DHS Opening Office In Silicon Valley To More Efficiently Complain To Tech Companies About Encryption

from the we-have-no-solutions-but-we-do-have-plenty-of-talking-points! dept

If only the endlessly-escalating West Coast cost of living could have prevented this:

Today I am pleased to announce that the Department of Homeland Security is also finalizing plans to open up a satellite office in Silicon Valley, to serve as another point of contact with our friends here. We want to strengthen critical relationships in Silicon Valley and ensure that the government and the private sector benefit from each other’s research and development.

That's Jeh Johnson addressing the crowd at the RSA Conference. Of all the news no one wanted to hear, this has to be close to the top of the list. Three-lettered government agencies are pretty much NIMBY as far as the tech world is concerned, especially after Snowden's revelations have seriously and swiftly eroded trust in the government.

No one wants a next-door neighbor who's going to constantly be dropping by for a cup of decryption.

The current course we are on, toward deeper and deeper encryption in response to the demands of the marketplace, is one that presents real challenges for those in law enforcement and national security.

Let me be clear: I understand the importance of what encryption brings to privacy. But, imagine the problems if, well after the advent of the telephone, the warrant authority of the government to investigate crime had extended only to the U.S. mail.

Our inability to access encrypted information poses public safety challenges. In fact, encryption is making it harder for your government to find criminal activity, and potential terrorist activity.

We in government know that a solution to this dilemma must take full account of the privacy rights and expectations of the American public, the state of the technology, and the cybersecurity of American businesses.

We need your help to find the solution.

"Let me be clear: I understand the importance of what doors bring to privacy. But, imagine the problems if, well after humanity moved out of caves, the warrant authority of the government to investigate crime had only extended to dwellings without doors."

Bullshit. The DHS, along with other law enforcement agencies -- is seeking is the path of least resistance. It can get warrants to search encrypted devices. It just may not be able to immediately crack them open and feast on the innards. It may also get court orders to compel decryption. This is far less assured and risks dragging the Fifth Amendment down to the Fourth's level, but it's still an option.

Then there's the option of subpoenaing third parties, like cloud storage services, to find the content that can't be accessed on the phone. So, it's not as though it's locked out forever. This may happen occasionally but it won't suddenly turn law enforcement into a wholly futile pursuit.

Silicon Valley isn't going to help the DHS "find a solution." There isn't one. The DHS may as well get some legislation going and force companies to provide a stupid "good guys only" backdoor because the tech world already knows you can't keep bad guys out with broken encryption. This should be painfully obvious and yet, the "good guy" agencies seem to think tech companies are just holding out on them.

From there, Johnson switches to his most disingenuous rhetorical device: the assertion that Americans are clamoring for an unrealistic level of safety.

I tell audiences that I can build you a perfectly safe city on a hill, but it will constitute a prison.

Who the fuck is asking you to do that? The only people pushing for "perfectly safe" are government agencies who like big budgets and increased power and the private companies that profit from this sort of fearmongering. Most Americans are far more pragmatic and they'd rather keep what's left of their privacy and civil liberties, even if it means the safety of the country is slightly less assured.

And this makes me want to vomit with contempt:

In the name of homeland security, we can build more walls, erect more screening devices, interrogate more people, and make everybody suspicious of each other, but we should not do this at the cost of who we are as a nation of people who cherish privacy and freedom to travel, celebrate our diversity, and who are not afraid.

THAT IS LITERALLY ALL YOU HAVE DONE SINCE 2001.

In the name of "homeland security," we have TSA agents groping people, breaking their luggage, humiliating people with medical issues and stealing personal belongings -- all without ever having prevented a single attempted hijacking or bombing. In the name of "national security," we have indulged every nosy do-gooder with numerous hotlines to report their neighbors' ownership of luggage or cameras or pressure cookers. In the name of the "war on terror," we have a 100-mile buffer zone around the nation's borders that nearly completely eliminates every Constitutional protection.

Jeh Johnson hasn't been in the position long, but he's already descended into inadvertent self-parody. This speech was apparently delivered with complete sincerity, which means Johnson has no idea how his agency is perceived. There are very few people who believe the DHS is some sort of civil liberties champion. Jeh Johnson is obviously one of them.

