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joeross.me

Civil litigation lawyer. Interested in the collision of law & tech policy. Prone to geekery.

The Verge

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    U.S. DOT paving way for self-driving cars (and a Klingons aside)

    U.S. DOT paving way for self-driving cars

    Chris Ziegler reports at The Verge:

    DOT and NHTSA will develop the new tools necessary for this new era of vehicle safety and mobility, and will seek new authorities when they are necessary to ensure that fully autonomous vehicles, including those designed without a human driver in mind, are deployable in large numbers when demonstrated to provide an equivalent or higher level of safety than is now available.

    This is far more progressive than I expected the federal government to be on the autonomous transportation vehicle front, primarily for safety reasons. It’s good news.

    Read More →

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    Adele's '25' on Pandora

    Adele’s ‘25’ on Pandora

    Pandora confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that every track from Adele'e new album is available through its radio service. That's not going to be a particularly great way of listening to 25 — because Pandora is a radio service, it means you can't choose what to listen to and will have to wait for a station to play the new songs — but it does mean that Adele's album is streaming in some form. You just have to be really, really patient to hear it all.

    Pandora’s strange licensing niche usually works against it but here, despite the inability to listen through the songs in order, Pandora has something like an exclusive.

    I wonder if Adele’s lawyers told her that keeping it off the on-demand streaming services means the track order she chose will not be the one many people hear the first time they hear the songs.

    I don’t know how much that matters to modern musicians, or to someone like Adele, who doesn’t really have a customer acquisition problem.

    For the, er, record, I prefer to listen to an album in order if possible.

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    The Verge made a FAA drone exemption search engine

    The Verge made a FAA drone exemption search engine

    Ben Popper reports at The Verge:

    We have partnered with the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College to collect data on every commercial exemption the FAA grants. It's a fascinating snapshot of a fast-growing industry still in its infancy. [The result] is an interactive database that allows you to drill deeper into details, exploring the companies that have been given permission to fly and what they are planning to do with their drones. You can also search by state and figure out who near you is planning to put a drone in the sky.

    Photo by Capricorn4049

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    The Amazon Noncompete Clause

    The Amazon Noncompete Clause

    Here it is, in all its overbroad glory:

    During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee’s own behalf or on behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner, or consultant), engage in or support the development, manufacture, marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is intended to compete with any product or service sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon (or intended to be sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon in the future) that Employee worked on or supported, or about which Employee obtained or received Confidential Information.

    Whew. All that legalese is translatable into American English as:

    You can't work in another warehosue that, you know, contains stuff people buy, with money, that is, um, anywhere, pretty much in the world.

    The linked report by The Verge resulted in a much-needed revision to the policy, but it’s a powerful reminder that behind all the random stuff we order online are people who are sometimes commoditized and mistreated by their employers.

    Image credit: “Amazon.com Customer Service Center (Huntington, West Virginia) 003” by Leonard J. DeFrancisci. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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    Apple under federal anti-competition scrutiny, again

    Apple under federal anti-competition scrutiny, again

    Micah Singleton writes for The Verge:

    Sources also indicated that Apple offered to pay YouTube’s music licensing fee to Universal Music Group if the label stopped allowing its songs on YouTube. Apple is seemingly trying to clear a path before its streaming service launches, which is expected to debut at WWDC in June. If Apple convinces the labels to stop licensing freemium services from Spotify and YouTube, it could take out a significant portion of business from its two largest music competitors.

    I dislike hyperbole, but the fact that Apple would even engage in behavior that is capable of misperception as anti-competitive is shocking.

    Image credit: “Apple Headquarters in Cupertino” by Joe Ravi. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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    The ethics of reporting on the Sony hack

    The ethics of reporting on the Sony hack

    Emily Yoshida (@emilyyoshida), entertainment editor at The Verge, one of my favorite tech news sites, on the publication’s ongoing and deep contemplation of the ethics of reporting on unethically leaked information:

    The contents of the leak are already public; they’re just not in a very user-friendly format until a news outlet decides to amplify a piece of it. Which means, one could argue, that the press is merely drawing lines of best fit through a dataset. It could also mean that the press is essentially finishing what the hackers started.

