The Library of Congress has given iPhone users a get-out-of-jail-free card.

As part of a periodic review, the agency determined that “jailbreaking” the iPhone is allowed under American copyright law. Owners of iPhones (and other smartphones) have the right to unlock their devices and use applications not approved by the manufacturer or seller.

The decision is important in a variety of ways, not all of which are directly related to phones, or even to the wider goals of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sought a smartphone exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Basically, the Library of Congress reinforced the idea that when you buy a device, you own that device. This concept should apply to all sorts of technologies.

Automobiles are one example. Between built-in DVD navigational systems and the impenetrable engine service codes, drivers have to rely on the manufacturer for updates and service more completely than ever before. The days of teenagers in garages tinkering with their cars are all but over. Any owner, however, should be able to buy a third-party DVD database for the navigation system, or a program that can interrogate a car’s onboard computers to learn which malfunctioning gewgaw is making the “check engine” light flash ominously.

The world of e-books is another arena where the rules of ownership are fuzzier than they ought to be. A year ago, Amazon incensed its customer base when it wirelessly deleted certain previously purchased books from Kindle users’ libraries. Though the customers owned their Kindles, the files were apparently not so clear cut. And, while Amazon has since acknowledged that it was wrong to handle the matter the way it did, the company still has recall-enforcement mechanisms that are not available to merchants who sell more traditional merchandise.

Technology changes quickly, but some concepts ought to be enduring. One is that you own what you buy. Yesterday’s ruling means that, if you wish, you can install unauthorized applications on your own device, or make changes to the firmware.

Be careful. These modifications can have consequences much worse than a copyright violation notice. Jailbreaking your phone will almost always void its warranty. The practice can also open the door to spyware and viruses. But those choices are now firmly in the hands of the individual user, as they should be.

Apple claimed that permitting iPhone owners to jailbreak their phones would destroy the company’s technological protection for software on the device. But the Copyright Office noted that jailbreaking involves changing fewer than 50 bytes out of 8 million. It’s a small change that yields a lot of flexibility.

Vendors are usually eager to invoke the digital copyright law to the maximum extent. Apple understandably wants to keep its iPhone customers tied as closely as possible to its own iTunes and App stores, and to the wireless carriers (in this country, AT&T) with which it makes exclusive marketing arrangements. But hardware customers are not serfs. A car company cannot tie its customers to a certain brand of gasoline. Television makers cannot select only certain channels that will appear on their screens. (I am old enough to remember when the Federal Communications Commission mandated that all TVs must be able to receive UHF signals.) Even my shaving razor accepts third-party blades.

Our mothers taught us that we can’t “eat our cake and have it, too.” The Library of Congress now has delivered the same message to smartphone makers: You can’t sell a device and still behave as though you own it.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

Photo Credit: Apple-Phone-Hacks.com

As many observers and bloggers have noted, this year’s Super Bowl commercials featured an unusual number of henpecked men.

In an ad for Chrysler’s Dodge Charger, a male voiceover recites a long list of husbandly duties, including putting down the toilet seat and carrying his wife’s lip balm, while blank-faced men stare mutely at the camera. At the end, the speaker concludes that, after doing so many good deeds, he deserves to get the car he wants.

If the commercials revealed that guys are feeling a bit uneasy about their gender’s position, new studies show that they have good reason to think they are living in a woman’s world.

The Pew Research Center recently reported that more women now have higher incomes than their husbands than in 1970. In 2007, 22 percent of women out-earned their husbands, compared to just 4 percent in 1970. Paul Fucito, spokesman for the Pew Center said, “Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women.”

Thanks to the recent recession, which put more men than women out of work, the number of female breadwinners has probably increased even further. Construction and manufacturing, both of which are still predominately male industries, were both hit hard by the downturn. In December, 11 percent of men were unemployed, compared to just 8.8 percent of women.

