Archive for March, 2007|Monthly archive page
Daily Show on Viacom v. YouTube
This is pretty great.
Mom, they bleep out some swears.
Last.fm
I think I’m a little late to the game on this one, but Last.fm is pretty sweet. I have been looking for a streaming music solution for a while and Last.fm is by far the best that I have come across. Definitely worth checking out. The coolest thing about it I think (besides it’s seamless, ad-free streaming music) is that it it’s NOT organized into channels – instead you just type the name of the band you want to hear at the time, and Last.fm feeds up similar music to the band you selected. This eliminates having to find stations or channels that have the mix you are in the mood for – when you want to switch from ambient mellow background music, type in Lemon Jelly, Radiohead, etc. When you want something higher energy, type in Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica…you get the point. They even have Jethro Tull. I’m pretty sure I’ve only scratched the surface of the features at this point – it also looks like everything is tagged and you can use them to filter as well. Lots of cool widgets too. Pretty sweet!
Home price index negative for first time since ’94
“The S&P/Case-Shiller Metro Area Home Price Indices are designed to be a reliable and consistent benchmark of housing prices in the United States. Their purpose is to measure the average change in home prices in a particular geographic market. They cover ten major metropolitan areas (Metropolitan Statistical Areas or MSAs), which are also aggregated to form a national composite. The indices measure changes in housing market prices given a constant level of quality. Changes in the types and sizes of houses or changes in the physical characteristics of houses are specifically excluded from the calculations to avoid incorrectly affecting the index value.”
For young renters like myself, this data is bittersweet. Obviously a bad sign for the economy and my heart goes out to those loosing value in their homes…but the housing market is ridiculously overpriced and needs to come down. I don’t want to rent forever!
Lichtman, Viacom & YouTube
Filed under: Google, University of Chicago Law School, litigation |
Leave a Comment Douglas Lichtman, IP legal guru and rising professorial star at the University of Chicago Law School, has joined the YouTube fray on the side of Viacom. His recent piece in the LA Times indicates that he is working for Viacom, although I am guessing he isn’t doing it pro bono. Lichtman is a high profile contract consultant for the Gerson Lehrman Group, and I’m sure he bills out at a pretty penny. He is also my patent law professor, and the first class meeting is tomorrow morning. Should be interesting…
Mark Cuban & the DMCA
Mark Cuban, the guy who sold streaming video and audio site Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999 (unclear if Yahoo’s failure to own the space is the fault of Broadcast.com or Yahoo) and later bought the Dallas Mavericks, really has it out for Google and YouTube. Cuban has branded himself a defender of copyright and anti-piracy, both reasonable positions, but he consistently doesn’t give the whole picture to his hordes of fanboys.
Case in point: I came across one of his posts today while researching the DMCA definition of OSP (online service provider). The legislation contains no real definition and courts have historically treated it as open-ended. Cuban thinks that the DMCA shouldn’t apply to websites since they weren’t specifically included within the definition of an OSP in the legislation – specifically, he thinks YouTube isn’t an OSP and shouldn’t be able to get into the DMCA safe harbor. This is an interesting position to take, but Cuban doesn’t mention the fact that if a court were to take this position, it would be go against the majority (if not all) other courts that have been faced the same situation. Hendrickson v. eBay, the flagship DMCA case, does just this and treats eBay as an OSP.
It’s possible that a court could look at YouTube and the DMCA and say that they are not an OSP, but this would be a major reversal of past precedents. Granted, the reviewing court may not be bound by the precedent set (Hendrickson was in federal district court in CA), but courts are far more likely to look to non-binding precedents before they dig into legislative history, as Cuban suggests they should.
Sorry for the law nerd rant.
J.K. Rowling v. eBay
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has gotten an Indian court to injunct eBay from selling pirated versions of the Harry Potter books. Granted the injunction is in India, but it comes at an interesting time and will return to court on May 23rd, just days after the Tiffany & Co. case, filed in June of ’04, reaches trial in the US. As noted by the Times of the UK, the Harry Potter ruling marks the first time eBay has been ordered to take affirmative steps to police items sold via its auction system.
My posts on Tiffany v. eBay actually get a fair amount of traffic from Google searches run on terms like “tiffany ebay court case”. I think this is mostly due to the fact that the mainstream press hasn’t renewed interest since the original hype back in ’04, although I’m guessing things will heat up as the May 15th court date draws closer. SDNY’s Pacer shows no action since the conference call back on December 20th.