Filed Under: dhs, encryption, homeland security, jeh johnson, silicon valley

Silicon Valley Needs To Be More Willing To Talk Openly About Failures

from the needs-more-openness dept

There's a story in Business Insider that's been getting a lot of attention thanks to the click-baity headline of: The founder of a $50 million startup just sold his company — and he didn't make a dime by reporter Alyson Shontell. Almost everything about the headline is misleading. The company, Get Satisfaction, was once valued at $50 million, at its peak back in 2011. But from what I've heard, the final sale, to Sprinklr, that went down recently was for $8 million (and it's possible that not all of it was cash, making the valuation even more questionable). So, the whole $50 million bit is meaningless, because that's not what the company was worth. And, considering the company had raised at least $21 million (and possibly more), the fact that it eventually sold for less than half the money raised means that it shouldn't even be remotely surprising that the company's founder, who had been pushed out years earlier, got nothing out of the deal. This is how it works. The early shareholders/founders were diluted and pushed out, the company basically tanked and sold off in a firesale. It's no surprise that the early players got basically nothing -- it's how things are done.

What struck me as more interesting about this, however, was the fact that the founder who kicked off the story, Lane Becker, was actually willing to come out and say the truth: that it was a firesale designed to make people look good, rather than actually make anyone any real money. This is Silicon Valley's stupid secret that really should be discussed more openly. Lots of startups fail. It happens all the time. And Silicon Valley prides itself on supposedly being a lot more accepting of failure. You hear it all the time. But the reality is that we often try to hide failures behind fake success stories. High profile startups rarely just disappear -- they find someone to buy them for next to nothing so they can pretend to have successfully exited. The truth is, many of those companies were out of money and the "acquisition" was nothing more than an attempt to "create good optics" and pretend to the outside world that there was a successful conclusion to the startup.

If Silicon Valley were truly accepting of failure, it would be much more willing to openly discuss its failures. It happens, but it's rare. The one I remember most clearly is Chris "moot" Poole from about a year ago writing about the failure of his startup Canvas/DrawQuest:

I’m disappointed that I couldn’t produce a better outcome for those who supported me the most—my investors and employees. Few in business will know the pain of what it means to fail as a venture-backed CEO. Not only do you fail your employees, your customers, and yourself, but you also fail your investors—partners who helped you bring your idea to life.

In my case, I am extremely lucky and grateful to be partners with people who are simply the best. What separates the best investors is not how they help you when you’re a rocketship, but when your ship is on fire and you’re venting atmosphere. In this case, our investors have demonstrated what sets them apart from the rest—they’ve supported me throughout the ups and downs, and especially the downs.

There's a lot more to that post and it's well worth the read. It talks about the kind of things that lots of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs talk about privately, but almost never publicly. Yes, Silicon Valley is relatively accepting of failure. Compared to other industries and other areas, Silicon Valley is much more open to second (and third and fourth) chances for those who have failed -- but we're terrible about exploring why things fail and the impact of those failures. Being a part of a failing startup is no fun at all -- but the end of the story tends to be pretty typical: if it's not high profile, it just disappears. If it is high profile, it does what Get Satisfaction did here and finds a firesale option where people can pretend it was a success, thereby hiding the reality and keeping the important lessons from being learned more widely.

The interesting thing about Becker's statement was not -- as Business Insider assumed -- that a founder didn't get to cash out on a firesale of his former company. It was that Becker wasn't willing to play the usual game and pretend a failure was a success. Rather he was direct about how the company had flopped and how. And that's something that we need more of, rather than silly stories that try to make it look like something "unfair" or "wrong" happened. What happened is totally normal in Silicon Valley. It happens every week around here, and we should be more open to talking about companies that fail and why they fail -- not to revel in the schadenfreude, but to learn the lessons from those who ran into trouble along the way.

Filed Under: failures, fire sales, lane becker, silicon valley
Companies: get satisfaction

Officials Upset Tech Companies Reluctant To Play Along With Administration's 'Information Sharing' Charade

from the fooling-no-one dept

The government's on-again, off-again love affair with everything cyber is back on again. The CIA has just shifted its focus, abandoning its position as the free world's foremost franchiser of clandestine torture sites and rebranding as the agency of choice for all things cyberwar-related.

For years, legislators have been attempting to grant themselves permission to strong-arm tech companies into handing over all sorts of information to the government under the guise of cybersecurity. CISPA, CISA, etc. The acronyms come and go, but the focus is the same: information sharing.

Of course, the promise of equitable sharing remains pure bullshit. Tech companies know this and have been understandably resistant to the government's advances. There are few, if any positives, to these proposed "agreements." The government gets what it wants -- lots and lots of data -- and the companies get little more than red tape, additional restrictions and fleeing customers.