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    Apps for storing your photos in the cloud

    Apps for storing your photos in the cloud

    At the end of the day, expertise or a lack of it will define your requirements in this space. Less savvy folks love Google+ Photos because the auto-upload is effectively unlimited for them with the appropriate size setting.

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    How the death of Google Reader is saving RSS

    How the death of Google Reader is saving RSS

    Ben Popper, at The Verge1:

    Some Reader partisans may have given up on RSS after the shutdown, but the majority seem to have migrated to other platforms. In the weeks following the announcement, Feedly saw 3 million Google Reader refugees sign up and Newsblur says it now has 25 times the paid subscriptions it did in March.

    Interesting. It looks like Google inadvertently revived the very market Reader killed when it debuted.

    I’m still relying on Feedly right now, and they’re the paid option I’m most likely to go with whenever they begin offering a premium tier, but the options are admittedly plentiful.

    And there’s no denying that the death of Reader, in retrospect, was probably the best thing to happen to RSS since, well, the birth of RSS.

    1. I like my headline (above the quote) better than Mr. Popper’s, which is “A month after Google killed its beloved Reader, the market for paid RSS tools is booming.” His is more informative, but for some reason mine just feels better. Arrogance? ↩

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    2nd Circuit: Aereo streaming of individual over-the-air TV feeds via internet doesn't violate copyright law

    2nd Circuit: Aereo streaming of individual over-the-air TV feeds via internet doesn’t violate copyright law

    The Second Circuit has held in WNET v Aereo (PDF) that sending a unique stream of over-the-air TV signal to customers via the internet isn’t a copyright violation.

    Aereo assign each of its subscribers their own personal antenna and stream to comply with a previous Second Circuit decision. In other words, Aereo could provide its service with one antenna, but it needs to use one for every subscriber. The use of one antenna for all subscribers, as the Second Circuit held in its 2008 Cablevision opinion, would likely constitute an unlawful public performance.

    Judge Chin says in his dissent that he isn’t pleased by this technique:

    Aereo’s “technology platform” is, however, a sham. The system employs thousands of individual dime-sized antennas, but there is no technologically sound reason to use a multitude of tiny individual antennas rather than one central antenna; indeed, the system is a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law.

    Aereo’s technology isn’t an attempt to avoid the reach of the Act. It’s an attempt to comply with the Second Circuit’s own characterization of the Act’s meaning and purpose. The absurdity of the situation arises not from Aereo’s attempt at a “sham,” but from the outdated Copyright Act itself.

    A quick glance at the rest of Judge Chen’s dissent suggests he may make some reasonable points distinguishing Aereo from the DVR service at issue in Cablevision, so I’ll withhold my own final thoughts on this case until I’ve read the Aereo opinion through.

    But copyright law needs fixing. It was written during a time when the cost of copying was non-trivial, and copies were typically finite and controlled centrally by the rightsholder. There is no longer any non-trivial cost to copying. Whether between servers or from a server to your computer, the internet is nothing more or less than a giant copy-making machine. This doesn’t mean we need to weaken copyright law (although shorter terms would be more in line with copyright’s Constitutional imperative), but we do need to adapt it to the modern world.

    Professor David Post, whose copyright class I took at Temple Law, signed an amicus curiae brief in this case late last year—here’s my post about it.

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    Google and Experimentation

    Google and Experimentation

    This is a great article, especially if you don’t know much about the history of Android. However, Adrianne Jeffries of The Verge ends her article with a silly quote from Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg. Perhaps analysts have a legitimate role to play in the consumer electronics industry, but this statement doesn’t support that thesis:

    "I think Google doesn’t necessarily know what it’s going to do until Google has done it," said Gartenberg, the Gartner analyst. "I’m sure there’s going to be some experimentation here."