Parallels update = good.
I’ve had Parallels installed on my MacBook Pro for a while and used it to connect to my employer’s VPN for a while (for some reason I could only get a Cisco VPN on a PC to connect) but haven’t used it much since. My buddy Lew also has a MacBook Pro and when I mentioned to him that I wasn’t a huge Parallels fan, he asked if I had loaded in the updates. I hadn’t, and while loading the update could have been easier, the end result is awesome. I wish I had thought of checking a while ago – the update was back in October of ’06. I can now run OSX and have a Windows bar on the bottom of my screen as well as specific windows open that are running Windows, and others running OSX. This eliminates much of the clunk from running a specific Windows window with all Windows windows open within that…window. It also allows me to have PC versions of PowerPoint and Excel open in windows on my Mac desktop that are no different than every other window I have open. Hopefully the sluggishness that came from having Parallels open and running will be gone too, but only time will tell on that one.
Justin.tv
Arrington’s post about a police raid on Justin.tv piqued my interest enough to check it out. Kiko founders (a Y Combinator backed calendar start-up that auctioned off their software on e-Bay after Google Calendar ate their lunch) Justin Kan and Emmett Shear started Justin.tv five days ago. Justin wears a head-cam that is kept on 24 hours a day, seven days a week which is connected to a laptop and EVDO card that transmit wirelessly. This takes video-blogging to a new level. The site is actually set up pretty well and the video streams nearly perfectly. There is live chat under the video stream where viewers blab with each other about what Justin is doing or what he has been up to recently, as well as a forum where users can make suggestions of what Justin should do, and a blog updating viewers to plans, hardware changes, etc. This is a ridiculous idea, but the site works so well I’m guessing that it will be at least a short-term cult hit. If nothing else, these guys have actually done what we all once hoped we could do in college for our most ridiculous friends – give them a head-cam all the time to have a record of what they do. For me, this person was my good friend Jeff. The obvious problem is that what Justin does all day might not be as funny as what Jeff did in his Dartmouth fraternity basement while wearing a clown suit. That said, the Justin.tv apartment has been received two visits from police and fire departments in the last five days thanks to pranks pulled by viewers, so the audience might help keep it interesting. His cell number is right on the main page too, so you can give him a call.
Back online
Just got back from a quick trip westward to surf with my brother and a few of his buddies. Very fun, relaxing time that has me nicely recharged for my last quarter of school. The waves were nice and the company couldn’t have been better.
Freebase
Lots of buzz recently about Metaweb‘s product Freebase. My friend Kevin directed me to a good essay by Esther Dyson on Huffington Post that attempts to explain how Freebase will try to fill the space between the world of the fluid Wikpedia entry and that of the rigid Oracle database. While the goal of Freebase is clear (to organize information in a functional manner such that computers rather than humans) the path they will take to get there is far less apparent. Also, as I have written before, in order for information to be organized and interpreted by computers, the information has to be online in the first place… 
Kim Jung Il’s jumbotron
I first read about “communist pixels” at The Long Tail and did a little digging on YouTube to find this bizarre video of the “Mass Games” organized by crazy Kim Jung Il in good ol’ North Korea. Those are people trained to show the right color paper at the right time up behind the field…
The YouTube description:
TV Broadcast of the entire “Ever-victorious Workers’ Party of Korea” held at the May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea on September 4, 2001.
Certainly the TV broadcast wouldn’t do justice to actually being there and witnessing over 100,000 performers. This was pretty hard to find on the internet and very few people will ever see this outside of the DPRK, let alone travel to north korea to see their mass games.
LinkedIn: MySpace for grownups?
A while back Guy Kawasaki put up a great post on the benefits of LinkedIn and, with the help of some folks at the company, laid out some solid steps to flesh out a LinkedIn profile. I have sent the link to his post to several friends in the past few weeks, so I thought I would include it here. LinkedIn has been described as MySpace for grownups, and while their are definite similarities, there are also a bunch of differences (on a side note, I think I would place Facebook solidly between these two – it has “add connections” and set appearance of LinkedIn with many of the social features of MySpace).