The government has recently been playing up the narrative that unreasonable tech companies are standing in the way of the nation's super-secure future.

U.S. government officials say privately they are frustrated that Silicon Valley technology firms are not obtaining U.S. security clearances for enough of their top executives, according to interviews with officials and executives in Washington and California. Those clearances would allow the government to talk freely with executives in a timely manner about intelligence they receive, hopefully helping to thwart the spread of a hack, or other security issues.

The lack of cooperation from Silicon Valley, Washington officials complain, injects friction into a process that everyone agrees is central to the fight to protect critical U.S. cyberinfrastructure: Real-time threat information sharing between government and the private sector.

Before dealing with the questionable promise of "real-time threat information sharing," let's deal with the supposedly minor requirement of security clearances. It's not as if this won't impose undue burdens on tech company leaders, especially when they already have a pretty good idea this stipulation will be a major hassle followed by continued opacity from a government that's 90% lip service and 10% outright lying. Tech execs are being asked to make all the effort and hope against hope there will actually be some benefits.

"I believe that this is more about the overclassification of information and the relatively low value that government cyberintel has for tech firms," said one Silicon Valley executive. "Clearances are a pain to get, despite what government people think. Filling out the paper work … is a nightmare, and the investigation takes a ridiculous amount of time."

[...]

"I think tech companies are doing a return-on-investment analysis and don't think the government intel is worth the cost or effort," said the Silicon Valley executive. "This is why government threat signature sharing initiatives are such a nothing-burger: The signatures are of limited value and only a few select companies with clearances can actually use them."

The clearance process can easily take over a year. The application runs 127 pages and asks a mixture of questions ranging from highly-intrusive to facially-ridiculous.

[This question seems to disqualify nearly every law enforcement officer in the United States.]

And that's just the start of the process. The rest of the vetting process takes several months, and there's no guarantee the executives the government wants to obtain clearance will actually be cleared to discuss classified information.

And even if these clearances are obtained, the benefits are unproven and suspected to be minimal. On the other hand, the downsides are enormous. As Marcy Wheeler points out, clearances may open up discussion channels with law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but they also create additional restrictions for those carrying these privileges -- the breach of which can result in severe consequences. In light of the inequitable "sharing" envisioned by many tech companies, the hassle just isn't worth it.

Because it’s not just that the security clearance application that is unwieldy. It’s that clearance comes with a gag order about certain issues, backed by the threat of prison...

Why would anyone sign up for that if the tech companies have more that the government wants than the government has that the tech companies need?

On top of this, there's the bottom line to consider. The information that may or may not flow back to tech companies won't do much to offset the perception that company executives are willingly buddying up with the US intelligence community. In the post-Snowden world, this could mean the loss of customers, future contracts and sensitive foreign markets.

The government has yet to offer anything Silicon Valley wants in exchange for additional burdens, greater secrecy and increased demands for customer data. The government is better at taking than it is at giving, and no amount of cyberterrorism hand-wringing is going to change that reality.

Filed Under: cybersecurity, information sharing, security clearance, silicon valley, tech industry, washington dc

YouTube Has Paid $1 Billion To Copyright Holders Via ContentID; What Happened To Stories About It Destroying Content?

from the curious... dept

Remember those days when YouTube was "killing" the entertainment industry. You don't even have to look back very far. There are artists who still insist that YouTube is killing creativity and is nothing but a den of piracy. Viacom spent years trying to argue that YouTube was the equivalent of Napster, but for video, until that lawsuit finally settled just a few months ago.

However, reality is looking pretty different these days. A couple months ago, Businessweek had a big cover story about how YouTube has become Hollywood's "hit factory", and just this week, YouTube revealed that its ContentID program, which allows copyright holders to monetize unauthorized uses of their works, had paid out over $1 billion since its inception. This isn't to say there aren't problems with ContentID. We've noted in the past the problems with false flagging, revenue diversion and other issues -- but the simple fact is that it appears to be making money for content creators. Actually, quite a lot of money.

And this brings us back to a key point that we've hit on over and over and over again: given a chance to operate, these business models tend to come about without the need to pass draconian copyright laws and without the need to completely takedown and destroy businesses. When allowed to thrive, innovate and experiment, it's only natural that workable business models develop. We've seen it over and over again in the industry. The recording industry insisted radio was going to kill the entire industry -- and then it made the industry into a massive juggernaut. The movie industry insisted that the VCR would be its "Boston Strangler," but four years later home video outpaced the box office in generating revenue for the studios.

