It’s been four months since Aaron Swartz, the celebrated computer prodigy and Internet activist, committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment, prompting an outpouring of grief from his family, friends, and many others in the Internet community. Swartz had been facing federal felony charges that carried a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison for downloading academic articles from a computer server at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the wake of Swartz’s death, MIT announced an internal investigation into the university’s role in the matter, and top U.S. lawmakers criticized the Justice Department’s handling of the case. Now, as MIT prepares to release its report, Aaron’s father Robert Swartz is speaking out about what he calls the “injustice” of his son’s prosecution, the role that MIT played, and the legal reforms he’d like to see ensure that no one else is threatened with the harsh punishment his son faced. (MORE: Aaron Swartz, Tech Prodigy and Internet Activist, Is Dead at 26) “For the U.S. Attorney to argue that Aaron was a criminal who had done terrible things was just wrong,” Robert Swartz told TIME this week during an interview in midtown Manhattan. “The prosecutor was completely determined to use every means to intimidate Aaron and make his life miserable.” The pain over Aaron’s death is still raw for his father: Several times during the interview, Robert Swartz paused, closed his eyes, and slowly shook his head, before continuing. Aaron’s case has become a flashpoint in the growing debate over the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1980s-era law originally designed to punish and deter attempts to break into Cold War-era government computer systems like NORAD (think WarGames), as well as financial institutions like banks. Critics say the law has been twisted by U.S. prosecutors to bully and intimidate security researchers, journalists, and activists with extremely harsh federal prison sentences. Robert Swartz, a 63-year-old technology consultant who lives in Highland Park, Ill., hopes that his son’s death will spur lawmakers and MIT officials to act. “I’d like to see the CFAA reformed,” he said. “I’d like MIT to recognize the
Tag Archives: Technology & Media
Video: Sorry eBay — Turns Out Some Small Businesses Support the Marketplace Fairness Act
Online giant eBay is leading the charge against legislation that would require sales tax to be collected on Internet sales. The mandate would be an unfair burden on small businesses, eBay says. And yet who are among the bill’s strongest supporters? Yep, small businesses. For years, online sellers have benefitted from what brick-and-mortar retailers call the “internet sales tax loophole.” For the most part, e-retailers are only required to charge customers sales tax if the vendor has a physical presence in the state where the purchase is being made. Consumers are supposed to pay the appropriate sales tax when they file their annual federal and state income taxes, but almost no one does. The situation gives e-commerce businesses an obvious pricing advantage over brick-and-mortar stores and online retailers with a physical presence in the state, which must always tack on sales tax. The Marketplace Fairness Act, which passed in the U.S. Senate and is now being considered in the House, would close this loophole. The legislation would allow states to require out-of-state vendors to collect all the same sales taxes that are currently assessed in physical stores at the customer’s location. (MORE: 5 Ways to Save Money Shopping Online, Regardless of New Internet Sales Tax Legislation) Amazon, the world’s largest e-retailer, has voiced support for online sales tax collection initiatives in recent years. The only big company that’s actively fighting the legislation today is eBay. Company CEO John Donahoe was quoted on NPR this week arguing that the law would hurt small businesses: If it’s allowed to play out things will still sell in eBay marketplace, but it will be larger and larger sellers that are doing the selling and the small guy will, over time, slowly be squeezed out. Currently, the Marketplace Fairness Act would exempt retailers with less than $1 million in annual revenues. Instead, eBay wants the exemption pushed to the $10 million revenue mark, which Donahoe pointed to as one of the criteria used in Obamacare to define a small business. “All we’re saying is an
The Charles Ramsey-McDonald’s Episode: How a Viral Marketing Opportunity Can Backfire
Using a story about women being kidnapped and held against their will for years for marketing purposes is questionable enough. Now that the hero in the story turns out to have a history of domestic violence convictions, the Charles Ramsey-McDonald’s episode is shaping up as an argument that perhaps brands should respond to viral marketing opportunities slowly, cautiously—and sometimes not at all. The accepted wisdom today is that when a brand is suddenly front and center in the news for almost any reason whatsoever, the company must seize the moment and take advantage of the situation as a marketing opportunity. Responding with speed is deemed to be absolutely essential. Oreo, for instance, was widely lauded for its quick-thinking Tweet during the Super Bowl blackout. The Tweet, featuring a photo of the iconic cookie and the caption “You can still dunk in the dark,” was put up in 10 minutes—before the lights were back on at the New Orleans Superdome—and was immediately retweeted and liked on Facebook tens of thousands of times. (MORE: Stealth Celebrity Endorsement: No Money Changes Hands, Just Free Burritos) The Etch a Sketch toy and Sesame Street’s Big Bird both had big moments in the news during last year’s presidential campaign, and Poland Spring bottled water received plenty of attention thanks to Marco Rubio’s “Gulpgate” during the Republican Address to the Nation in February. These odd spectacles were all viewed as prime branding opportunities that fell into the laps of their respective marketing departments—an opportunity that Poland Spring, for one, was criticized for botching. This week, McDonald’s was suddenly, bizarrely in the news in a big way, when a man named Charles Ramsey became a viral sensation. Ramsey is the neighbor who helped rescue three women who had been abducted and held captive for a decade in a home in downtown Cleveland. In interviews that have been shown on TV stations around the world—and viewed millions of times online—Ramsey mentioned that he was “eating my McDonald’s” when he heard screaming, leading him to save a woman trying
