No fool

Congressional Budget Office, January 26, 2009:

In combining the spending and revenue effects of H.R. 1, CBO estimates that enacting the bill would increase federal budget deficits by $169 billion over the remaining months of fiscal year 2009, by $356 billion in 2010, by $174 billion in 2011, and by $816 billion over the 2009-2019 period.

CNN, April 15, 2008:

Last year Sen. Barack Obama, submitted a laundry list of federal funding requests, known as earmarks, to the Senate Appropriations Committee: 112 earmarks totaling more than $330 million in taxpayer funds.

But that was last year.

This year, as the Senate funding request deadline approaches and the final primaries of the Democratic nomination process draw near, Obama's staff told CNN the junior senator from Illinois will request no earmarks for fiscal year 2009.

The dramatic change is in line with a statement Obama issued last month in connection with an amendment calling for a one-year moratorium on earmarks in the Senate.

The amendment, sponsored by federal earmark foe Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, was shot down by a vote of 79-21.

"We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress' seniority, rather than the merit of the project," Obama's statement said.

"The entire earmark process needs to be re-examined and reformed. For that reason, I will be supporting Sen. DeMint's amendment and will not be requesting earmarks this year for Illinois," the statement added.

MSNBC, January 6, 2009:

On his second day in Washington, President-elect Obama met with his budget team and promised no earmarks will be in the stimulus plan.

"We are going to ban all earmarks -- the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review," he explained. "We will create an economic recovery oversight board made up of key administration officials and independent advisors to identify problems early and make sure we are doing all we can to solve it."

Video: President-elect Barack Obama tells reporters that the massive economic stimulus bill he wants Congress to pass will set a "new higher standard of accountability, transparency, and oversight."

When asked to clarify if some projects could be put in after they are reviewed, Obama drew a harder line.

"We will ban all earmarks in the recovery package," he said. "And I describe earmarks as the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review. So what I'm saying is, we're not having earmarks in the recovery package, period."

MSNBC, February 5, 2009:

In stimulus bills, earmarks by any other name
By Michael Grabell and Christopher Weaver

Lumped together, the House and Senate versions of the economic stimulus plan number some 1,400 pages, roughly the equivalent of the complete works of Shakespeare.

And some of the language is just as artfully crafted.

The package includes an insurance exemption — but only for companies that work on recreational boats longer than 65 feet. Another provision would lift a Medicare regulation affecting only three long-term care hospitals in the country. There’s also language requiring the Transportation Security Administration to buy 100,000 uniforms from U.S. apparel makers.

In theory and publicity, the package is “earmark free.” But it contains dozens of narrowly defined programs that send money to specific areas or cater to special interests, despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to pass “an economic recovery plan that is free from earmarks and pet projects.”

Some — like the yacht workers’ exemption — would take little or nothing from taxpayer pockets. Others, like $3 billion in extra transit money added by the House, are handing ammo to critics who say the stimulus plan, now at about $900 billion in the Senate, has morphed into a Christmas list.

As part of the ShovelWatch project with WNYC radio in New York, ProPublica plumbed the depths of the stimulus bills looking to see how closely Congress is coming to Obama’s stated goal.

What is an ‘earmark’?
In part, the answer hinges on the definition of an “earmark.” Democrats insist they are nowhere in the plan; Republicans see “pork” everywhere. So we cribbed from criteria Congress laid out in a 2007 reform bill: language that aims spending at specific programs, states or localities, often at a member’s request.

Specific location? The Senate stimulus contains $50 million for habitat restoration and other water needs in the San Francisco Bay Area. There is another $62 million for military projects in Guam.

Specific industry? The House bill includes an amendment authored by Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley setting aside $500 million for biofuel makers, which he says, would bring jobs home to Iowa.

Specific program? There’s $198 million to compensate Filipino World War II veterans for their service. Most don’t live in the United States.

In a speech about the stimulus last month, Obama acknowledged that there often are valid arguments for earmarks. At the same time, he called for restraint.

“Many of these projects are worthy and benefit local communities,” he said. “But this emergency legislation must not be the vehicle for those aspirations. This must be a time when leaders in both parties put the urgent needs of our nation above our own narrow interests.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

DTV pandering hits telecom operators

The House voted Wednesday to support President Obama’s plan to delay the end of over-the-air NTSC broadcasts to June 12. Despite all the public announcements we have been hearing from a year ago through this week, the DTV changeover will not happen on February 17.

The delay will prevent Qualcomm from rolling out is MediaFlo mobile phone TV service for another three months. Efforts to exempt four key markets were ignored. Two of the markets Qualcomm asked to exempt were Boston and San Francisco: if these markets are not tech savvy and educated enough to understand that DTV is coming, who is — or ever will be?

Verizon will also be impacted in their use of the 700 MHz spectrum, which they planned to use for their LTE rollout. Congress did not vote to refund a portion of the billions paid in the auction for the spectrum. The three most affected companies — Qualcomm, Verizon and AT&T — paid a total of $16.6 billion in the 700 MHz auctions.

This is bad policy on so many levels. Besides pulling the rug out from under businesses that made these multi-billion dollar investments, there is no evidence that the delay will have any significant impact on the supposed 6 million households that are not ready. If they are watching TV, they have seen the ads, and another 4 months of ads are not going to change that. Last month, the leading House opponent said it best:

“I guarantee you, no matter when you set the date — Feb. 17, June 12, July the Fourth, Valentine's Day — there are going to be some people that aren't ready,” said Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas).