The continuous claims of "Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley" on copyright issues is so clearly bogus. As we've argued for years, it's the innovations of the tech industry that keep saving the entertainment industry over and over and over again. There's no "war" between the two when it appears that Silicon Valley is the one supplying the "weapons" that's making Hollywood very, very wealthy.

But when will those folks in Hollywood learn this? Instead, they keep attacking these new services, demanding more copyright "enforcement" and blocking these forms of innovation. Who knows what other innovations might have occurred had the industry not shut down Veoh. Or Grokster. Before the US government completely shut down Megaupload, it was experimenting with new revenue models were attracting the interest of lots of famous musicians. Imagine if that had been allowed to continue. Who knows what other kinds of cool business models would be in place today making more money for artists.

Attacking innovation seems to be the legacy entertainment industry's default position, no matter how many times that innovation actually opens up new markets, provides new revenue streams and makes pretty much everyone better off. Oh, except some of the gatekeepers. Those guys tend not to be able to keep quite as much of the revenue generated by these new platforms. And maybe, just maybe, that's the real reason they're so angry about innovation.

Filed Under: business models, contentid, copyright, culture, experiments, hollywood, innovation, silicon valley, youtube
Companies: google, youtube

Over 100 Internet Companies Call On FCC To Protect The Open Internet

from the don't-fail-us-fcc dept

As the net neutrality debate has kicked into overdrive, over 100 internet companies -- including most of the big names such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Ebay, Reddit, Automattic, Yahoo, Kickstarter, as well as many smaller names, such as us here at Floor64/Techdirt -- have all signed onto a letter to the FCC asking it to actually suck it up and protect the open internet. Consider this a warning shot to the FCC from the internet community. The community knows what's at stake in this fight and it's watching closely what the FCC does. Having helped to get some of the companies to sign on, I can say that many leaders at companies are both very informed on the topic, and very engaged about it. If the FCC thinks it can sneak one by the tech community, that may be more difficult than it expects.

Along those lines, one FCC commissioner, Jessica Rosenworcel, has suggested that the FCC should put the brakes on its net neutrality plans to think things through a bit more carefully -- though apparently FCC boss Tom Wheeler has rejected that idea and plans to move forward with his rule-making proposal next week.

Filed Under: broadband, fcc, jessica rosenworcel, net neutrality, open internet, silicon valley, tech industry, tom wheeler
Companies: amazon, automattic, ebay, facebook, floor64, google, kickstarter, microsoft, netflix, reddit, twitter, yahoo

Chamber Of Commerce, Main Lobbyists Behind SOPA, Suddenly Wooing Silicon Valley

from the good-luck-with-that dept

The US Chamber of Commerce doesn't have a particularly good reputation among innovators for a very good reason. It's the epitome of protecting legacy players from innovation, using backroom lobbying and dealmaking, and representing the interests of the highest bidder. While it trades off its name -- and the fact that some people think it's actually a part of the US government, rather than an extremist lobbying group -- its positions are generally considered problematic to actual innovators that are driving the "commerce" of tomorrow. The US Chamber was the main outside lobbying group (beyond the MPAA) that was behind SOPA and PIPA, and was a major voice pushing completely ridiculously bogus "facts" about the evils of "IP theft" and "rogue sites."

While some big tech companies were members, the relationships have frayed over the past few years. Apple dumped the Chamber over its anti-science position on climate change. Yahoo dumped its membership because of the US Chamber's position on SOPA and PIPA. While some other big players, including Google have made noises about dropping out, they haven't yet done so. But, smaller startups and innovators know the Chamber's reputation, and are staying away for good reason.

Perhaps realizing that relying on Hollywood to keep paying for lobbying powers going forward isn't the best idea, the Chamber has apparently decided to start wooing Silicon Valley, opening an office here and sending one of its top execs to try to convince entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that they need to join the Chamber. As the WSJ article notes, this is a long shot at best. The US Chamber of Commerce's position on a whole lot of things is antithetical to nearly everything entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley stand for. The USCoC is about using politics to kill off competition and let a few top businesses collect more of the pie. Silicon Valley is about trying to innovate and expand the pie, even if there's lots of competition.