Collecting Music is Back — But Harder Than Ever
The article below was originally published at Evolver.fm. First we collected music objects, then we hoarded MP3s to the point that many of our computers’ music collections became so huge and labyrinthine as to become almost useless. Now that most active music fans play music from the cloud as much or more than we access our local libraries (remember iTunes?), we music fans have a big opportunity to collect music in a way that makes sense again. It’s too bad nobody’s letting us do that. We haven’t conducted a study about this, but we have a feeling most people who care about music listen to a diverse mix of sources including YouTube, Rdio/Spotify/Rhapsody/MOG, streaming radio services, SoundCloud, Hype Machine, television, radio, live music, and the songs that are stuck in their heads. We don’t have an answer for that last one, but for everything else, can we please have a way to collect music again? The on-demand music service Rdio has long been aware of the value of “collecting” digital music within a near-infinite catalog of music, with a feature called “Add to my collection” that lets you store your favorite records from the millions and millions of songs in your profile. It works perfectly, if all you use is Rdio, which you don’t. (MORE: Why YouTube is Launching a Music Service) Spotify, which originally spurned the idea of a collection in favor of playlists, followed Rdio’s lead in the new version it teased last December in Manhattan, some of which is now live. Any time you Star, buy, import, or add a song to a playlist, it goes into your Spotify Library. That’s great, but it doesn’t solve the problem of collecting from a fan perspective. Streaming radio services tend to include iTunes links, which made perfect sense ten years ago, and but doesn’t translate to today’s situation, in which all of our music is scattered all over the place. Here’s my SoundCloud collection. Here’s my Rdio collection. Will the twain ever meet — not to mention all the other apps and sites where I listen to music, of
For a Musician with a Webcam, All the World’s a (Profitable) Stage
On a recent April evening, 20 fans gathered to hear folk singer Ben Taylor play in his living room in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts . The relaxed 40-minute set, which had all the production values of an acoustic performance on YouTube, cost $20 to attend. Fans were happy to pay that and then some—they collectively offered Taylor more than $300 more in tips, doling out dollars whenever he played a favorite song. Instead of gathering at a single location, the 20 concert-goers were scattered around the country, watching Taylor perform through their computer monitors. The venue was Stageit, a website that live streams musical performances and allows attendees to chat with artists as they play. Judging by the excitement during the Ben Taylor show, you’d think fans were sitting in the front row at a concert hall. “My lighter was in the air!” one fan wrote in the concert page’s chatroom after a favorite ballad. Taylor and hundreds of other artists have adopted Stageit as a promising new revenue source in an industry that has been bleeding money for more than a decade. Unlike other video websites, Stageit is primed for commerce. Admission to the site’s virtual shows is limited and costs a minimum of 10 cents. The shows are not archived anywhere, heightening the monetary value of the live experience. Artists solicit extra money through a virtual tip jar, which fans are often eager to fill—the average user spends $13.40 on a Stageit experience between tickets and tips. (MORE: Internet Saved the Video Star: How Music Videos Found New Life After MTV) Part of the site’s appeal is its intimacy. Instead of broadcasting shows in huge concert arenas, Stageit performances are more likely to be filmed in an artist’s bedroom or on the tour bus. “We call it a front row seat to a backstage experience,” says Evan Lowenstein, Stageit’s CEO. A musician himself who made a hit song featured on Dawson’s Creek, Lowenstein has seen firsthand how the rise of Napster decimated the value of recorded music. Now he’s betting that
How Silicon Valley is Hollowing Out the Economy (And Stealing From You To Boot)
