The December 30th FoxTrot comic hits on the very idea IPac ran with two years ago: sending iPods to Senators. Back in February 2006, Senator Ted Stevens mentioned the iPod he'd gotten for Christmas in a hearing, and to educate Senators on the many legitimate uses of digital technology, IPac launched the Your Senator Needs an iPod campaign.

It was a stunt as much as anything, but it generated awareness of the digital divide between citizens and elected officials who barely understand the technology they are legislating. The humorous nature of the campaign was the very quality played up by Sunday's FoxTrot, in which Jason sends iPods to members of the U.S. Senate this Christmas for exactly the same reason IPac did.

A small excerpt of the comic (click to read the whole thing with punchline):

Labels: comedy, Congress, FoxTrot, iPod

Advocates of a completely unregulated broadband ISP market argue that left to its own devices, ISPs will offer the array of products to consumers that best fit consumers' needs at the optimal price points.

Yet for millions of people who live in Comcast's service area, there is only one choice for fast Internet - Comcast. And Comcast gives customers two choices: residential cable Internet for around $60/month, or business Internet for $1500/month. But residential cable has a secret bandwidth limit, and as Consumer Affairs reports, if customers exceed the limit, Comcast cuts them off. Want to pay more for twice the download capacity, like you can on with cell phone minutes? Too bad, no.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Justice believes that everything is peachy keen in Internet land. Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge debunks the DOJ, comparing the range of broadband Internet choices in the U.S. (for most people, that's just one, and for lucky people, two) with the huge array in the UK. The Consumerist arranges it into a nice side by side comparison chart.

Why can't we have a real market with real competition, instead of ideologues like those at the DOJ using "free market" rhetoric to actually stifle the development of an actual free market? Sounds like the people at the DOJ didn't get past the first chapter in their economics textbooks, to the part where it explains how barriers to entry are one of the primary impediments to a healthy market.

The Huffington Post has a really interesting piece on how movies that Hollywood pundits call flops actually make boatloads of money:

Film industry misperception and its perpetuation by the Hollywood press have long gone hand-in-hand.

Part of this is due to a provincial view in Hollywood so limited that it doesn't recognize existence of an area known as "the rest of the world." Part is the Hollywood love of Schadenfreude, German for "taking joy in the failure of others." Part, too, is because Hollywood is made up of freelancers, even at the executive level, always looking over their shoulders, terrified. But most is because of a crushing lack of interest in a bothersome concept known as "Facts."

Consider two movies that the myth of Hollywood perceived into disastrous flops. One is even perceived as a flop of epic proportions.

That would be the second Charlie's Angels. After the massive success of the original film, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle flopped so horrifically that it literally destroyed the franchise and any thought of future sequels. Right? I mean, right?? But -- well, surprise. The sequel actually grossed a quarter billion dollars around the world! That is only $5 million less than its megahit original.

When you read about Net Neutrality here or around the Net, one topic that comes up frequently is the telcos' failure to deploy high-speed broadband years ago. You see, the telcos' argument for discriminating on their networks is that they need the revenue to pay for infrastructure improvements. Problem is, last time they got revenue for infrastructure improvements - under the Telecom Act 1996 - they pocketed the money but didn't actually improve the infrastructure.

In Robert Cringely's latest column, he explains the telcos' betrayal in detail, which he knows because he was there. He was an entrepreneur trying to innovate under the 1996 Act's framework, creating set-top boxes to deliver high-speed video on demand to homes. Unfortunately for him and for consumers, the telcos never implemented his or any other system. It's good reading if you want to understand why, exactly, the "we need revenue to build out the network" argument doesn't hold water.

AT&T wants us to trust them. It's ok for them to have a monopoly over Internet access for many consumers in areas without multiple broadband options, they say, no need to require neutrality or open access because they'll never use their power to favor certain connections over others for censorship, only to improve service to consumers.