And, really, just the fact that the Chamber of Commerce still runs its laughably bogus propagandist Global IP Center, which does nothing but push for greater and greater intellectual property maximalism, shows how out of touch it is with the innovation community. I'm sure they realize that they backed the wrong horse on SOPA, but it's not like everyone in Silicon Valley is going to be fooled by their name.

Filed Under: copyright, crony capitalism, lobbying, politics, silicon valley, sopa, tech
Companies: us chamber of commerce

Apple, Google, Adobe And Intel Have To Face The Music Over Collusive Hiring Practices

from the good dept

It's been nearly five years since we wrote about a DOJ investigation into collusive activity between a number of technology giants, in which the companies basically agreed not to poach employees from one another in an effort to keep salaries and employee turnover down. As the details have come out over the years, they've looked worse and worse, with Steve Jobs acting as sort of a ring leader -- or really more of a mob boss -- threatening retaliation (via patent infringement lawsuits) against companies that didn't obey the "rules." It's one thing to want to be careful about hiring practices to avoid angering a partner, but it's quite another to set up an official agreed-upon policy between a bunch of companies not to go after certain employees.

While some companies have already settled (and a few others likely involved in the agreements have so far escaped lawsuits), Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel have been trying to get a class action lawsuit built off of the DOJ's efforts thrown out. That effort failed on Friday, meaning that it's likely that these four remaining companies will try to work out a settlement, rather than go through a full trial.

As we've discussed for years, part of what actually made Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is the ease with which employees could switch jobs, often between competitors. Multiple studies have made it clear that greater job switching within an innovative industry is actually much better for that entire industry. With job shifting comes important cross-fertilization of ideas, allowing the bigger breakthroughs to happen faster, opening up new opportunities. Without that kind of job shifting, knowledge gets stuffed into silos, and overall innovation gets held back and stymied. In fact, if you look at the success of basically all four of the companies in this lawsuit, you can point to evidence of how the easy shifting of jobs was a key part of important breakthroughs that created tremendous opportunities and innovations (hell, two of the three members of Intel's founding team were once part of the traitorous eight, who left Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild Semiconductor -- only to go on to form Intel, AMD and a bunch of others). Job hopping, poaching employees and the like often get a bad reputation, but the research is pretty clear that it was a key factor (according to some, the key factor) in allowing Silicon Valley to become a hub of innovation.

Hopefully, the end result of the DOJ efforts and these class action lawsuits is to maintain an innovation economy where job hopping and information sharing is empowered, rather than hindered.

Filed Under: anti-poaching agreements, collusion, hiring, innovation, silicon valley, steve jobs, technology
Companies: adobe, apple, google, intel

Bogus Comparison Between Detroit In 1990 And Silicon Valley In 2012

from the apples-and-tomatoes dept

I've seen a few folks discussing a slide that was apparently part of a SXSW presentation, comparing Detroit in 1990 vs. Silicon Valley in 2012, with the crux of the argument being that while Silicon Valley has created plenty of value, it hasn't created jobs like Detroit did. Here's one version I saw from WSJ columnist Geoffrey Fowler:

Silicon Valley has created a lot of value, but not very many jobs. Compare the "big 3" in Detroit vs SV #SXSW pic.twitter.com/XMNx9zX3yU

— Geoffrey Fowler (@geoffreyfowler) March 8, 2014

This false comparison has led some to suggest that somehow Detroit in 1990 was better for the economy than Silicon Valley in 2012. But knowing a fair bit about both industries, that's an absurd and misleading comparison on multiple levels. First off, the employees: not all "job creation" comes directly from the big companies at the center of an industry. And, yes, there was a large ecosystem around the "big three" in Detroit that employed many other people, but the "multiplier effect" of jobs created by the internet by 2012, as compared to jobs created thanks to Detroit by 1990 is quite different. Part of the wonders of the internet is that it has enabled all sorts of new kinds of jobs, companies and careers that wouldn't have been possible before. If you summed up the entirety of direct and indirect job creation from the two industries, I'd bet a strong likelihood that the internet has had a much greater impact.

Not only that, but the type and quality of the jobs created by Silicon Valley today are likely to be much better than the grunt factory work that dominated Detroit. The internet has given more people control over their own jobs and careers, as opposed to becoming just a cog in the automaking machine, that left few options for employees in that industry. Furthermore, by 1990, Detroit was already in decline, its heyday having come decades earlier. By 1990, Detroit had been seriously eroded by competition from abroad (largely Japanese, but also from Germany and elsewhere), and we were talking about giant companies that were slow to react and change, and whose large employee bases were actually a lot more of a liability in innovating and keeping up with the times.