The biggest difference I see is between LinkedIn and MySpace is that, while it is clunky and ugly, MySpace is extremely interactive. Lots of messages are shot back and forth between friends and strangers. LinkedIn, one the other hand, has features like “In Mail” that allow for interactivity, but they are very rarely used. In my experience, the vast majority of people that are “connected” on LinkedIn route a total of two messages through the system: 1) an invitation to connect, and 2) an acceptance of an invitation. LinkedIn is definitely trying to change this, and in turn get more page views, ad revenue, and functionality out of the site through features like LinkedIn Answers and the below-the-radar LinkedIn Experts. One definitely similarity between the two networks is how users of both go to lengths to “primp” profiles. MySpace users add background graphics, songs, and even hire professional designers. LinkedIn users add job descriptions, solicit recommendations, and add connections.
In my experience, the best use of LinkedIn is to do background diligence on a potential professional contact. It gives you an easy way to see their background and education while giving you a glimpse into their professional network. It may be the case that down the road I’ll use LinkedIn to reconnect, but I have yet to use it to extract contact information thus far.
Feed inversion
So I just went through my posts and tagged them all with topics (now listed in the sidebar to the right) and now when I see my post headlines in Netvibes and via Firefox toolbar, they are completely scrambled and almost in a perfectly inverted order, since I edited my most recent post first and my first post last. I think this is feedburner’s fault. Oh well. At least now my recent subscribers will now get more exposure to my older stuff?
Marshall Wace & TOPS
A post by Roger Ehernberg on Information Arbitrage led me to Marshall Wace, a hedge fund that, according to Wikipedia, is one of the biggest funds in Europe and accounts for 3 or 4 percent of equities traded in London (their logo actually looks pretty cool on their site). For several years, the fund has generated solid returns from the TOPS system (“Trade Optimized Portfolio System”), which “collects and evaluates investment ideas generated across the securities industry, so as to create optimised (sic) portfolios which have historically delivered attractive risk-adjusted returns.” It seems like they track sell-side research performance, put money on who’s hot, and pay the sell-side for performance. Although it seems like a simple concept, apparently MW is on the cutting edge with this and remains so today – no other fund advertises using such a system. However, the performance trackability seen in social web 2.0 sites Yardbarker and SocialPicks, which I have posted about before, seems to be similar. Like MW, these sites cut through the “noise” and allow individual investors & gamblers to put their money on the backs of those that are hot.
I like this trend towards performance tracking. I hate to say that its is a feature of web 2.0, but ever since PPC carried the day, there seems to be an increasing premium placed on noise reduction and compensation for value. This is definitely a good thing for those that add value and a bad thing for those that don’t.
Google Trends
One of my favorite Google applications to mess around with is Google Trends. The service allows users to see search volume for different queries over time, and allows for comparison. Some interesting ones:
Blue: “Yahoo Answers“
Red: “Google Answers“
Blue: Linux
Green: PHP
Orange: MySQL
Red: Apache
Those Google guys have some cool data.
Hans Rosling on global health & wealth
TED 2008 sold out out before 2007 even happened . Admission = $6,000. Luckily, some of the TED presentations end up online. I found this video of Hans Rosling speaking on global health & wealth through the Valleywag post and tracked this an embeddable version down in YouTube. Very interesting data and very cool software that I am going to have to spend some time with.
Reasons to blog
I started this blog for several reasons, the primary of which was to have an outlet for my thoughts. Ben Casnocha had a good post a while back on the benefits of blogging, the focus & research it demands, and the benefit of forcing intellectual engagement. I agree with all of Ben’s points, but I think he misses an obvious one that is clearly part of my motivation and I am willing to bet is a backdrop to Ben’s voluminous posting as well.
It sounds silly and stale, but blogging gives you an “online identity”…not in the sense of a Second Life identity (e.g.: you can be a furry ninja bear-man) but in the way that a web designer’s online portfolio creates an identity that is accessible and available when someone wants to research their work. For those that don’t have concrete evidence of their work product on the web like designers and developers, blogging is like creating a portfolio for your thinking and thought processes. Doing diligence on someone that has a blog is really, really easy. It gives you access to their thoughts over a long span of time, lets you analyze their writing style and thought processes, and shows what they spend most of their time thinking about. The more you blog, the bigger your online record gets, which in turn makes it easier for people to learn about what makes you tick.