On Sunday at Lollaplooza, they did some major service-improving by censoring part of the webcast of Pearl Jam's concert. Pearl Jam used some lyrics criticizing President Bush, and AT&T cut it out.

According to the Pearl Jam release, AT&T apologized and said the cut was a mistake. But when a communication provider has a monopoly, as AT&T does over the Lollapalooza online content, and they give themselves the power to cut content at will, these things will happen. Pearl Jam has the megaphone to get the word out and force AT&T to apologize, whether the mistake was genuine or just a hasty retreat. Not everyone has Pearl Jam's power. The Internet enables anyone to speak, from Pearl Jam to the average citizen, but only if their telco doesn't "mistakenly" cut their speech.

The pilot of a new WB show, "Pushing Daisies", and several others appeared on BitTorrent. Amid rapant speculation about who leaked the video, a studio employee admitted to leaking it on purpose (via BoingBoing). The anonymous uploader claims that it's a common practice in the TV industry to upload videos, but always done without explicit discussion or approval - a "Don't Ask Don't Tell" situation, as he refers to it. He explains:

We don't know if it's a great idea or not. I mean, there's a sense that it would be a good promotional move, but that's just a gut feeling by some of us.... Plus, there are all sorts of legal and financial issues. You don't want to piss off your partners on the show, or the networks. Hey, we're looking at maybe having a strike next year with writers over just this type of thing. Whether or not they get paid for uses outside of the regular broadcast window. Particularly online use, like streaming and such.

In other words, filesharing is good for publicity, but they won't admit that. Oh, and the TV companies want to use content in a certain way without paying. Would studio lawyers argue they should be liable for the $150,000 fines and prison terms that college students face who download the shows that the studio uploaded on purpose? Or maybe Marc Jacobson thinks that the All Your TV website is committing inducement by publishing the story?

The content industry not only feels any use of "their" content, fair or not, ought to be illegal and punishable by extreme measures - they also now feel (or their lawyer, at least) that even criticizing their behavior is illegal - "inducement" of copyright infringement.

Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge detected this absurdity from the mouth of Greenberg Traurig lawyer Marc Jacobson in this article in the eCommerce Times. Companies like Google and Microsoft have decided to stand up to the excesses of content companies who claim, for example, in NFL broadcasts that any unauthorized use of their content is punishable by death (well, almost), and that content companies should stop misrepresenting the law. Jacobson responds, instead, by misrepresenting the law even worse.

With the Induce Act, they tried to get Congress to make any behavior illegal that might encourage copying. They failed to pass such an overbroad law that could have outlawed VCRs, TiVos, iPods, photocopiers, and many other technologies. But the Supreme Court let a little bit of "inducement" creep back in in their Grokster case, and one certainly wouldn't call the content industry restrained in their interpretation of the law.

To the content industry, everything in life is subservient to the overwhelming need to stop filesharing. Huge punishments for tiny actions - excessive punishments don't seem to be a problem as long as they stop filesharing. Suing eight year olds and seventy year olds - a little collateral damage is okay in the service of the war on filesharing. Diverting law enforcement efforts from terror or child porn to prosecute college students, getting AT&T to spy on their customers - well, filesharing is so evil we need to do it. Now free speech, too, is not so important as stopping copying, at least according to the content industry's lawyers.

Did I miss a Constitutional Amendment, which supersedes the Eighth (cruel and unusual punishment), the Fourth (privacy in "persons, houses, papers and effects") and even the First?

New York City passed a law requiring certain restaurants, like fast food chains, to include nutrition information on their menus. Subway complied. Other fast food chains sued, and Dunkin Donuts claimed it was impossible to fit the information by creating a really hard to read menu containing it. The NYC Department of Health called their bluff by creating a much better mockup.

Wendy's thinks it must be illegal for anyone to show them how their menu could be better, and has claimed that a mockup made of their menu is "misleading" and an "improper use of Wendy's trademark".

It's a legal strategy for the modern era: If your arguments aren't working so well in court, claim that the people making the arguments are infringing your copyrights trademarks in the process!