While I enjoy reading The New Yorker when I get the chance, it's rare they cover an issue that I'm deeply familiar with. So it's great to see James Surowiecki jump into the pool with an article about the problems with the US's view towards skilled immigration. It's an issue we've been covering for years, and I still can't figure out why people are against opening our shores to skilled immigrants. It often seems like the arguments against it are a mix of just under the surface racism with a healthy dose of ignorance about economics. Skilled immigrants help expand the pie, creating new companies and new jobs, rather than taking away from the market, as some falsely assume.

The Surowiecki piece is a good one in debunking many of those arguments and highlighting why we really need reform to let in skilled immigrants -- because as we keep turning them away, plenty of other countries have been welcoming them with open arms, meaning that they'll be building businesses that compete with domestic companies, rather than building companies in the US. And, even worse, a large number of those that we're turning away are people who were schooled here. So we're building our own competitors -- who want to stay here and help our economy -- and then sending them elsewhere to compete with us. How does that make any sense at all?

Of course, with unemployment here above eight per cent, too little immigration may not seem like a bad thing: surely we need more jobs, not more workers? But this is a shortsighted view. Economies are not static, with a limited set of resources to go around. As the work of the economist Paul Romer has shown, economies grow faster when there is more innovation, and having more smart people in the workforce is a key driver of innovation. And the quickest, cheapest way to get more smart people is to make it easy for them to move here. What’s more, historically there has been a clear connection between immigration in the U.S. and entrepreneurship, with immigrants creating companies (and jobs) at a disproportionate rate. In one famous study, the social scientist AnnaLee Saxenian showed that Chinese and Indian immigrants alone founded a quarter of Silicon Valley start-ups between 1980 and 1998, while a 2007 study found that a quarter of all technology and engineering start-ups between 1995 and 2005 were founded by immigrants. On a larger scale, more than forty per cent of the companies in the 2010 Fortune 500 were started by immigrants or their children.

Of course, the piece also explains why various bills to fix this (even with bipartisan support) don't seem to be moving: "there is no urgency in Washington on the issue, and voter anxiety about the weak economy and the scarcity of jobs gives politicians an excuse for inaction." Basically, some fear mongering among those who don't like "foreigners" during an election season is holding back good and useful policy, much to our own detriment.

Neil Armstrong's recent passing has reminded lots of folks about the first manned mission to the moon. The whole idea that "we could put a man on the moon" seemed incredible in the 1960's, and the feat is still remarkably difficult -- even if kids today can't fully appreciate the accomplishment. Maybe someday, we'll go back to the moon (and this XKCD will have to be adjusted), but in the meantime, here are just a few links about that historic first moonwalk.

• Neil Armstrong's first words as he stepped on the moon were slightly misheard by everyone on Earth, and audio analysis of the recordings suggests that Armstrong didn't just mis-speak. "That's one small step for *A* man, one giant leap for mankind." [url]
• In 2006, NASA realized that it had lost its original Apollo 11 moon landing videos, but fortunately, archived footage of the moonwalk was found in Australia in 2010. The tapes were restored and digitized -- and hopefully we won't lose them again when nobody remembers what MP4 is. [url]
• President Nixon was prepared for an Apollo 11 disaster with a speech that he thankfully never read to the American public. The "moon disaster" speech is a creepy reminder that space exploration is an inherently risky venture... [url] [page2]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

While there's been a fair amount of focus lately on the legal status of Aereo, the company offering broadcast TV over the internet by setting up a bunch of individual antennas and letting people access them online, there's also the ivi case. ivi, if you don't remember, offered what sounds like a very similar service to stream broadcast TV over the internet (for a fee). However, it used a completely different legal theory, believing it had found something of a loophole in the Copyright Act; namely Section 111 which allows cable providers to rebroadcast content for a compulsory payment to the Copyright Office.

The district court was not impressed, and basically said that ivi was trying to do an impressive tapdance -- defining itself as a cable provider to be able to use Section 111, but then claiming it was not a cable provider under the Communications Act. On appeal, ivi has lost again (pdf and embedded below), as the appeals court went a simpler route, and pointed out that reading the legislative history of Section 111 makes it clear that it was not intended to be used by services over the internet.

While I had bounced around on this earlier, I actually think that the court is probably right here, in terms of what Congress' intent was.

There still are some troubling parts to the ruling, mainly concerning purely faith-based claims by Judge Denny Chin that a service like ivi creates irreparable harm to the TV networks. Chin specifically claims that if ivi streams the videos online it hurts the networks:

First, ivi's live retransmissions of plaintiffs' copyrighted programming over the Internet would substantially diminish the value of the programming.

I don't see how that's true at all -- and it's certainly not obviously true. In fact, it could increase the value of the programming by making it easier and more convenient for more people to watch. Judge Chin tries to back up this statement by arguing that because the TV guys often sell ads targeted at specific segments and times, this could mess with that:

Plaintiffs broadcast their copyrighted programming to various communities at different scheduled times, for example, based on time zone or local network provider. For this reason, negotiated Internet retransmissions -- for example, on Hulu.com -- typically delay Internet broadcasts as not to disrupt plaintiffs' broadcast distribution models, reduce the live broadcast audience, or divert the live broadcast audience to the Internet.

If ivi were allowed to continue retransmitting plaintiffs' programming live, nationally (and arguably, internationally), over the Internet, and without plaintiffs' consent, ivi could make plaintiffs' programming available earlier in certain time zones than scheduled by the programs' copyright holders or paying retransmission rights holders. ivi's retransmissions of plaintiffs' copyrighted programming without their consent thus would devalue the programming by reducing its "live" value and undermining existing and prospective retransmission fees, negotiations, and agreements. ivi's retransmissions would dilute plaintiffs' programming and their control over their product.

But... that makes no sense. If that's true, then one could just as easily make the same argument about VCRs or DVRs. Yes, they disrupt the "traditional" way that a certain industry's business model works, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's automatically diminishing the value of the original. After all, the TV guys made the same arguments about both VCRs and DVRs and now most of them admit that the DVR has actually helped their business by increasing the value of shows by making them more easily watchable by people. There's no reason to think the same thing wouldn't be true here.

In the end, as we argued from the beginning, the situation with ivi and Aereo (and Zediva and others) is silly. They're all looking for loopholes in the law to do what should clearly be allowed anyway. But because of the ridiculously expansive nature of copyright law, which is allowing legacy players to kill off new technologies, such things aren't allowed. And we end up with results like this, where an interesting concept (even if it tried to jump through crazy legal hoops) is flat out declared to break the law and shut down. Innovation be damned. NBC has to sell you more diapers via the commercials it's always sold in prime time. And you're not allowed to mess with that.