Supreme Court Rulings

by Bob Seidel

Ah, summer is here, along with the traffic. In my computer consulting business I am on the road quite a bit and it is becoming more and more difficult to get through certain intersections, and to make left turns on certain area roads. I am not surprised that it's happening, but how quickly it has occurred. The intersection of 211 and Long Beach Road was just redone recently, and it's already out of capacity - and there is an accident in that area every day, it seems. And it's not going to get any better soon.

I am finally getting around to reading "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" by Lynne Truss. Good reading, especially if you write a newspaper column! Moving on…

Two of the recent flurry of Supreme Court rulings are worth noting here and may be of interest to my readers. The first concerns cable companies. Back in the days when cable companies just distributed television signals, they were in a distinctly different business than telephone companies and not regulated in the same way. When the great unbundling of telephone services occurred, decades ago now, and Ma Bell was partitioned into the Baby Bells, the local phone companies were required to "carry" the long distance services of many companies besides their own. But the cable industry was not subject to that kind of ruling, and remained effective monopolies - carrying just their own services. But now the cable companies offer not just cable TV, but also telephony and other services.

Pressure to open up the cable systems was finally denied by the Court. I don't fully agree, but not for the usual reasons. I believe that there should be a single provider of the data "pipe" into your home or business. That pipe can carry all the digital signals you need - TV, FAX, phone, Internet, etc. That local pipe should be a regulated local utility, much like the water company or the power company. The only difference is that the local utility would provide only the physical connection - services "sold" on the pipe would be open to any and all. The local county or municipality would generate very significant revenue from use fees and licenses.

Cary NC attempted to do this a few years back, but it did not come to pass. Perhaps its time may come.

The second Supreme Court decision concerned file swapping programs and websites. In the pitched battle between the "labels" and file swappers, this decision was grossly misinterpreted. Very simply, the Supreme Court said that there was sufficient cause to believe that some file swapping systems are in existence primarily for illegal swapping purposes, and thus that they should not be exempt from prosecution. This dates back to the landmark decision that the manufacturers of VHS tape decks could not be sued because the recorders possibly could be used to make illegal copies of movies.

But the Court didn't say that swapping was inherently legal or illegal, nor that prosecutions would succeed. It merely opened the door.

But let's be very specific here. You may grouse about the prices, or how rich some artists get, or whatever. But the bottom line is that swapping of copyrighted material is illegal - whether you do it for profit or for your own personal use. The people doing the protesting against the MPAA and RIAA are on very shaky ground. There are lots of ways now to legally acquire music at reasonable prices.

An interesting statistic I heard the other day was that if you divided the number of songs sold by the Apple iTunes website by the number of Apple iPod music players, it came out to only about 20 songs per iPod. Although certainly not an accurate measure of file swapping, it is an eye-opening statistic. There are other legal ways to put music on your player (such as ripping them from CDs you have purchased), but the statistic still makes you wonder. Stay legal...

(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)