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Last week, many in the beltway attended the State of the Net Conference put on by the Advisory Committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus. The second panel discussion was on content filters. It was a lively panel, and how could it not be, Gigi and Cary Sherman were on it!
The panel went on for an hour, which is kind of long for any one with just a casual interest to stream over the Internet (Real Player video). I wanted to make sure that folks saw some of what I thought were the more important statements about content filtering—straight from the source: the RIAA.
In this abridged six minutes of video, Sherman addresses four questions about filtering:
What’s the RIAA’s stance on content filtering?
What about encryption?
What about fair use?
Should Congress mandate filters for ISPs?
Lastly, Chris Soghoian asks Sherman about the legality of ripping CDs to your iPod.
Perhaps the most interesting part comes as a response to Question 2, where Sherman essentially proposes placing spyware on users' computers to get around the “problem” of encryption:
Filters can be put in the applications for example. You know, one could have a filter on the end user’s computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from…encryption because if you want to hear it, you’d have to decrypt it, and at that point the filter could work.
And he goes on to say the spyware might be in your virus checker or media player, or even in an ISP-provided modem or somewhere else under the ISP’s control. But fear not, it's just to "notify" you so you learn what's right and wrong.
Don’t believe me? Watch the video.
What's next, our keyboards will shock us when we download the wrong music?
If you care about issues of fair use and net neutrality, you owe it to yourself to learn how the recording industry would like to change the Internet, in the name of protecting its music.
And for the record, the video excerpts were used here without permission for purposes of political criticism and comment. These clips were selected sequentially and edited for time and not to change the meaning of any of the statements.
Let’s just make a note here – Green Options could invest more in the environment than the US Federal Government is planning.
A report is circulating regarding my favorite tech company, that they are pledging themselves to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in to big alternative-energy projects started by commercial businesses. They plan to focus on projects that have traditionally had a hard time getting financing. Thus, I would imagine the majority of such projects will get financing, considering Bush’s position on such things.
The executive in charge of their environmental push, Dan Reicher, said Wednesday that “There are a lot of technologies that get to the pilot scale and look promising, but the first few large commercial projects deploying those technologies, financing those can be extremely difficult.”
“Often the usual equity and debt players will say come back to us when you’ve demonstrated this at scale,” said Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.
Reicher referred to the “Valley of Death,” a term used in the technology industry to describe the difference between successfully developing a new technology and amassing scale. This is something that Google is aware of, and their pledge to invest such moneys as they can in to projects is hoped to alleviate this problem.
“When you get to building a commercial-scale project in the energy world, you can be looking easily at hundreds of millions or even across the billion dollar threshold,” Reicher said. “Over years we’ll be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars. So we’re very mindful of the Valley of Death.”
Google has already committed large amounts of finances to various green projects, both within their own company and without. They’ve committed $20 million to funding start-up firms researching solar-thermal and high-altitude wind power, and another $10 million to Pasadena, California-based eSolar Inc to support research and development on solar thermal power.
Authors Note - if you want to weigh Google’s proposed spending, check out my three part series on the US Budget. Check out Budget 09: How’d the Environment Do – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Reuters via ENN - Google to help green technologies amass scale
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