The hottest topic on a lot of legal/internet blogs centers around the Department of Homeland Security seizing a number of domain names back in February. [http://bit.ly/gXs5ih]. The basics are that the Department, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), nabbed hundreds of domain names and claimed legality under criminal copyright infringement (what are either of these organizations worried about copyright for? great question…). This, not coincidentally, happened right before the Super Bowl, and basically seemed like an attempt to shut down a bunch of sites that were blatantly infringing copyright by streaming sports. Only problem was, they used a rather un-fine tooth comb to pick the sites they were taking down, clearly operating under a “too much is never enough” philosophy. So they basically took down a bunch of sites with no infringing content in a move that obviously lacked sufficient due process, given the scope of the takedowns. Here’s what a seized domain looks like: http://www.atdhe.net/
I’ll admit freely that I found atdhe.net last year when I lived with no cable, and that leads me to the real issue here, because I’m not going to take a stab at every due process, free speech, property and copyright infringement issue implicated by all of ICE’s nonsense (it is all very new territory, and exciting, but there are no clear answers at this point anyway). I’m an avid sports fan, and last year I was presented with a choice: pay 60 bucks a month for cable and more for sports packages (for the NBA and NFL packages, the cost would have been in the hundreds), or search the internet for streaming sites where I could get relatively low quality feeds instead. So I streamed the internet, and basically got better access to the content I wanted for free, at the cost of quality.
This year I decided to splurge on cable with the most basic sports package, and it is absolutely and completely the biggest rip off on the planet. I’m pretty fluent in the moving parts that bring us the cable industry as it stands today: the justifications for the artificial monopolies, the last-mile problems, the copyright issues. If you don’t know what any of those things mean, the bottom line is that cable will never, ever improve its product until we have super bandwidth that can transmit an HD signal wirelessly from outside your home to your television, allowing somebody (google? apple?) to break the monopolies. There’s a perfect confluence of flawed economics, a lack of competition, lagging technology and a sprinkle of copyright law that keeps us stuck with the same operating system on our cable networks that we had in 1998, paying money for 200 channels nobody watches, and trying to justify paying so much to watch only 2 or 3 channels 90% of the time.
Even though I don’t frequent them any longer, I hope streaming sports sites surge back stronger than ever, and I hope somebody audits ICE to figure out how much time and money they are wasting helping make sure the NFL gets it’s ad revenue.
danielmarkmiller.net 