Jaron Lanier’s latest book, Who Owns the Future?, begins by noting an instructive coincidence: The bankruptcy of the photography-giant Kodak occurred within months of Facebook‘s billion-dollar acquisition of the photo-sharing site Instagram. This would be just one example of the destructive dynamism of American capitalism, a process through which old companies are overtaken by new technology and new firms more in tune with the needs of customers — and that arguably benefits us all. Except for one thing, that is: Whereas Kodak employed 140,000 workers during its heyday, Instagram employed just 13 people when it was purchased in April 2012. “Where did all those jobs disappear to?” Lanier asks. “And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created?” Lanier’s answer is that the new “information economy,” which is now superseding the manufacturing economy, is developing in such a way that the rewards are filtering to an elite few at the expense of everybody else. Lanier is certainly not the first public intellectual to expound upon rising income inequality or the fact that the emergent information economy isn’t able to produce the sort of middle-class jobs that automation is destroying. But Lanier, a computer scientist who made his name in the field of virtual reality (a term he coined) in the 1980s, is one of the few conversant enough in the necessary disciplines — namely history, economics, and technology — to approach the problem holistically. (MORE: Can Robots Bring Manufacturing Jobs Back to the U.S.?) One popular view of the American economy’s recent troubles is that we’ve become too decadent, that we no longer make anything the rest of the world wants, and that our economy will not recover until we can learn to overcome our addiction to debt and cheap, foreign-made goods. And if one were to look at where the average American gets his paycheck these days, there’s evidence to support this worldview. Fewer and fewer Americans are employed in making physical goods — just 9% of the population works in manufacturing, compared with 40% during World War Two. But total manufacturing output – that is, the dollar-value of all the
Bait-and-Switch: Beware Low-Price Guarantees
Retailers love that price-matching guarantees attract shoppers. At the same time, they hate it when customers actually try to take advantage of these policies. Walmart has had a price-matching guarantee for years, and Target and Best Buy have recently introduced their own policies on a full-time basis—which even include matching prices with online competitors such as Amazon. In some ways, it seems inevitable that stores would get on board with price matching. The rise of “showrooming” and increased transparency in the marketplace all but forces retailers to either match prices of competing stores and websites or risk losing sales to them. And yet, even as pricing is becoming more transparent, the price-matching policies employed by some retailers remain something of a mystery to shoppers. Bloomberg News recently rounded up many of the gripes consumers have regarding the price-matching policies of national retailers such as Walmart and Toys R Us. Mostly, the complaints center on how confusing and frustrating the policies can be, especially because the decisions inside stores to allow or shoot down price-match requests can seem arbitrary. “Shoppers can get confused,” Robin Sherk, a Kantar Retail analyst, told Bloomberg concerning Walmart locations. “They go to different stores and there are different policies — even in the same store, if you go to different cashiers.” (MORE: Does Kmart’s Hilarious New Ad Acknowledge That Kmart Stores Are Hopeless?) Part of the reason shoppers will find varying policies is that it’s “up to the local managers what matching they will do,” one pharmacist who has worked at several Walmarts explained. Another reason could be that the policies themselves are complicated enough to not only confound shoppers, but store employees as well. The fine print of Target’s “low price promise” is nearly 1,000 words long and includes more than a dozen exclusions such as “prices advertised only as a percent off or dollar off.” The Toys R Us Price Match Guarantee, which the National Advertising Division recently recommended be changed or discontinued because it was misleading, states that stores will match prices listed
Tom Wheeler, Former Lobbyist and Obama Fundraiser, Tapped to Lead FCC
U.S. President Barack Obama named prominent venture capitalist Tom Wheeler as his nominee to be the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as expected. In a brief White House ceremony on Wednesday, Obama said that Wheeler will help give “businesses and workers the tools they need to compete in the 21st century economy.” Obama added that Wheeler is “the only member of both the cable television and the wireless industry hall of fame.” Wheeler, a former top cable and wireless industry lobbyist, raised more than $700,000 for Obama’s two presidential election campaigns. Last month, TIME reported that Wheeler, 67, was the front-runner for the top FCC job. On Wednesday, Obama made it official. Referring to Wheeler’s lengthy experience as a lobbyist for two of the industries he will now be regulating, Obama joked that his nominee is “like the Jim Brown or Bo Jackson of telecom.” Earlier in his career, Wheeler served as president of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA). Since his last job as a lobbyist in 2004, Wheeler has been a technology entrepreneur and executive at D.C.-based firm Core Capital Partners, which manages about $350 million. (MORE: Tom Wheeler, Former Lobbyist and Obama Loyalist, Seen as FCC Frontrunner) Wheeler also “bundled” at least $700,000 in contributions to President Obama’s campaigns over the last two presidential election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics — a fact that Obama neglected to mention during his announcement on Wednesday. Of course, Wheeler wouldn’t be the first major campaign supporter that Obama tapped to lead the FCC. Outgoing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former Harvard Law School chum of the president, was also a major campaign bundler for Obama. Wheeler did not immediately respond to a request for comment. If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Wheeler will confront several knotty issues. The FCC is currently weighing new rules about media ownership, and preparing for a complex wireless spectrum auction aimed at freeing up airwaves for consumer use. The agency also faces a closely watched legal challenge over its authority to enforce