This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.com.
Of course, the content of this post consists entirely of the thoughts and opinions of the author.

You don’t often get to see the details of a massive data center. The companies that run them tend to keep things pretty quiet, as they view the datacenter as a competitive advantage. Thus, what happens in Google’s datacenters remains mostly a mystery. And yet, it seems that the folks at Weta Digital, famous for providing the computing horsepower behind major Hollywood blockbusters like Lord of the Rings and now Avatar are apparently willing to open up a bit and provide some details about its setup. What struck me as interesting wasn’t so much the hardware specifics, but how they had to switch from the industry standard cooling system of raised floors and air-cooling, because the machines were too close together to get the necessary bandwidth. So, instead, they went with water-cooled racks. Water-cooled data centers have been increasingly common over the past few years (and were typical with many old mainframes), but they’re still a technology that not all data center operators are comfortable with, and which many still think create more problems than they solve. So it’s always interesting to see another one in action.

At the same time, as neat as it is to read about Weta Digital’s massive computing power (which apparently represents one of the 200 largest “super computers”) in the world, I’m still left wondering if the trend — even for amazing movie effects — isn’t moving away from such massive data centers. We’re seeing more and more what can be done on the cheap. And, no, it doesn’t come close to matching the stunning effects found in the blockbuster movies that Weta works on, but it does have all the symptoms of a classic innovator’s dilemma scenario, where the new stuff isn’t “as good” as the old stuff, but is improving at a faster rate, and quickly reaching a point where it’s “good enough” at significantly lower price points.

Given the regular discussions around here concerning movie budgets, where do people think the technology is headed for movie special effects? Will it always be run in giant datacenters, or is there a place for making high quality (even blockbuster-type) films on cheaper hardware?

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I actually had decently high hopes for Vevo, the partnership between Universal Music and YouTube to create a website for official music videos (currently from three of the four major record labels). I mean, I always figured that eventually the labels would screw stuff up, but I thought it actually had a shot at maybe being useful. The fact that Universal put Rio Caraeff in charge seemed like a good sign as well, since Caraeff seemed like the sort of music industry exec who understood the new marketplace for music, and wasn’t encumbered with the “old ways” of doing things. But rather than a useful site, Vevo has basically been a cookie cutter version of what you would do if the record labels created their own YouTube. That is, it took none of the good parts of YouTube. Hell, it didn’t even take the ability to handle a lot of traffic. For the first few days after it launched, Vevo just didn’t work at all.

Its latest screwup was that it didn’t include its preroll ads in the YouTube API, meaning that others who used the API could access and repurpose Vevo content without the ads, and even show the content outside the US (which Vevo currently does not allow). It didn’t take long for one enterprising startup, Muziic, to do exactly that. Muziic has received some attention for basically using the YouTube API to create an iTunes-like experience out of YouTube videos (it also gets attention for being founded by a 16-year old). Muziic sent out an announcement this week about how it was using the YouTube API to add Vevo content, meaning you could access Vevo videos without the preroll ads and outside the US.

Vevo’s first response? To send a cease and desist. At the very least, it wasn’t a legal nastygram, but a more friendly cease & desist sent by Caraeff himself. But “cease” what? Muziic was using the API as designed, and even though Caraeff admits that Vevo is quickly scrambling to change the API, he still says Muziic needs to cease from using the Vevo logo or referencing the company’s name. But Muziic used the name in an accurate and descriptive manner. It accurately noted that it was now offering Vevo content — without ads and outside the US — all legally via the use of the API provided by YouTube/Vevo itself.

Muziic’s co-founder responded to Caraeff’s email over at Hypebot, saying that he “was as shocked as anyone when I realized there were not yet any “pre-roll” advertisements for Vevo content in the API,” but since it was how the company set up the API, it seems perfectly reasonable to use it that way. He also notes that he had reached out to Vevo prior to this to try to work out an arrangement with the company and got no response.

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Via EFF comes this rather interesting calculation of the DRM tax of owning an Amazon Kindle. It’s not a definitive number, as it would differ for different people based on what kinds of books they buy, how often and how many of those books they’d like to keep. But it’s a good little thought experiment for those looking to buy a Kindle. The key recognition, of course, is that with a Kindle ebook you’re renting, not buying the books:

There is one other problem with DRM protected books. When the reading device reaches its end of life, you have to assume all the content you purchased will be lost. If, for instance, I went with a Kindle, all of the content I purchase can be used only on devices supported by Amazon.