    Google, the data-driven engineer’s paradise knows what it’s doing before it has done it. Experimentation is not, in Google’s world, akin to musical improvisation. Experiments in any setting are, if done right, rigorously planned and researched, and then executed with careful precision.

    Google will heed the data, and the market climate, and the reaction to rumors about a commingled Android/Chrome OS, and myriad other factors. And they will definitely know what they’re doing before they do it.

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    Nope, Flickr's hashtags aren't news either

    Nope, Flickr’s hashtags aren’t news either

    WSJ was wrong to pretend potential Facebook hashtags are news, and everyone reporting about a similar move by Flickr is just as wrong.

    What makes this even less news is that Flickr has so far only started calling their longtime tags feature “hashtags” in their iOS app.

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    Apple store trade dress

    Apple store trade dress

    I wonder if there are any retail stores out there that have looked like Apple stores since before Apple stores, and before this trademark was granted earlier this month. I don’t mean knock-off stores, though. I’m thinking make-up shops, art galleries, and other entities that often embrace a minimalist store design aesthetic.

    Here’s a direct link to the very-user-hostile USPTO page for the filing.

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    The Verge picks the best reads of 2012

    The Verge picks the best reads of 2012

    This is a great list, and includes only a few that missed, which probably means I read too much about tech. But what I particularly like about it is that most of the stories would appeal in one way or another to even to “normals”who don’t obsessively follow the technology industry.

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    Nilay Patel on what we agree to when we use cloud services

    Nilay Patel on what we agree to when we use cloud services

    Nilay Patel at The Verge reads some Terms of Service and drops some knowledge bombs. It’s definitely a must-read if you’re a Google, Dropbox, iCloud, or Skydrive user. So, if you’re on the internet at all, basically.

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    US accused of launching cyberattack against French government

    US accused of launching cyberattack against French government

    A spokesperson from the US Embassy in Paris, responding to an article at The Verge about the accusations:
    We categorically deny these allegations from unnamed sources, published in L’Express, that the United States government has participated in a cyberattack against France. France is one of our best allies. Our cooperation is remarkable in the areas of intelligence, law enforcement, and cyberdefense. It has never been as strong and essential to our common fight against the threat of extremism.

    L’Express is the French publication that first ran the accusations of US involvement in a cyber-espionage attack on the offices of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy (while he was still in office). They asked the US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano why the US would do such a thing, and she reiterated her French visit’s mission to strengthen the long-standing alliance between the two nations.

    I have no reason to doubt the Embassy’s (or Secretary Napolitano’s) sincerity, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider that the US Embassy in France, and even the Secretary of Homeland Security, may not be aware of any covert cyber espionage operations the US carries out in France.

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    Nearly all of Omni Magazine at the Internet Archive

    Nearly all of Omni Magazine at the Internet Archive

    Adi Robertson shared this at The Verge and it made me very happy. I loved this magazine.

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    Kindle Fire HD 8.9: how the new Kindle tablet compares with the competition

    Kindle Fire HD 8.9: how the new Kindle tablet compares with the competition

    Amazon increased the power and range of its Kindle offerings and achieved impressively-low pricing across the board. Again.

    I’m 100% certain someone I know will get one of the newly-announced devices, maybe even before the holidays, and I can’t wait to have a look.

    Further Reading

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    Microsoft's Election 2012 hub on Xbox Live heralds the interactive TV future

    Microsoft’s Election 2012 hub on Xbox Live heralds the interactive TV future

    Samit Sarkar, reporting at The Verge:

    The interactive element of the hub is a live polling system. It will gather impressions from Xbox Live users as they watch live broadcasts of the three scheduled presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

    It’s not exactly the cross-examination inspired debate format pushed for by Will McAvoy in The Newsroom, but I think it’s a forward-thinking use of the platform.

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