The growth of female economic power is likely to continue, as more women than men pursue higher education. According to a recent report by the American Council on Education, for nearly the past decade women have consistently represented about 57 percent of undergraduate enrollments at American colleges. Women earn more master’s degrees than men and earn just as many professional and doctoral degrees.

Fortunately, if the Super Bowl ads are any indicator, men at least have a sense of humor about their changing situation. Advertising agencies were betting that guys whose wives hold the purse strings would be willing to laugh about it.

One spot, however, did strike me as having a nasty undertone. In the FloTV ad a man accompanies a woman on a shopping trip. He stands with a bra draped over his shoulder at the lingerie store and reluctantly sniffs candles in the housewares department. At the end of the commercial, a narrator tells him to “change out of that skirt.”

Rather than inviting us to laugh along with the hapless man, FloTV portrays his position as womanly and, by the commercial’s logic, therefore degrading. The commercial suggested that, while it would be fitting for a skirt-wearing woman to cater to her mate’s whims, a man should not let himself be put in that position.

But most of the ads took a good-natured approach to the bad times that have been particularly bad for men. Underneath the ribbing, it seems, most of today’s men appreciate how much worse off they would be without the accomplished women in their lives. And if they have any complaints, they usually keep them private.

My wife sometimes tells me to “just smile and nod” when voicing my opinion is going to get me into trouble. On my better days, I have enough sense to take her advice. It looks like I have a lot of company.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

There were only a few channels on TV when I was a kid. Everyone watched them, and we watched the commercials that came with them, too.

Now the business model of advertising-supported broadcast television is breaking down. Customers with cable or satellite service pick from a huge number of channels, drastically reducing the audience that any single cable or broadcast station can hope to deliver to advertisers. And, with customers increasingly able to bypass advertisements using services like TiVo, the payoff for TV spots is dwindling. At the same time, the recession has tightened companies’ advertising budgets.

“Good programming is expensive,” Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the Fox television network, told shareholders this fall. “It can no longer be supported solely by advertising revenues.”

While traditional broadcast networks are struggling, cable channels are doing fairly well. These channels have two revenue streams. Cable companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast Corp. charge consumers monthly subscription fees. These fees are then used to purchase the right to carry cable channels, providing the channels with an important source of funding in addition to advertising.

Broadcasters may be forced to follow the dictate, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Fox has already started going after fees from cable providers. With its contract with Time Warner Cable expiring at the end of 2009, Fox threatened to pull its programs if Time Warner did not offer the network more money.

The two companies managed to reach an agreement before screens went dark. Though the terms were not disclosed, they most likely compromised somewhere between the 30 cents per subscriber Time Warner offered to pay and the $1 per subscriber that Fox originally demanded.

Of course, cable companies do not always see eye-to-eye with cable programmers, either. After talks between Cablevision and non-broadcast Scripps Network broke down, The Food Network and HGTV disappeared on New Year’s Day from Cablevision’s lineup in metropolitan New York. Cablevision told customers that it had “no expectation” of carrying the network’s programming again “given the dramatic changes in their approach to working with distributors to reach television viewers.”

Nonetheless, some now-free networks may switch over completely to the cable model. Jeff Zucker, who runs NBC and its sister cable channels such as CNBC and Bravo, told investors this month “the cable model is just superior to the broadcast model.”

This switch would not necessarily be a bad thing. As technology makes it easier to avoid advertising, consumers will have to get used to paying for their information and entertainment. Those who enjoy quality programming ought to help shoulder its costs (as public television and radio broadcasters have reminded us for years).

In the old advertising-supported model, you “paid” for programming by lending your ears during commercial breaks. Only the channels that aired shows you wanted to watch could count you as part of the audience they delivered to advertisers.

With cable, however, consumers generally have to pay for many channels they do not care about. Rather than allowing consumers to select the specific channels they want to buy, cable companies usually offer different service tiers, meaning that, if you absolutely have to have one of the channels in the top service tier, then you have to pay for all of the other channels that also come in that tier.

