The protection of innovation, one of the US?s fundamental concerns, has attracted the attention of the US Supreme Court. Its ruling last week devastated Aereo, the streaming, delayed-transmission TV delivery service promoted in 2012 by Chaitanya ?Chet? Kanojia, which shut down, probably permanently, on Sunday. While the ruling was immediately followed by the predictable breast-beating over creativity being penalised?and Aereo petitioned Congress right away?it may have actually been good for the culture of innovation.
Aereo?s innovation lay in the transmission architecture. Each subscriber was leased a coin-sized antenna to stream delayed programming to their PC or tablet, and the company?s business plan hinged on this tiny stratagem. It had gambled that it would not have to pay customary retransmission fees charged by TV channels and other content providers because of this unique feature. The question before the court was, does delivery to subscribers one by one qualify as ?public performance?, the term in US copyright law which attracts payment for content? The court has ruled that the distinction between cable and Aereo was insubstantial, and therefore fees would be attracted. The company has gone off the air but continues to argue that since spectrum is a public good, signals passing over it should be publicly accessible, ?whether your antenna sits on the roof of your home, on top of your television or in the cloud.?
Similar cases involving Kanojia?s competitors, which have already attracted territorially limited injunctions, remain in various subordinate courts, and will be instrumental in shaping the future of the TV industry. But the Supreme Court has laid down the general line: innovation is to be valued in the technical sphere, but using technology to exploit technicalities is not innovation.
With technology evolving ever more rapidly, there was a need for clarity on the place of innovation in the relentless struggle between property rights and the common good. Meanwhile, technology is also trying to clear the air on another issue which deeply concerns the US, and has become a major feature in world affairs?climate change.
The global warming denial industry likes to claim that it deals in certainties?like the unqualified ?no??while those who ring the alarm bells live in a confused haze of ?mays?, ?mights? and ?coulds?. That is the language of responsible science, of course, which hesitates to use the unqualified ?yes?. It is wise because scientists who speak in black and white look pretty silly when fresh data or insights overturn old certainties.
However, a satellite launching this week from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California could bring a little more black and white into the smoggy grey of the climate wars, producing definitive answers to a few specific questions. Which country is the biggest source of carbon dioxide today? Which growing economy produces the most and the least carbon dioxide per head? Where is the rate of change steepest and shallowest? Where are the biggest carbon sources and sinks? These questions are valuable counters in the game of climate bargaining, which has made a home for itself in the heart of diplomacy in the Obama era.
Fairly certain answers on these questions would also reduce doubts about climate science, and they can be supplied by Nasa?s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, which is essentially a very small aperture spectrometer compensating for its tiny field of view by taking about a million exposures every day. OCO-2 deduces the prevalence of carbon dioxide by detecting its absorption of light. Since clouds interfere with the absorption picture, the aperture has been kept small to secure exposures which are entirely cloudless and can add up to carbon maps that are matters of fact, leaving little room for opinion and interpretation.
Climate science has been in the cautious land of ?maybe? for lack of data. Weather measurement was standardised only in the middle of the 19th century, and measurements in the upper atmosphere or below sea level became common only in the middle of the 20th century. The occurrence of major climatic events in the remote past is deduced by measuring proxies like tree rings (dendrochronology), the distribution of vegetal carbon sinks by studying fossilised pollen, and oceanic changes by the distribution of static life forms like corals, whose preferred depth, water temperature, salinity and pH are well documented.
Without certainties about the past, it would be scientifically irresponsible to claim to understand the present in context, or to speak credibly about the future. However, satellites like NASA?s can at least produce fairly uncontroversial snapshots of the present. They would arm their owners with reliable diplomatic ammunition for the climate wars and other nations, especially rapidly growing economies, will perhaps want their own, to fight data with data, world-view with world-view. The beginning of yet another micro space race for Sriharikota to monetise, perhaps.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com