Also, the more your blog and the more people read your site, the easier it is for people to find you in the first place. For example, I can see in my site stats from yesterday that six people found my blog by searching on variations of rob, webb, blog, and university of chicago in Google. B
efore I started blogging, if you Googled my name you would get lots of stuff about the British actor Robert Webb (who, pictured, was the host of Numberwang and Peep Show) and some Rhodesian guy’s homepage. Thanks to this blog, I’m at the top of the results for “rob webb blog” and about to crack the first page for “rob webb.” Thus, in the future when potential employers, coworkers, employees, and investors want to learn about me, it’ll be easy for them to find this blog and sneak a peak into my head.
So, as long as I hold back on posting my thoughts on Iraq, gay marriage, abortion, politics, gun control, school testing, smoking bans, trans fats, Scooter Libby, global warming, religion in schools, and anything else that isolates and polarizes, I’ll be in the clear…
Sunstein on Wikipedia
Last week, the Washington Post ran an interesting article by Cass Sunstein on Wikipedia. Sunstein is a tenured professor at my law school and is often referred to as the most cited living legal scholar, although I think Posner might have him beat. The article leads with a great stat:
In the past year, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that “anyone can edit,” has been cited four times as often as the Encyclopedia Britannica in judicial opinions, and the number is rapidly growing.
The article pulls much of its content from Sunstein’s most recent book Infotopia, which analyzes wikis, future markets, and crowd wisdom in a variety of arenas. I’m reading it and it’s great so far, although I think the article in The Post probably pulls the most salient points. I will put up a full r
eview of the book when I have completed it. The most interesting thing I have gotten to so far is his statistical analysis of prediction markets and when they work and when they don’t. In short, they work nearly perfectly when the average respondent is more likely than not to be correct. As the number of respondents increases, the more accurate the market prediction will be, so long as each participant has on average more than a 50% chance of being correct. This is why prediction markets work for things like internal corporate polls about product releases but fail for stuff like Supreme Court nominations.
The beauty of the small size and intense focus of my law school is that Sunstein was one of my professors during my first quarter of my first year and I was lucky enough to have Epstein the following quarter as well. Both are brilliant and wonderfully quirky. Sunstein would always start each class with a 10 minute recap of what was discussed in the previous class and everyone would pound on their laptops to capture every word. Then he would launch into the new discussion for the day and the typing would quickly taper off, replaced by intense focus trying to follow him from point to point. He would cold call about five people every day and I bet 20% of the people called on in that class had any idea what was going on when they answered him. Definitely some of the hardest thinking I have ever done.
Becker on Immigration
I attended a talk today given by Nobel laureate Gary Becker entitled “How to Improve United States Immigration Policy.” Becker is one of the most prominent of the Chicago school of economists and won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992 for his work in the field of price theory. He is a outspoken supporter of free markets, worked closely with Milton Friedman and George Stigler (also Chicago school Nobel laureates), and co-authors a blog with Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit and the University of Chicago Law School.
Not surprisingly, Becker proposed that immigration rights be sold to aliens that wish make the US their permanent residence. He threw out $50K as a potential low-end cost, but noted that there were several ways in which prices could be set optimally. The economic justifications of the idea are quite good. He modeled out the 
net results on countries that lose and gain immigrants and showed that on the whole, immigration maximizes efficiency and benefits the country receiving immigrants in the short term and helps the countries that loose the immigrants in the long run. He showed that selling entrance rights would force self-selection and only those that were truly interested in staying and building a life in the US would be willing to pay. He also argued that the proposal would work for skilled and unskilled workers, and thought that those who did not have the resources to pay could be put on payment plans and showed that even an unskilled workers would be able to pay of a large loan over time due to the increase in income they would get from coming to the US. One area that he failed to address was how these loan payments would be enforced, which I think would be quite difficult.
On the whole, I think the idea is an interesting one. Becker and Posner often discuss immigration on their blog, and I am guessing Posner would in large part support Becker’s proposal, especially considering his support of adoption deregulation (which, over time, has been twisted into his support of “baby-selling” and has probably played a large part in keeping him off the Supreme Court). Apparently Switzerland and Canada have small programs in place that allow people to buy citizenship for extremely large prices. However, while the idea is interesting, given the hot nature of immigration I don’t foresee any politicians championing Becker’s proposal anytime soon…although I’m guessing Mr. Becker isn’t holding his breath either.