When, several years later, it comes time to replace that Kindle I may get a new Kindle — but I can’t assume that. Maybe somebody else will have a better device at that time. Or, maybe Amazon went bankrupt or evil or stupid and I need to switch to another vendor. There are any number of reasons I might like to switch my e-reader. If I do, I have to assume I won’t be able to use any of the content I purchased for the Kindle.

Thanks to DRM, when my e-reader reaches its end of life, I will have to pay to acquire replacement books for the material that’s locked out of the new e-reader. I call the amount of that purchase the “DRM tax” — an added cost imposed by DRM restrictions.

He’s quite fair in calculating his own personal DRM tax, noting that he probably wouldn’t want to rebuy all the books, but just a portion of them. He also knows that ebooks are cheaper. But, in the end, he realizes that this DRM tax makes the total cost of ownership of a Kindle much higher for him than just buying the physical books — even if it’s more of a pain to have to sometimes lug them around. In his case, he would use it mainly for technical books, which is a different situation than, say, recreational novel reading, where “ownership” may be less important. Still, he feels that the DRM issue is a problem and a serious hidden cost:

Maybe someday Amazon (and publishers) will realize how much harm they are doing with DRM. If the DRM tax was removed, not only would more people get e-readers, but also, thanks to the low friction of e-book purchasing, they’d buy more e-content.

This is actually a key point. Just the fact that he had to run through this calculation to determine if a Kindle made sense is a serious amount of friction. If Amazon made this calculation easy (i.e., no DRM tax) that would lead to more sales.

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Famous politico-pranksters The Yes Men have a long history of putting forth convincing parody websites that get those they parody to rush around to get the websites offline. Back in 2007, there was the fake ExxonMobil site that got pulled. Earlier this year it was the fake Chamber of Commerce site that the real Chamber issued a DMCA takedown over. The latest prank is based up in Canada, with the Yes Men setting up some parody sites of Canadian government organizations, promising massive greenhouse emissions reductions. This greatly upset the Canadian government who ordered the websites’ service provider to pull them down. However, as Michael Geist points out, in the rush to pull down the sites, the ISP also took down 4,500 other websites. Seems like quite a bit of unnecessary collateral damage. Of course, this is exactly what the Yes Men want. For every takedown, they get another burst of publicity.

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One of the more famous examples of abuses of the YouTube video takedown process was the case of Lenz vs. Universal Music, which involved Universal Music issuing a YouTube DMCA takedown to a woman who posted a very short clip of her baby dancing to a Prince song that was playing in the background. It was a clear case of fair use, and while after the woman filed a counternotice Universal chose not to sue, the EFF filed a lawsuit against Universal Music, saying that the DMCA notice was fraudulent, since it was such an obvious case of fair use. While Universal Music argued that since fair use is just a “defense” and not a “right” it need not consider fair use in sending a takedown, the court disagreed.

You would think, then, that any takedown notices on similar short videos of kids dancing to music would avoid a similar scenario. Copycense points us to the news that a guy has received a notice from Google of potential infringement for his short clip of his kid dancing along to what appears to be a version (not the original) of the Kool & The Gang song “Celebration.” As in the Lenz case, this video is a kid dancing to somewhere around 30 seconds of a song:

The notice claims that the video contains content for which the copyright is held by record label Razor & Tie. The guy who got the takedown seems a bit confused, in that he appears to be blaming McDonald’s for the mess, when it appears McDonald’s had nothing at all to do with the takedown. In fact, the record label Razor & Tie may not have anything to do with it either… as I’ll explain below. The song used in the video was from a CD that came with a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Looking around, it appears that in April, McDonald’s announced a promotion with record label Kidz Bop to issue music CDs. Razor & Tie is the parent company of Kidz Bop. The problem here is clearly not McDonald’s. All it did was include the CD in Happy Meals. It’s got nothing to do with the takedown, and the guy’s anger at McDonald’s is misplaced (though, you could make the argument — and it’s a stretch — that McDonald’s should tell its partners to avoid these sorts of ridiculous copyright claims that scare people away from buying Happy Meals).

The next assumption, then, would be that Razor & Tie is guilty of sending the takedown, but I don’t think that’s true. If Razor & Tie had sent a DMCA takedown, the video would be down. When Google receives a DMCA takedown, it almost always (or perhaps always) pulls down the content immediately in order to retain its DMCA safe harbors. The user would then need to file a counternotice to start the process of potentially getting the video back up. The fact that the video is up and the notice the guy received simply tells him to review the videos suggests that no DMCA takedown was sent.

