Christopher Herot's Weblog

Elvis Sightings

In doing some research on Copyright Law, I came across this little gem from the U.S. Copyright Office:

How do I protect my sighting of Elvis?

Copyright law does not protect sightings. However, copyright law will protect your photo (or other depiction) of your sighting of Elvis. File your claim to copyright online by means of the electronic Copyright Office (eCO). Pay the fee online and attach a copy of your photo. Or, go to the Copyright Office website, fill in Form CO, print it, and mail it together with your photo and fee. For more information on registration a copyright, see SL-35. No one can lawfully use your photo of your sighting, although someone else may file his own photo of his sighting. Copyright law protects the original photograph, not the subject of the photograph.

Visitors to Boston Beware

Did you know you can get a ticket for parking even if you are sitting at the wheel with the engine on?

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Park. to place or leave (a vehicle) in a certain place for a period of time.

From the Boston Traffic Rules & Regulations:

Parking. The stopping or standing of a vehicle, whether occupied or not.

Stand or Standing. The halting of a vehicle, whether occupied or not, other than for the purpose of, and while actually engaged in, receiving or discharging passengers. 

Stop or Stopping. The halting, even momentarily of a vehicle, whether occupied or not, except when necessary to avoid conflict with other traffic.

From Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There:

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

High Fiber Breakfast

I had breakfast yesterday with Benoît Felten, a.k.a.@fiberguy. Benoît follows fiber-to-the home for Yankee Group and knows more about the subject than anyone I've met, including people implementing the services he writes about.

I asked him the question that's on the every geek's mind: do the Koreans (Japanese, australians, etc.) really have much faster Internet access than we do in the USA? The short answer is yes, but Benoît started with an anecdote about a group of French Telecom executives who visited Korea to find out the same thing.  Before the French could ask the Koreans how they managed to provide fast access for a low price, the Koreans surprised the French by asking them how they managed to sell so many high-margin services on top of their network. The Koreans did, indeed, offer their residential subscribers a level of bandwidth that is the envy of the world, but they weren't happy about the commodity price they were getting for it. The Korean government prohibited the network operators from offering services (the "structural separation that has often been proposed in the US) with the result that they had to compete on bandwidth and price. The consumers won, but the network operators envied the ability of the French to sell more profitable services.

Of course it is perfectly possible to make money selling commodities (just ask Archer Daniels Midland or any oil company) but after a century of subsidies and government-enforced monopolies, the incumbent telephone companies have a mindset and cost structure that pushes them in the opposite direction, e.g. charging $0.20 to send a 140 character SMS, a profitable $178 per megabit. It doesn't need to be this way.  There are companies such as Free in France that have very lean organizations and can make money on low-priced services.

Another problem is a mismatch of time horizons in building out a network.  While telcos have traditionally planned on 50 year amortizations of their outside plant, they continue to put in copper instead of fiber, which will become obsolete very quickly as consumers come to expect higher bandwidth.  Even fiber deployments such as Verizon FIOS suffer from such short-term planning.  The reason Verizon can't offer gigabit connectivity such as is common in Asia is that the fiber from each home does not run all the way back to the central office but is connected to concentrators that feed around 30 homes and are, in turn, fed by 2.5 gigabit connections.

In the end it comes down to which of three visions a network operator subscribes to:

1. kill net neutrality and go back to a walled garden of high-priced services
2. resign themselves to being in a low-margin, commodity business
3. become an aggregator of services from third parties

Given their core competency in lobbying, the incumbent operators are not likely to give up easily on option #1, especially when they have mountains of debt and large, unionized workforces, but if they put all their eggs in that basket they are likely to end up at path #2.  Benoît argues strongly for the third option, which would give consumers the confidence to purchase through a trusted party. We'll have to wait and see if the telcos and cable companies have the vision and skill to take that path. 

Farewell Facebook?

Arriving as predictably as fire season in LA, articles predicting the demise of the latest Internet phenomenon show up as soon as the product or service in question approaches mass adoption. The latest in this series was an article by  Virginia Heffernan in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine entitled Facebook Exodus. Somewhat reminiscent of Yogi Berra's remark that "No one goes there any more; it's too crowded," Heffernan notes that people she knows are leaving Facebook, even as its overall numbers increase.

Is this just normal churn, or is Facebook doomed? While, as John maynard Keynes said "In the long run we are all dead," social networking services such as Facebook go through a predictable cycle. At the beginning, the early adopters sign up and get their friends to do so (the infamous "viral" spread), and the fun is seeing how many of your friends have joined and linked to you. By the time the wave has reached the general population, the earliest users have already "friended" everyone they know and are getting bored.  Who remembers Friendster or Orkut? The better sites give people something to do once they've signed up their friends, and Facebook has proven useful to many people as a way to share photos and events in their lives. Facebook may not be new and cool, but new and cool drives the early adopters - practical utility is what keeps them.

However, according to a recent report from Forrester, we are all early adopters now: 63% of Americans have broadband Internet and 75% have cellphones and PCs. Whether Facebook survives or not, there is no going back to an era when we wrote letters with quill pens and had them delivered by hand.