This practice is known as bundling. In some cases, bundling can be illegal. When films with sound were still new, Hollywood studios relied on a form of bundling known as block booking. In order to show popular films, movie theaters had to agree to also screen a studio’s other, lesser-quality films, often without even seeing them in advance.

The theaters, stuck with the duds, grouped high quality and low quality films together into double features, ensuring that they would be able to get moviegoers to munch popcorn and other profitable concessions through the bad flicks.

In the 1948 case of United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. et al., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the practice of block booking violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, since it prevented studios that were not able to produce A-list movies from competing in the low-budget market.

Bundling is not always illegal, but, even when it is legal, it is often bad business. Time Inc., which publishes a variety of magazine titles, including Time, Fortune, People, Entertainment Weekly and GOLF Magazine, does not require Fortune subscribers to also purchase People and Entertainment Weekly, because those customers would probably forego the package altogether instead of paying for glossies they don’t plan to read.

The same thing may happen with television programming. If cable companies continue to force customers to pay for programming they don’t want, viewers may turn off their television sets for good, finding other ways to see what they want to see. Those who want to stick with a more old-fashioned method can buy shows when they come out on DVD. Others will make their purchases from iTunes and the like. Still others will watch shows online, either on network sites or on third-party sites like Hulu.

That is, of course, assuming that cable companies that offer both television and Internet service don’t slow down online video sites in order to draw customers back onto the sofa. In order for the net to provide a true alternative to television, we need strong net neutrality rules to prevent cable companies from using their control over customers’ Internet service to squash those who dare to threaten their hold on TV viewers.

As we transition away from a system in which advertising supports most of our programming, consumers will have to start paying for what they watch. But they should not have to pay for everything that a cable company decides to throw into the package.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

My little brother started kindergarten in the fall of 1965, which allowed my mother to go back to work full-time. Our family needed the money. I was 8 years old and in third grade, and it was my job after school to walk my brother back to our Bronx apartment and look after him until our parents got home.

I had plenty of help. My mother’s friends in neighboring apartments would look in on us. I could reach both of my parents by telephone if I needed them. And there was Soupy Sales and his cast of zany characters on Channel 5, WNEW-TV in New York, every afternoon, to entertain us.

Soupy had a personal relationship with his young audience. His shows were done live. He played most of the live-action characters (like his girlfriend, Peaches) himself, while puppets made up the rest of the cast. He would speak directly to his viewers. Sometimes this got Soupy into trouble, like the time he told us kids to go through our parents’ wallets and mail him those funny green pieces of paper that had pictures of dead presidents.

One day I decided I wanted talk to Soupy. I got the number for WNEW from directory assistance (yes, we had 411 back then) and called the switchboard. A kind woman’s voice told me I was too late; Soupy left the studio by 4:30 each afternoon. The next afternoon I called back just after the show ended. A few minutes later Soupy picked up the phone.

I have no idea what I said to him, or what he said to me. But I remember being excited and proud that I had reached my friend Soupy. A few days later, an autographed picture arrived in the mail. It showed Soupy getting hit in the face with a pie, which was his trademark. Soupy later estimated that he took 25,000 pies to the face in the course of his career. I wish I could say I still have the picture, but it got lost with the other debris of my childhood.

Soupy Sales, whose legal name was Milton Supman, died last week at a hospital in The Bronx. Hearing of his death was a bit like learning that a long-lost friend had passed away. It also made me appreciate the way the world, with all its risks and opportunities, was so accessible in that long-ago time.

Soupy Sales had been a local TV personality in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles and finally New York by the time I called him. For several years his show was carried nationally on ABC. The season I called him was the apogee of his career, a year in which Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. would appear on his show and take the requisite pies to the face.