Instead, the blame almost certainly lies with Google’s content recognition engine/filters that the record labels pushed them to use to try to catch copyright infringement ahead of time. Now, Razor & Tie is somewhat complicit here, in that it appears to have uploaded its catalog to train Google’s filters (if I remember correctly — and correct me if I’m wrong — Google needs the copyright holder to submit copies for its filter to work). So, Google had this particular song on file, and noticed the similarity. Google’s filter algorithms don’t appear to consider fair use (or, perhaps more likely, they do a bad job of it in many cases) and the guy then is sent the automated notification, even though it makes everyone — McDonald’s, Razor & Tie and Google — look bad, though the blame from the recipient appears to be in almost reverse order of culpability.

Unfortunately, the guy who received the notice also appears to be confused concerning his own rights. He says he is going to take down the video, though he clearly has a strong fair use case in asking for the video to be left alone. It seems likely that Google would allow the video to stay up, and I highly doubt that Razor & Tie would do anything else (it would be ridiculous to try to claim that this was not fair use).

Either way, this highlights a variety of interesting things. First, despite all the publicity of the Lenz case, these types of “takedowns” (even if it’s not a DMCA takedown) still happen. Second, people on the receiving end of these notices assume that there is no recourse that would allow the video to stay up. People get official sounding notices and they assume they need to jump. Third, Google’s content match filter isn’t particularly good on fair use issues. Fourth, when these sorts of bogus notices are sent, it reflects very poorly on a variety of companies. In this case, McDonald’s is getting most of the blame, despite being almost entirely blameless (well, it did decide to put out these silly music CDs, but that’s a separate issue). Even Razor & Tie may be getting misplaced blame (though it may depend on the “rules” it set for Google’s filter). Amusingly, it may be Google that deserves the most blame, and it appears to be getting the least.

Still, no matter what the situation, it’s simply ridiculous that a guy filming 30 seconds of his kid dancing should have to worry about any of this.

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With the failed attempted terrorist attack last week, there has been a tremendous amount of confusion and changing stories concerning airline security. What was especially odd was that there were so many conflicting reports about what the TSA was requiring that it really made the very concept of flying a total pain. There were some reports saying that no carry on baggage was allowed and other reports saying no electronics were allowed. Then there were the reports that you could carry on one bag, but wouldn’t be able to leave your seat in the last hour of the flight or have anything (anything at all) on your lap during that hour. Every flight seemed to be different and the TSA was silent for a few days, before finally issuing a vague “guidance” press release that didn’t really answer any questions. Basically, the TSA said that it was changing rules constantly. One supposes that the idea was to completely vary the rules so that no “terrorist” could prepare for them and get around them, and I actually can see some merit in that, conceptually. But from a travelers’ perspective, it’s ridiculous. You simply can’t plan ahead with any sense of reason.

And since the TSA was so quiet and/or vague, there were a ton of people searching for information. Even the NY Times was relying on info found on airline websites rather than the TSA itself. So it was of little surprise that there would be plenty of demand for anyone to share any info that they knew — not for any nefarious purpose, but just so regular travelers could properly prepare for their trip.

Among those who found and posted such information was blogger/reporter and travel expert Christopher Elliott, who regularly blogs about travel issues. He posted the details of a TSA order requiring pat-downs of all passengers on international inbound flights. The order that he posted had been sent to US Airways employees, and seemed like a reasonable bit of information that people would probably like to know about, so it’s no surprise that Elliott blogged about it. But last night, Elliott received a surprising knock on the door from a Federal Agent with a subpoena demanding he hand over the details of where he received the info on the pat down procedure (thanks to Rob Hyndman who pointed me to an account of this incident).

Now, the argument in favor of this action is that these sorts of security procedures are probably supposed to be kept quiet (again, the idea would be to throw off any terrorist), but if you actually think about this, it doesn’t make any sense. First, it wouldn’t take long at all for reports of universal pre-boarding pat downs to be spread around. After all, thousands of people get on planes to fly to the US every day. In fact, among the many stories I heard, the universal pat down story was among them. So it’s not like it’s actually a secret. It’s quite clear from what’s being done. Second, if the TSA’s security plan is based on keeping information like this “secret” (even if it’s made obvious by their actions), then we’re in even more trouble than I thought. It’s security through pretend obscurity. It’s ostrich-level security theater. It’s security theater where the idea is that if the TSA pretends no one knows what’s actually happening, then it can assume that no one knows what the procedures really are for airport security.

