Million dollars for a transmitter & pennies for a receiver

[beskeptical]

Wasn't sure if this went in Small Media since there's as much pondering here as discussing show particulars...

I heard this fascinating point on a POV film about the work of two folk music professors.

Alan Lomax Radio (http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2006/lomax/special_radio.html) was the title of the program. It was wonderful. These guys went around the country and later the world and collected/documented incredible folk music. Their scientific work on the subject was dismissed at first but I think it was eventually received as valid science in the end.

Anyway, One of them made a fascinating comment about the music they collected and that which was played on the radio. He said transmitters cost millions while radios cost almost nothing. That makes communication a one directional event, with only a few transmitters and millions of receivers. It had profound implications about the perception of the folk music the researchers recorded.

And I thought how different the computer and the Internet are making that very idea. Now transmitters and receivers cost the same. And while a computer costs a bit more than a radio, in the industrialized world computers are fairly accessible. So the discrepancy exists between transmitters and receivers in the poorer places on the planet but it is disappearing here. UTube in particular now makes transmitters available to all those folk music producers (producing as in singing into a tape/digital recorder).

It also has good implications regarding the million dollar transmitters of the major broadcasting networks. No longer are a few holding the same power over communication as they did when there were only million dollar transmitters. Just a little more time and the 'only TV/no computer' crowd is going to die out and the 'computer first/TV secondary or not at all' crowd will replace them. Thank goodness, because this is occurring just as the science of marketing has advanced into the most dangerous territory.

We need to be real careful not to allow an insidious monopoly manage to exert control over those millions of transmitters. You can bet they will try.

[Doodler]

The recording industry has sat up and taken notice with its really outrageous attempts to control media distribution. The level of power that computers places in the hands of end users makes the old recordable cassette tapes look positively quaint in comparison. I can almost sympathize with their concerns, but some of the steps they're taking have bordered on the fascist.

Obscure rules regarding the number of legal copies, attempting to impose restrictions on the conversion of music from one format to another by saying the license to own a copy of music is only on CD, and not in MP3 or other digital formats, the backdoor installation of steath programs on end users computers.

Very big brotherish, and in my opinion, every excuse I'll ever need to celebrate the day that file sharing breaks them financially.

[Trebuchet]

How about software licensing while you're at it? Ever tried to read to actually read one of those things you have to accept in order to get a program to install? You're only using it out of the "kindness" of their hearts. I'm convinced that when BillG's OS says "My Computer", they really mean it's their's!

The original point is valid, but it's a two-edged sword. The proliferation of computers and spread of the Internet has led to some very good things, such as Bad Astronomy. But it's also led to some spectacularly bad "thinking" in the abounding woo-woo (and worse) sites out there.

[Doodler]

Intellectual property laws almost remind me of the way West Virginia handles its mining rights in the coal industry. The people own the land, the companies own the coal, and the coal companies get to pick how they want to extract it whether the land owner likes it or not.

[ktesibios]

beskeptical, I suspect that you're forgetting a fundamental difference between radio broadcasting and Internet communication.

In broadcasting, there's an entry barrier in the cost of constructing and licensing a transmitter, but once that hurdle is vaulted the signal propagates freely and uncontrollably, courtesy of the laws of electromagnetism. While it's possible to jam reception, doing so is expensive and onerous enough that only governments have attempted it. In addition, jamming a broadcast announces openly that you are so afraid of what someone has to say that you're willing to use brute-force methods to try to prevent it being heard.

On the 'net, by contrast, signals have to pass through a physical network which can be made to fail conveniently when someone tries to access content which the operator of any part of the path from client to server doesn't approve of. This can be done without having to give away the fact that the site is being censored; if your browser returns an "unable to locate (or contact) server" message, how will the average surfer determine whether this is a bona fide technical problem or content censorship?

This has already been done.

On July 25, 2005, Canadian Internet Service Provider (ISP) Telus blocked subscribers' access to a Web site set up by an employee labor union intended to publicize the union's views about its dispute with Telus. In addition, the OpenNet Initiative's (ONI) research shows that Telus's decision to block traffic to the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the site caused collateral filtering of at least 766 additional, unrelated Web sites. Telus restored access to the IP address hosting the sites on July 28, 2005, while appearing to maintain an option to block any sites it chooses.

Telus is one of Canada's largest ISPs, with over one million customers. The company temporarily blocked its subscribers from accessing a union-run Web site in an escalating labour dispute with the Telecommunications Workers Union. Subscribers attempting to access the site were not given a message informing them that their ISP was blocking the site, but rather found it simply inaccessible, as if the site itself had been taken down or a network error had prevented a connection. Telus confirmed that it blocked access to the Voices for Change website (www.voices-for-change.com), on the basis that the "website ha[d] posted illegal information." (1) Telus blocked access to the site on July 25, 2005 and restored access on July 28, 2005.

Tests undertaken by the ONI on July 27, 2005 showed that Telus's blocking extended to far more than the single targeted site. Telus's filtering also blocked 766 additional, unrelated sites with domain names hosted on the same server as the blocked site. These sites included http://www.airgasengineering.com/, an engineering company; http://www.boogieforbreastcancer.org/, a breast cancer fundraising site; http://www.medicinemodernlife.com/, an alternative medicine site based in Australia; and http://www.mountainrecyclers.com/, a Colorado based electronic recycling company.

http://www.opennetinitiative.net/bulletins/010/

Telus got caught, but had they been more sophisticated they could have made detection of their censorship much more difficult.