Yet Soupy Sales, at the end of his work day, found time to talk to an 8-year-old latchkey kid, jot down his address and send a picture. On one level this was a small gesture, a personal touch in a more-personal era than today’s. But on a different level Soupy Sales was teaching me to go after things that might seem out of reach. It was a valuable lesson.

A couple of years later I did a school project about India. Most kids would have gone to the library, but I looked up the Indian consulate in Manhattan and persuaded my mother to let me make my first unaccompanied trip on the subway downtown. I was 10 or 11 at the time. It helped that I had memorized the New York City subway map.

At the consulate I was greeted politely and ushered into a meeting room. A turbaned man entered, sat down and gravely spoke with me for a few minutes. I did not get the impression that I was being humored or patronized. About a week later, an amazingly thick envelope arrived, jammed with booklets and brochures about every part of India. I was delighted, and as I recall, so was my teacher.

An 8-year-old home alone with a kindergartner. A fifth- or sixth-grader alone on the subways and streets of New York. Parents who permit these things today might find themselves facing child endangerment charges, especially if anything bad happens. But my parents were not negligent or uncaring, or even unworried. Nor was my childhood unusual for that place and time. We rode bikes without helmets. We played ball in the streets. We got on the subways or buses when we needed to go somewhere, and we looked after younger kids when there was nobody else to do it.

Looking back, it was risky, even if it was necessary. A lot of things could go wrong. Occasionally they did. But most of the time, when we reached out to the grown-up world, it reached back, gently.

Photo Credit: LeftInAboite.blogspot.com

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

It is no surprise that a New York Times media columnist would write, and not in glowing terms, about the Tribune Company’s plan to pay $66 million in bonuses to executives who led the company into bankruptcy.

It is a newsworthy item. The company’s creditors support the bonus plan, which is supposed to help retain managers who can turn Tribune’s fortunes around. But there is vigorous opposition from the bankruptcy trustee and the Newspaper Guild, the union that represents newsroom employees at the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and other Tribune papers.

David Carr pulled no punches in his Oct. 5 column. “You’d expect them to walk the plank, or at the very least, spend a good stretch of time in the naughty corner,” he wrote. “But you wouldn’t expect the top 700 managers to collect $66 million in bonuses.”

Carr acerbically described real estate tycoon Sam Zell as a “grave digger” for leading the leveraged buyout that saddled Tribune with debt it could not sustain. Carr recited what he called “a litany of infamies” surrounding the deal, and noted that Tribune has laid off 2,000 employees since the buyout.

Fair enough. Carr did provide management’s explanation for the bonus plan, though most of the column gives much more prominent treatment to the union criticism. “It is sort of along the same lines as the Bank of America and A.I.G. bonuses, except it is not taxpayer money,” Carr quotes Cet Parks, executive director of the Baltimore-Washington Newspaper Guild.

There is one notable detail that Carr left out of his column. The Newspaper Guild represents employees at most major American dailies, with the prominent exception of The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times has a Guild newsroom. Carr himself may well be a Guild member, though management personnel and freelancers typically would not be. I do not know Carr’s employment status. Also, it is possible to work in some Guild newsrooms without formally being a Guild member, though the employee still pays dues to the union.

Disclosure gets a lot of attention in financial journalism these days. Analysts and money managers who are interviewed for print and broadcast routinely say whether they have an investment position in companies they comment about. If Bloomberg L.P. discusses a company that owns an interest in Bloomberg, this fact is noted. Likewise, when The Wall Street Journal covers Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp., it points out that News Corp. owns the Journal.

But The Times never seems to mention its own employees’ labor affiliation when covering any labor matter – not even one, as in Carr’s case, that involves the journalists’ own union. The only exceptions I have seen have been stories about The Times’ negotiations with its employees. In other words, if employees are not writing about themselves and their company, their labor affiliations are nobody’s business.

I think this is wrong. Credibility is hard to come by and easy to lose. Too many people already assume journalists are prone to bias or worse. Lack of disclosure ultimately feeds those suspicions.