Instead, the whole thing (once again) demonstrates how silly the TSA security procedures are. And, oh yeah, rather than sending federal agents to issue subpoenas to folks like Elliott to figure out how he got the security procedures, shouldn’t Homeland Security be spending more time tracking terrorists and coming up with plans that actually make us safer? What good is it engaging in a witch hunt over who passed on the obvious info that people get patted down before they board a US-bound flight?

Update: Wired has details of another blogger who received a similar visit, that was a lot less friendly (lots of threats involved) named Steven Frischling. Frischling cooperated, and they went through his phone — even calling his mom, and then wanted to get an image of his hard drive. When they had trouble making the image, they ended up taking his laptop. I’m still confused as to how this makes anyone safer.

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Copyright maximalists who hate the DMCA’s safe harbors often claim that service providers can easily tell what content is infringing and which is not. This is, in fact, a key part of the argument made by Viacom in its lawsuit against Google over YouTube. It claims that YouTube must know that the clips are infringing and should be taken down. There’s just one problem: even Viacom doesn’t seem to know which clips are infringing and which are not. It turns out that, among the many YouTube clips included in the lawsuit, approximately 100 were uploaded on purpose by Viacom. Yes, you read that right:

Viacom sued Google over clips it claimed were infringing, that Viacom purposely uploaded to YouTube.

That alone should show how ridiculous Viacom’s claims are in this lawsuit. There is simply no way for Google to know if clips are uploaded legitimately or not. Oddly, however, the court has now allowed Viacom to withdraw those clips, but lawyers like Eric Goldman are questioning how this isn’t a Rule 11 violation for frivolous or improper litigation. But, more importantly, it demonstrates that even Viacom has no idea which clips are infringing and which are authorized. Given that, how can it possibly say that it’s reasonable for Google to know?

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Taser is notoriously defensive about any claims that its supposedly “non-lethal” devices have ever caused anyone to die. Yet, there is a ton of evidence concerning people who have died after being tazed. There are even cases where the company has had courts overrule medical examiners forcing them to change the “cause of death.” Now, as Karl Bode points out, an appeals court has ruled that using a Taser can constitute excessive force. The ruling doesn’t say that Tasers are automatically excessive force, but suggests that the overall circumstances behind the use need to be taken into consideration, and if the victim is not acting in a threatening way, use of a Taser may be inappropriate and excessive.

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As a bunch of countries continue to negotiate ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, in secrecy, Kenya already has its own Anti-Counterfeit Act. Michael Geist points us to the news that that particular law is now being challenged in Kenya for violating peoples “right to health.” The issue is worth following, because it will almost certainly become an issue assuming ACTA moves forward. Whenever we discuss ACTA, it’s inevitable that someone stops by to say that anti-counterfeiting is really, really important to stop dangerous counterfeit drugs from being sold, potentially harming people. Now, I have no doubt that counterfeit drugs may be a serious problem — but if that’s the problem, we should target a narrow attack on that problem alone, not some wider “anti-counterfeiting” effort.

We’ve already seen that lobbyist-funded and promoted reports on the “counterfeiting problem” are widely exaggerated, and any real “problem” is much smaller than the numbers that get tossed around. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that counterfeit products quite frequently lead to purchases of the real product in the future (i.e., people aren’t “fooled” into buying counterfeits — they know they’re buying counterfeits). But that’s with things like luxury goods. What about drugs?

Well, we’ve already seen that big pharmaceutical companies conveniently like to use anti-counterfeiting laws not to stop dangerous counterfeit drugs, but to destroy legitimate generic drugs. It’s not about making sure that drugs and people are safe — but quite the opposite. It’s about limiting competition so that these pharma firms can jack up prices even higher.

And that’s the issue in Kenya. About 90% of the drugs in Kenya are generics — for a very good reason. Those drugs are much cheaper and are helpful in saving many lives. The Kenyan anti-counterfeit law makes counterfeiting a criminal issue, rather than a civil one, and gives the power to police and border officials, who have no way of knowing counterfeit from generic, so often label generic drugs as being counterfeits. There are plenty of good reasons to try to stop counterfeit drugs from hitting the market, but if that’s the real problem, any solution should be narrowly focused on that specific problem. Unfortunately, since it’s quite often the big pharmaceutical lobbyists who help write and push through these bills, that’s not how it works at all.

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