American Broadcasting Companies v. Aereo

The Internet is abuzz with discussion in the wake of today’s ruling in American Broadcasting Companies v. Aereo, but I can’t let it go by without offering my own opinion. As a “cord cutter” who lives an hour away from most of the over-the-air broadcasters, I have a personal interest in an Aereo-like service. I’d much rather pay $8/month to receive local television broadcasts over the Internet than to pay to install and maintain an aerial antenna. So it was with much dismay (but little surprise) that I read that the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against Aereo.

I won’t presume to say that I know the law better than six justices of the nation’s highest court. Indeed, I’m not convinced that the ruling is incorrect from a legal standpoint. It’s certainly true, as the majority held, that Congress acted in 1976 to prevent the retransmission of broadcasts by community antenna TV (CATV) systems. Aereo, according to the majority, is similar to the old CATV systems. The fact that the underlying technology is substantially different from CATV (particularly in that there’s a 1:1 correspondence between receiver and customer as opposed to the one-to-many of CATV) is irrelevant, only the customer-facing experience matters.

As Justice Scalia noted in his dissent, that’s a lousy argument. I’ll grant that Aereo was slavishly devoted to the strict letter of the law (a less generous description is “exploiting the hell out of loopholes”), but the technical implementation matters. Aereo subscribers have their own antenna (ephemerally-assigned, as I understand it) and their recordings are stored in their own account. It’s not much of a leap (except in the cost) to provide an antenna and run a coaxial cable directly from the antenna to the customer’s television. At that point, it would be very difficult to argue that the service provider is “performing”, even by the ludicrously broad definition in the 1976 update to the Copyright Act.

Even if the Court’s ruling today is technically correct for this specific case, I worry about the impact it will have on technological advances in general. While the majority took care to say that “those who act as owners or possessors of the relevant product”, you have to imagine that some enterprising entertainment lawyer is looking to step up the attack on services like Slingbox. Just as rulings against Napster, Grokster, and others have failed to end file sharing, consumers will still be able to find content they want online. It’s just a matter of whether or not the creators and distributors get paid for it. The content industry has shown to be remarkably out of tune with the consumer, and the Aereo ruling only delays the inevitable.

Of course, Aereo isn’t exactly being forced to shutter. They can stay in business by paying retransmission fees to the broadcasters (assuming such an option is economically viable for them). This is probably the outcome that would make the broadcasters happiest. The real money these days is in retransmission fees, not advertising, so broadening the viewer base without broadening the pool of people paying for content they’re entitled to (by virtue of living within the broadcast range of the station) isn’t nearly as lucrative. Alternately, if Aereo provided a specific antenna to each user (such that the user owned the antenna and Aereo just housed it), that might be sufficient to meet the conditions established in today’s ruling.

It’s unlikely that Aereo will do anything but shut down. Aereo’s CEO has said “there is no plan B”. While the Court’s ruling today may have been correct, it is wrong.

Is storm chasing unethical?

Eric Holthaus wrote an article for Slate arguing that storm chasing has become unethical. This article has drawn a lot of response from the meteorological community, and not all of the dialogue has been productive. Holthaus makes some good points, but he’s wrong in a few places, too. His biggest sin is painting with too wide a brush.

At the root of the issue is Mark Farnik posting a picture of a mortally wounded five-year-old girl. The girl was injured in a tornado that struck Pilger, Nebraska and succumbed to the injuries a short time later. To be perfectly clear, I have no problem with Farnik posting the picture, nor do I have a problem with him “profiting” off it. Photojournalism is not always pleasant, but it’s an important job. To suggest that such pictures can’t be shared or even taken is to do us a disservice. 19 years on, the picture of a firefighter holding Baylee Almon remains the single most iconic image from the Oklahoma City bombing.

None of this would have come up had Farnik not posted the following to Facebook: “I need some highly photogenic and destructive tornadoes to make it rain for me financially.” That’s a pretty awful statement. While I enjoy tornado video as much as anyone, I prefer them to occur over open fields. Nobody I know ever wishes for destruction, and I’d be loath to associate with anyone who did. This one sentence served as an entry point to condemn an entire hobby.

Let’s look at Holthaus’ points individually:

  1. Storm chasers are not saving lives. Some chasers make a point to report weather phenomena to the local NWS office immediately. Some chasers do not. Some will stop to render assistance when they come across damage and injuries. Some will not. In both cases, my own preference is for the former. Patrick Marsh, the Internet’s resident weather data expert, found no evidence that an increase in chasers has had any effect on the tornado fatalities. In any case, not saving lives is hardly a condemnation of an activity. Golf is not an inherently life-saving avocation, but I don’t see anyone arguing that it’s unethical.
  2. Chasing with the intent to profit… adds to the perverse incentive for more and more risky behavior. Some people act stupidly when money or five minutes of Internet fame are on the line. This is hardly unique to storm chasing. Those chasers who put themselves or others in danger are acting stupidly. The smart ones place a premium on safety. What’s more, the glee that chasers often express in viral videos is disrespectful to people who live there and may be adversely affected by the storm. Also true. The best videos are shot from a tripod and feature quiet chasers.
  3. A recent nationwide upgrade to the National Weather Service’s Doppler radar network has probably rendered storm chasers obsolete anyway. Bull. Dual-polarization radar does greatly aid the radar detection of debris, but ground truth is still critical. Radar cannot determine if a wall cloud is rotating. It cannot determine if a funnel cloud is forming. It cannot observe debris that does not exist (e.g. if a tornado is over a field). If you wait for a debris signature on radar, you’ve already lost. In a post to the wx-chase mailing list, NWS meteorologist Tanja Fransen made it very clear that spotters are not obsolete. To be clear, spotters and chasers are not the same thing, even if some people (yours truly, for example) engage in both activities.

The issue here is that in the age of social media, it’s easier for the bad eggs to stand out. It’s easy to find chasers behaving stupidly, sometimes they even get their own cable shows. The well-behaved chasers, by their very nature, tend to not be noticed. Eric Holthaus is welcome to not chase anymore, that’s his choice. I haven’t chased in several years, but that’s more due to family obligations than anything else. I have, and will continue to, chase with the safety of myself and others as the top priority.

Mario Marathon 7 begins today

Can you believe it’s been a year already? The Mario Marathon returns at 11 AM Eastern, once again raising money for Child’s Play Charity. The previous six Mario Marathons (plus a Zelda Marathon) have raised over $400,000 from donors around the globe. This weekend is your chance to support a worthy cause. You can donate through the widget on your right or directly at www.mariomarathon.com. I hope to see you around. I’ll be on the stream from 6 PM Sunday until 6 AM Monday.

Getting good reports from users

Earlier this week, Rob Soden asked an excellent question on Twitter: how do you train your non-technical co-workers to file useful/actionable bug reports? Is it possible?

It is, but this question doesn’t just apply to developers. Operations people need useful incident reports from users as well. Users generally don’t provide unhelpful reports maliciously.. In my experience, reports are often the least useful when users are trying to be the most helpful. A healthy relationship between a customer and a service provider means that everyone is working together. Users often don’t know what information is helpful, they just want to go about their work.

A useful report contains the following:

  • What happened and what the desired result is
  • What the user was doing when it happened
  • Any changes that may have happened
  • If the product/service ever worked and if so, when it last worked
  • If the problem is reproducible and if so, what steps are required to reproduce it

A useful report does not contain speculation about what the solution is. But what, Rob asked, if the lesson doesn’t stick? It gets annoying having to ask over and over again. As with any repetitive task, the answer here is to automate it. One option is to have a canned response at the ready. This way, you polish the text once and you never have to worry about irritation creeping in. A better solution is to have a website that explicitly asks for the information you need. This saves a round of back-and-forth and hopefully increases the time to resolution.

The most important part is to modify the process as you learn. Tweak the questions to make it easier on the users. Provide multiple-choice or other defined-response choices when you can to reduce ambiguity. No good process is ever in a final state.

Introducing redacted horoscopes

On Sunday,  I was sitting down with the newspaper. The crossword puzzle was proving to be more of a challenge than I particularly cared to tackle. My eyes wandered to the horoscopes. I started redacting words and realized that they became funny. Channeling my inner Yossarian, I ran my pen through the rest.

The horoscopes were short enough to tweet, so I did. They got a good reception, and I decided this should be A Thing [tm]. Thus, a new Twitter account (@RedactedHoros) and finally some content in the fun & games section. Redacted Horoscopes
will update most Sundays and also on the occasional weekday.

If you never test it, it doesn’t exist

Did you hear the one about the Texas couple who spent seven years paying for an alarm system that never worked? It’s easy to blame the vendor (especially since it’s Comcast) since 1) the system was not correctly installed and 2) when the homeowner noticed, the customer support agent said the system hadn’t reported in since 2007. Certainly Comcast shoulders a lot of the blame. After some pressure, they agreed to refund the full seven years worth of payments. However, the Leeson family is responsible as well. In seven years of paying for an alarm system, they apparently never tested it themselves.

A service that is never tested does not exist. If you don’t test it when you don’t need it, you can’t count on it being available when you do. It’s why emergency managers test outdoor warning sirens. It’s why hospitals test their generators. It’s why sysadmins test their backups. So here’s my challenge to you, dear reader: think about systems you rely on and test them — before you need them.

A new item on the weather humor page

The weather humor page hasn’t seen much love in a long time. It’s not that the weather stopped being funny (although this past winter stopped being funny in mid-January), I just haven’t added to it. Fortunately, my friend Scott noticed that the forecast office in Hastings, NE seems to have resumed its bad habit of canceling things it ought not cancel. Sure, it’s silly to pick on a poorly-worded product issued in the middle of a severe weather event, but silly is what I do.