We've discussed in the past the paradox of job creation, highlighting that innovative companies often look like they're "destroying" jobs, because they take down lumbering, slow, legacy industries that have failed to innovate, but that employ tons of people in inefficient and often unnecessary jobs. Upfront, that looks like a job loss, but the innovation often creates new opportunities, new efficiencies and different (and frequently) better job options. There are some very real concerns for those who are not able or qualified to make the shift from one to the other -- and that's something that needs to be addressed. But to simply compare these two cases as if they were apples and oranges is horribly misguided.

Filed Under: detroit, innovation, jobs, silicon valley

Leading VC: NSA's Activities Are 'Corroding Silicon Valley'

from the a-question-of-trust dept

Techdirt has already run a couple of stories about the longer-term damage the recently-revealed activities of the NSA are likely to have on the US computer industry. Bloomberg is reporting on how the growing distrust of US services is taking a new form:

Some companies are apparently so concerned about the NSA snooping on their data that they're requiring -- in writing -- that their technology suppliers store their data outside the U.S.

In Canada, a pharmaceutical company and government agency have now both added language to that effect to their contracts with suppliers, as did a grocery chain in the U.K., according to J.J. Thompson, chief executive officer of Rook Consulting, an Indianapolis, Indiana-based security-consulting firm. He declined to name the companies, which are using Rook to manage the segmentation and keep the data out of the U.S.

Significantly, that was before Der Spiegel detailed the incredible range of backdoors and vulnerabilities that the NSA is able to exploit in key software and hardware. As well as being terrible news for our privacy and freedom, this is likely to have huge knock-on consequences for the US computer and communications industries. Even though many of the companies named in the Der Spiegel piece have been quick to deny that they had any knowledge of the backdoors, their products are now inevitably tainted by the suspicion that they are compromised, and therefore cannot be trusted.

Some worry that the damage runs even deeper than a few tarnished brands. For example, the well-respected investor Michael Dearing has written an excellent post expressing his fears that:

the NSA's version of patriotism is corroding Silicon Valley. Integrity of our products, creative freedom of talented people, and trust with our users are the casualties. The dolphin in the tuna net is us -- our industry, our work, and the social fabric of our community.

As he explains:

Billions of people let Silicon Valley into their daily lives and they hug it close. They trust our products to find information, to get work done, to talk to each other, to buy and sell stuff, and to have fun. That trust is a decades-old endowment built up by inventor-founders from Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore through to the present day. The magic of compound growth works in our favor when trust is accumulating. But now we are making trust withdrawals every day as people around the world learn how the NSA has woven surveillance, search, and seizure into and around our products. This is the painful flip side of compound growth: the trust withdrawals compound too.

Silicon Valley's promise to people is simple and compelling: "We'll build a bunch of things. Try our work; keep what you love, dump what you don't love. We'll learn from it and build on the stuff that you like best." Sadly, the NSA undermines the promise at its foundation.

What that means is that the true cost of the NSA's reckless and illegal attempts to "collect it all" and "get the ungettable" may turn out to be not "just" tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in lost business, but the far more serious loss of trust in Silicon Valley itself.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: economic damage, michael dearing, nsa, silicon valley, surveillance, tech industry

Hollywood Studio Bosses Ask Obama To Help Improve Relationship With Silicon Valley... While Pressing TPP That Will Harm Silicon Valley

from the yeah,-so-that-first-bit... dept

Just before Thanksgiving, it appears that President Obama got to spend some time with the heads of the various major film studios, during which they made two key requests:

1. Help them improve their relationship with the tech industry.
2. Push forward with the various maximalist copyright proposals found in the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) agreement.

Apparently, these studio bosses don't realize that point number two is a big part of the reason why they're having trouble with point number one. Of course, the reality is they don't want "better relationships" with Silicon Valley, they want Silicon Valley to do exactly what they want, which is to try to kill off or block innovations that challenge their legacy business models, even if they provide better services to artists and the public alike. Furthermore, pushing bogus concepts like the maximalist copyright rules that the US has been seeking in the TPP agreement -- basically as a way to backdoor in much of their legal agenda -- is hardly the way to get Silicon Valley to be more friendly with Hollywood. It's just their way of trying to screw over the very industry that keeps providing them with the innovations that they need to adapt and to provide better services to consumers.

Filed Under: barack obama, copyright, hollywood, silicon valley, tpp