A majority of Congress seems to think otherwise. Of course, this is the same Congress that sold the spectrum, mandated (and previously delayed) the switchover and decided how much funding to provide for converter boxes. Perhaps if an independent commission will at long last consider Congressional culpability for the financial meltdown, perhaps they could move on to the DTV debacle after that.

Obama poster: AP, IP, and FU

The late night news had a hilariously ironic story about the money artist Shepard Fairey made off of the most famous poster for Sen. Obama’s. The Associated Press is suing the artist asking for a piece of the action.

As the AP reports on AP’s dispute:

"The Associated Press has determined that the photograph used in the poster is an AP photo and that its use required permission," the AP's director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement. "AP safeguards its assets and looks at these events on a case-by-case basis. We have reached out to Mr. Fairey's attorney and are in discussions. We hope for an amicable solution."

"We believe fair use protects Shepard's right to do what he did here," says Fairey's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a lecturer at the Stanford Law School. "It wouldn't be appropriate to comment beyond that at this time because we are in discussions about this with the AP."

This story works on so many levels. There are no clean hands, and is much like Captain Renault saying he is “shocked, shocked” to discover gambling in Morocco.

AP is the same AP that has spent the last five years taking text and image content from its dying newspaper members — who spend most of the money in the US to gather it — and then providing it to the same companies (i.e. Google and Yahoo) that are putting newspapers out of business.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the artist, Fairey used laziness (rather than scholarly or artistic license) for using the photo without rights.

…the idea of hijacking things was almost part of the concept rather than it being looked at as appropriation or plagiarism. It's like, "F*** you if you don't like that I'm using this, 'cause I'm using it anyway. I have no money and no power so you can't get anything from me anyway." …

Aspects of that have remained with me. When I did my Obama image, I just found my image from an AP news photo on Google and illustrated from that. There was no time to get Obama to do a sitting or license a photograph. I felt I needed to get the image done and out there right away. So part of that is still with me.

Finally, this seems to be encouraging rather than discouraging even sillier IP ideas. According to the LA Times, the administration is trying to control all rights to the president's image

The Ticket also reported the other day that White House lawyers are exploring ways of protecting the copyright of the new president's image like this. And we said good luck with that around the Obama-loving world.

This is coming from the administration that talked about openness and reportedly is interested in an open source mandate.

Besides the PR problem of such a ham-handed effort, there is also the issue of legal feasibility. While I defer to real lawyers, I suspect this image control strategy is doomed to fail: it was tried by our Governator here and only achieved minor success.

Photo credit: AP photo and Fairley poster used under a claim of fair use; the latter was redistributed by AP without prior license (presumably under a claim of fair use).

Mobile app BTE

Ofir Leitner writes the knowledgeable (if opinionated) blog “NextGenMoco.” Since I first saw it (through his self-promotion to the Mobile Monday mailing list) a year ago, I’ve found some interesting tidbits that intersect the technology and business of mobile phone application development. An example of this is a post a year ago on the carrier-by-carrier hoops that am app developer must jump through to deploy a J2ME app in the US.

His latest posting is “Top 8 rules for mobile entrepreneurs & application developers.” Fortunately he doesn’t take himself too seriously in that the last rule is “Don't listen to rules”:

Mobile is a new space and there's still a lot of practices we haven't found. Some of the things that look like Axioms today, might change along the way and open new opportunities. Perhaps you'll be the one to discover them when not following any rules.

Among his other advice, I found solid his first two points about dealing with carriers and how they price data plans. However, as a game developer he is strongly J2ME-centric, which means his platform advice is less applicable to developers targeting smartphones (whether Symbian S60 in Europe or iPhone in the US).

Yet another Google book (video)

In the best traditions of pack business journalism, there is a flurry of books about the Monster of Mountain View and its inexorable march to Total World Domination. There are four books out already, and at least 2 (perhaps 4) more books are coming out in the next 18 months, peddled to a business book audience today more interested in financial instability than tech growth companies.

The first wave of books came in 2005, with The Search and The Google Story. Leading the next wave was my coworker Randy Stross, with last fall’s Planet Google. Published last week is the latest book, What Would Google Do? in hardback, large print, Kindle and audiobook editions.

The latest book is by Jeff Jarvis, a blogger, Guardian columnist, and full-time journalism professor — also the founder of Entertainment Weekly and former TV critic for TV Guide and People. So if Stross is coming at Google as a veteran analyst of the tech industry (with books on NeXT, Microsoft and venture capital), Jarvis comes from the perspective of a veteran media critic.

This morning, the WSJ, PaidContent and Jarvis himself talked about a new version of the Jarvis book: a 23-minute video lecture. The video, available from Amazon (but not iTunes), is being sold for $10 (although Jarvis has a free sample). As the articles note, it’s an interesting experiment for publishers trying to gain marginal reviews.

However, I don’t get the pricing. Hour-long TV episode are being sold for $5 on iTunes ($6 on Amazon), while Amazon downloads of a two-hour theatrical release (with a $20 million production budget) runs $15.

I also don’t get the market: we tell all our business model students that they need to definite not only how they create value but also for whom they are supposed to create value. About the only audience I can see is professors who want a guest lecturer on Google, and I’m not clear if the $10 includes performance rights to show to a classroom. (Ignoring whether showing in a classroom fits under fair use of scholarship).

Also, instead of paying $10 to watch Prof. Jarvis give a 23 minutetalk from his book, you can watch Prof. Stross do a one-hour talk and Q&A from his book for free. In the case of Prof. Stross, it was not part of some master strategy to maximize publishing revenues, but a last minute decision by a couple of us here at SJSU (with his consent) to tape what we thought would be a talk that would enjoy a wide following.