It also makes it easier for journalists to fool themselves into dismissing their own biases. I know this from personal experience. I myself once was a member of the Wire Service Guild, which is the Newspaper Guild unit that represents Associated Press employees. I covered all sorts of labor stories, including a Montana state AFL-CIO convention. My stories never noted my Guild membership, nor the fact that The AP was a Guild shop.

I told myself that I could put my own union membership aside in covering labor matters. I convinced myself that I had no choice but to join the Guild, since I had to pay dues anyway, even though I could have opted out of formal membership.

As a crusading young reporter, my sense of ethics was so finely tuned that I would not join a political party or even sign a petition. I left a dream assignment in Washington when I got married because my wife, a professional marketer, probably could not have found work there without creating potential conflicts with my work. (I did not suffer professionally; The AP moved me to New York and let me cover federal courts.)

But, in retrospect, all this was wrong. I was a union member covering union matters. My audience had a right to know this fact. It might not have changed what I wrote, nor how I was perceived. But disclosure would have been honest and fair. It also would have made me feel better about what I was doing. I remember listening to the rah-rah speeches at that AFL-CIO convention and thinking that it felt strange to actually belong to something I was covering.

I emailed Carr last week to ask whether The Times has a policy on disclosing Guild representation of its employees. I also asked whether he is a Guild member, and whether he believes he should have noted this fact in his column. I have not received a reply.

These are tough times in the newspaper business. Bad management and a bad economy deserve some of the blame, but not all. Bad journalism plays a part. Arrogance and bias make for some pretty bad journalism, and I get a healthy measure of both in my daily New York Times.Jo

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

Despite all sorts of government help, dairy farmers say they can’t make a living milking their cows. Meanwhile, marijuana growers are doing just fine with a product nobody is allowed to cultivate, possess, transport or sell.

This is the opposite of what we want. Milk is good for us (especially babies), and cows are cute (especially babies). Meanwhile, the folks who supply us (especially our babies) with pot are the ones we want to put out of business.

So let’s flip the policies. We should outlaw milk and provide price supports and marketing boards to sustain the marijuana industry. Close your eyes and picture the billboards along America’s highways inquiring, “Anyone seen Mary Jane?”

Dairy farmers will benefit from a new, artificially high price on a product most people buy but nobody can openly sell. Meanwhile, America’s pastoral landscape will feature weed growing like weeds. We’ll have so much of the stuff that the government probably will force refineries to turn it into ethanol so we can pump it into our cars. Prices will collapse anyway and growers will scream bloody murder. But nobody will actually be getting killed, which is not currently the case, as anyone in Mexico can attest.

The Burlington Free Press reports that the price farmers get for their milk has crashed in the past year. In June 2008, dairy farmers in Middlebury, Vermont, could expect $18.91 per hundredweight, or 11.6 gallons, of milk. This year, that price was down to $11.28. Vermont state legislators Sen. Sara Kittell, D-Franklin, and Rep. Carolyn Partridge, D-Windham, wrote in a letter to Vermont’s State Agriculture Secretary Roger Allbee that the average cost of production is $17.88 per hundredweight.

That means that, at current prices, dairy farmers are losing money. It also means they cannot make money unless they always receive just about the highest price they have ever seen, which was the case last year. Most businesses are allowed to go bankrupt if this is the case. But hey, these are dairy farmers. They are nice people who buy alarm clocks with no snooze buttons.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has accused Dean Foods, a milk distributor which Sanders says controls approximately 70 percent of the dairy market in New England, of contributing to the “disastrously low prices” paid to dairy farmers. The decrease in prices has not been passed on to consumers who continue to pay an average of $3.01 per gallon while farmers receive just $1 per gallon, Sanders said.

