it. The reason we have dial telephones... it's a very famous case. I wish I could remember the name. But if now indeed we actually have the internet and we almost have proper index so you can look this up. There was a fellow who ran a funeral parlor around the turn of the century. And there was another funeral parlor in the town. And the other funeral parlor paid the operator, in those days all telephone calls went through the operator. He paid the operator to whenever anybody needed to get somebody prepared for burial the operator just sent them to the competitor. This guy found out about it because he called up and he said I'm a... And they said... And he said... And I said... I said... Once again there're... I'm so outraged. It's unbelievable. Anyway, so folks, so, so he said this We're going to put an end to this. He didn't enter into a bidding war. Maybe he did at the beginning with the other one. And he invented the stepper relay. And the early design of the stepper relays. That design was named after him. He did get a patent. He made some money. But now there is this weird assertion on the basis of completely false claims about expenses of building out that the telephone company and the cable company... look, at best it's a duopoly except maybe in Lower Manhattan where you can find maybe five big internet service providers who own the actual physical pipes.
So the issue of network neutrality is the issue of whether you have a computer and I have a computer and we connect our computers and we can send whatever we want over it because after all we're private individuals and you know we've had it, we got an internet connection. That was the tradition. The public today, the mass public who uses computers, most people who use computers they're not from the old tradition. They don't know what a computer is, they don't know it can be owned. And they don't know the internet was built, well it's an interesting history how it was built. It was, of course, built by visionary military men, mainly admirals and with some help later from the NSF and it was built largely by small pickup teams. And now of course people can make money using this new means of communication.
But now there's this, now there's this claim... somebody went by looked almost interested. I'm gonna grab the guy and give him a copy of our little piece of propaganda called We are the Stakeholders which begins Our stake is all the home and small business computers that we own and the free use we make of our computers. This piece of propaganda is focused on DRM. But to return to network neutrality the issue is whether I can communicate with you privately without being wiretapped. The issue's wiretapping. They don't have a right to wiretap our communications and they don't have a right to delay our communications. If they're... here's the... if for ordinary telephone communications the people who're against it were neutrality had the powers that they want for fast internet communications what they could do is they could listen in on your conversations with your bank and say Oh that's a bank communication. We want to make sure it gets through so you'll just pay us ten dollars a month extra. So there are connections with convenience and increases in price. But to focus on those things that either the DRM issue side of it or the network neutrality is to miss the main things. Fundamental rights are at stake. There's a loose association of large companies and governments that I call the englobulators and they...
Gareth Stack
At the higher end of it, sorry, if I could just interrupt please for one second. At the higher end in terms of the major nodes of the internet and so on aren't they already doing kinds of packet sniffing in order to optimize the transfer of information data?
Jay Sulzberger
That's a very very interesting question and unfortunately... the case of DRM our side has a clean argument.
Gareth Stack
Yes.
Jay Sulzberger
Whereby there aren't nearby confusing and difficult to understand issues which have at least a color of truth to the other side's position. Unfortunately, part of the issue with network neutrality is, and this is a serious issue, and it does depend. You know once politics do in part depend on empirical estimates of what the world is like. As you know, well one thing I always like to say is all utopias if they were possible would also be unnecessary. Look, come on, come on if communism is clearly better for everybody why don't people just start it, do it. Same thing for the Libertarian paradise. How come it's so difficult to get to the thing? I guess the idea is there's a barrier to getting there but then I don't believe that. But then once you're there it's just stay put forever and there aren't any same problems. What nonsense. Okay, there's the issue of quality of service and we know the results of quality of service. There's something called Ethernet. Which is the standard network area network protocol plus underlying hardware. And originally the guy who designed it said We'll be very careful. We'll look at all the packets. We'll route them very carefully. He found out pretty quickly that the right thing to do was to not worry about routing. And if sometimes two packets were headed somewhere and their sounds they made on the wire were overlapping and the computer or router couldn't tell what was what, they just waited and send out a general message Send again. And eventually you know you'd get through. Probability theory of course, has very unexpected consequences. The Birthday Paradox, et cetera. But we call know probability theory scattered... to do. Okay, it might seem reasonable that the thing to do for the underlying wires, the pipes is to be very careful, track every packet and treat it according to what it is. As it turns out we've had testimony in Congress by one of the head designers of something, a project called Internet2 that was a research project to considerably speed up the net. And they went through the... this has happened many a time. There's always the idea that you track the packet carefully and you compute what resources you should devote to the delivery of different packets and you're gonna win. The answer is more bandwidth. And this guy from Internet2 just testified to this before Congress. And this is what I say if it were true that bandwidth were such that if you were very careful you could deliver movies. And that would open up a new avenue of commerce. Well, then there's some argument for gross violation of network neutrality. It's not a completely clean... It's not certainly an argument for general wiretapping which is what they want. But it might be an argument for very different grades of service. It's it... Now, well, that's not the way it is. What it is is the telephone company and perhaps the cable company, I don't know their stuff as well, they have been granted a monopoly in effect. They're entirely government created things. They only exist, the telephone company because they can lay cable under streets. And, I know there's a claim now that anybody can lay cable under streets. It's just not true. There's a claim that they passed some deregulation in the '90s. It's just not true. It's interesting why it isn't true. And it's something of a story but it's not true. We gave them... the old deal was we gave the telephone company a monopoly once upon a time, a regulated monopoly because they were using our rights of way owned by the people. These roads were owned by the governments. It may or may not be the people. But... and in exchange they had to behave as common carriers. Now common carriage, of course, is also a very general principle of political, economic arrangements. Look, if people could own the roads, and extort money depending on how valuable the cargo was, well there wouldn't be, there'd be a hell of lot less commerce in the United States. They're anticompetition. They're anticommerce. What they're for is monopoly. And they want the government to give them special monopoly powers. And the... in particular the monopoly power they want is the power to look at every single one of your transmissions. And when they decide the transmission is particularly valuable to you, to break it out as a separate service. They have to pay extra. No. That's not right. That's wiretapping.
Gareth Stack
And, of course, they've already been granted hundreds of millions of dollars in fact billions, to bring broadband to...
15:52
Jay Sulzberger
This is... There's a man named Bruce Kushnick. A great man. A man who cannot find people to hire him full time and take the battle to the other side. If some rich person who thinks they have a personal interest, or perhaps a civic interest. Or they just want to help the cause of right. If somebody would go and hire Bruce Kushnick for one year and give him two assistants, we would stop a major part of the other side's argument cold. Yes, because they've asked again and again in the '90s and they were granted it, special privileges to give us what they claim, it's always ten years away. They're never going to give it to you because you know Ayn Rand had it right. She has wonderful portraits. And also Keynes. They know that big businessmen are the most chickenhearted, the most fearful, the most incompetent. They both knew that they're never going to risk anything if they can just bribe somebody, I'm sorry, if they can just make good arguments and help get people elected who will then give them special monopolies. And I'm trying to remember what Keynes said and I'm trying to remember what Ayn Rand said and for the life of me my poor brain has just failed me. But they both have just wonderful quotes about this. And, yeah they're never going to invest in something risky when they can just go to the government and say Give us the right to arbitrarily charge people as we invent arbitrary new services. That's the issue of network neutrality.
Gareth Stack
Okay, thank you very very much. Have a good day.