There was another example of an upstream provider censoring access to Web sites-in a manner undetectable by the ordinary user- which was documented on the Peacefire site. Unfortunately, Peacefire doesn't seem to maintain archives of past articles, so I can't find the particulars today.

The Chinese government openly censors Internet access, and IT companies like Google, Cisco and Micro$oft are happy to help them do it. What's more, since there are relatively few backbone providers through which nearly all 'net communication pass at some point in their travels, censorship could be implemented at the corporate level, with no direct governmental involvement at all- or at least with considerable "plausible deniability".

Mass communications are still really in the hands of a tiny, unaccountable minority of moneyed interests. The Internet hasn't changed that. :(

[beskeptical]

I wasn't commenting on all the ins and outs of either if these two situations. There are a lot of yes buts here. There are all sorts of details worth discussing, mind you, but my post was about the insight that comment by the music professor held.

[Peter Wilson]

The millions of people with transistor radios control the mega broadcasters as much as the other way 'round.

[mugaliens]

The recording industry has sat up and taken notice with its really outrageous attempts to control media distribution. The level of power that computers places in the hands of end users makes the old recordable cassette tapes look positively quaint in comparison. I can almost sympathize with their concerns, but some of the steps they're taking have bordered on the fascist.

Obscure rules regarding the number of legal copies, attempting to impose restrictions on the conversion of music from one format to another by saying the license to own a copy of music is only on CD, and not in MP3 or other digital formats, the backdoor installation of steath programs on end users computers.

Very big brotherish, and in my opinion, every excuse I'll ever need to celebrate the day that file sharing breaks them financially.


Yes, because of their technical incompetance, they'll never crack the code.

The bottom line is that no matter where you intercept the audio stream, there will always be a vulnerable point, even if it's at the receiver's output to the speaker.

Thus, the RIAA's gyrations are insane. They need to cut their losses and realize that once it's recorded, music dissemination is no longer in their hands.

Stick to concerts, as that's the only untouchable out there.

[Doodler]

Yes, because of their technical incompetance, they'll never crack the code.

The bottom line is that no matter where you intercept the audio stream, there will always be a vulnerable point, even if it's at the receiver's output to the speaker.

Thus, the RIAA's gyrations are insane. They need to cut their losses and realize that once it's recorded, music dissemination is no longer in their hands.

Stick to concerts, as that's the only untouchable out there.

Except when they confiscate and ban cameras. Pearl Jam (as much as I think Eddie Vedder is an obnxious...individual, I respect the heck out of this) and the Grateful Dead are the only bands which allow open photography and recording.

[beskeptical]

The millions of people with transistor radios control the mega broadcasters as much as the other way 'round.That is partially true, but unfortunately board rules don't allow me to elaborate on why the marketers are more sophisticated in controlling the buyers than the other way around and the broadcasters sell their product to the marketers, not to the consumers.

[beskeptical]

Except when they confiscate and ban cameras. Pearl Jam (as much as I think Eddie Vedder is an obnxious...individual, I respect the heck out of this) and the Grateful Dead are the only bands which allow open photography and recording.The Grateful Dead and Pearl Jam are on the million dollar transmitter side of the equation though they may not have been in the beginning. The people who never got to that side are the ones you can now find on UTube and they are akin to the ones the professors in the link went out and recorded all over the world in their research.

[mugaliens]

Interesting perspective.

And what would happen if websites became decentralized?

Instead of residing on server farms, what if they instead were spread throughout a number of computers on the Internet, much like automated file-sharing does today, employing redundancy to overcome when a computer or network is down, RAID technologies, automated load balancing, etc.?

[beskeptical]

There is a "take back the media" movement which seeks to build community based low watt FM radio stations through cooperative efforts and many small donations.

The group is great, their website isn't so I won't link to it.

I'd like to know what would stop free flowing Internet services from springing up should the big players win the right to control what their customers can easily find. Most people would switch in a minute to the ISP that didn't mess with data flow.

Your idea sounds great. I'd like to learn more. Any place with more on this subject you recommend I read?

[Kebsis]

ktesibios, how would the average Joe know that a government agency is jamming a radio signal? Wouldn't it just come out as static? Whereas on the net, if a website starts coming up 'Cannot access website...' many people would go to some other forum, make a post asking why soandso website is coming up blank, and eventually someone in the know would figure out what happened and spread the word.


Doodler, Metallica also allows recording of their concerts, ironically enough.

[Doodler]

Doodler, Metallica also allows recording of their concerts, ironically enough.

Understandable. While I've got much respect for their studio efforts, their live performances can leave you wondering exactly who it was in the studio...

[HenrikOlsen]

ktesibios, how would the average Joe know that a government agency is jamming a radio signal? Wouldn't it just come out as static? Whereas on the net, if a website starts coming up 'Cannot access website...' many people would go to some other forum, make a post asking why soandso website is coming up blank, and eventually someone in the know would figure out what happened and spread the word.
The problem is that it won't, it'll just show up very late, if ever, in searches and have really bad loading times so people give up on it before it's loaded.