Dairy farmers and their elected representatives are turning to Washington for the answers. While the prices of other products depend on the fluctuations of the free market, milk has not been subject to this laissez-faire approach. The U.S. Department of Agriculture boasts in its 24-page primer on milk pricing that “Over the past 125 years, a complex pricing system has evolved to deal with the problems of milk production, assembly, and distribution.” The U.S.D.A does admit that “The very complexity of the system, however, has baffled many and led to numerous misconceptions.”

The marijuana trade, on the other hand, operates quite outside government regulation and seems to be getting along very well without any “complex pricing system.” The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency reports that marijuana production appears to be increasing in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. We do not hear marijuana growers demanding federal price supports or complaining about their distributors. Of course, the distributors often carry Uzis, which may have something to do with it.

Admittedly, my approach means we will have to lock up a few kids who are indiscreet about their milk and cookies at snack time. Those shiny tanker trucks will have to leave the Interstate and take back roads through the woods. But there will be milk for all and everyone in the business will prosper, just as the marijuana sellers do now.

Meanwhile, pot growers, under the auspices of the U.S.D.A., will have to deal with quality standards, commodity prices, futures markets and state-run marketing boards. There will be fights about what qualifies as organic smoke and appeals for price supports from farmers under pressure from evil, monopolistic corporate mega-buyers.

In a year or two those hardworking New England farmers will be anxiously monitoring their cannabis, hoping for plants at least knee-high by the Fourth of July. The heifers will be locked up in the barn, or shall we say, the grow house. But don’t feel sorry for them. All that pot has to go someplace. I expect the Holsteins in those barns will be laughing their heads off, suffering from no more than a permanent case of the munchies.

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.

A man sits down to read a politically provocative novel on his electronic reader only to find that the book has vanished. Without warning, his purchase price has been refunded and the book he’d hoped to peruse has been deleted.

You might think this is from George Orwell’s famous anti-utopian adventure 1984, but it is in fact a scene that played out earlier this month in real living rooms and commuter trains across the country. Ironically, the disappearing book was 1984.

The deletion occurred after Amazon discovered that it was distributing 1984 and other books, including Animal Farm, without the proper permissions. Amazon’s Kindle devices come equipped with digital rights management software that enables the company to do something with ebooks that it cannot do with traditional print copies, which is to step into the customer’s home and take back what has been sold.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, apologized for the incident, saying Amazon’s “‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”

In spite of Bezos’s promise to “make better decisions going forward,” the incident provides plenty of reasons to be uneasy about technology that could potentially be used to monitor and to censor what we read. In this case, Amazon’s electronic recall had nothing to do with the content of the erased books, but, in the future, governments or other powerful entities could conceivably ask (or force) Amazon to use its powers for less benign purposes.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of the book, The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It commented to The New York Times that, eventually, digital rights management software might be used “like a line item veto for content.” He went on to suggest that “It could happen first in jurisdictions like the United Kingdom, where there isn’t as rich a First Amendment tradition and where libel suits happen much more frequently.”

In spite of Amazon’s efforts to make reading a book on the Kindle as much like reading a paper and ink book as possible, events like this remind us that electronic content distribution keeps us discreetly tethered to our suppliers. This is true not only of Amazon, but also of Apple’s iTunes store and cable companies that supply us with set-top boxes. What if the National Football League’s license agreement allowed it to demand that blown calls, wardrobe malfunctions and other embarrassments be electronically deleted from our DVRs?

The First Amendment gives Americans some of the strongest protections for free expression the world has ever seen. Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are not universally respected or even admired. Amazon goofed when it deleted the electronic books it had sold, but it also did us a favor by reminding us that today’s powerful information technologies work in both directions.

Come to think of it, this blog is available to Kindle users for the modest fee of $1.99 a month. If you downloaded this post on your Kindle, I hope you get the chance to read it.

We can bring the bookseller into our homes. The question now is: Can we also keep it out?

Larry Elkin is President and Founder of Palisades Hudson Financial Group LLC.