Sonia Arrison

Obama vs McCain: Who deserves the tech vote?

Nine months after Barack Obama, John McCain has unveiled his own technology plan for America. At last, both candidates can be graded for their long-term friendliness to the tech sector. You can read my analysis here, but the upshot is that Obama has multiple weaknesses, particularly when it comes to taxes, property rights, labor and government waste that harms America’s tech sector. McCain’s weakness is the transparency issue, but overall he looks better positioned than Obama on issues that matter most to innovators in the tech community.

August 22, 2008 | Comments |

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    I can't say who would deserve my vote based on technological issues. The rhetoric of both the Republicans and the Democrat's is an appeal to the masses consisting of smoke, mirrors, and the promise of circuses. Unfortunately, Sonia's analysis fails to convince me of who I should vote for, based on technological issues, since it lacks transparency and never gets down to what her "motherhood" statements would really imply.

    For example she writes "On piracy, McCain is clear that he "supports efforts to crack down on piracy, both on the Internet and off." But what does “fighting privacy” really mean?

    Sonia is opposed to regulation, yet “fighting piracy” clearly implies the creation of new regulations. Content producers are currently before Congress demanding new laws to force ISPs act as internet "traffic cops". Mike Masnick on TechDirt wrote “The RIAA has increased the flood of notices, and then convinced Congress to move forward on legislation that would legally obligate universities to act as the RIAA's copyright cops.”

    The quest to “fight piracy” also raises the issue of who has access to the data stream. People don’t want government reading their mail considering it to be an invasion of privacy, yet corporations are demanding the right (and regulations) to inspect packets as a means of fighting piracy. This also raises the issue of due process. Essentially, corporations are demanding the right to arbitrarily and capriciously break into your (figurative) house to search it for contraband. I would hope that people who say that they believe in civil liberties would not support this deprivation of civil liberties.

    Finally, there is the question of what constitutes “piracy”. Changes to copyright law and the passage of the DMCA have aggrandized the so-called property rights of the content producers so that formerly legal uses are now considered illegal. For example, content producers have been trying to criminalize fair use. Now, both TechDirt and this forum have articles on the recent US District Court decision finding that DMCA takedown notices should take fair use into consideration. Will fighting privacy mean continued efforts to criminalize the legal usage of content?

    Fighting piracy has sound bite appeal, but we should to be very careful of what we are asking for. Do we want all our civil liberties taken way to assure corporations their revenue stream. In a free market, corporations should earn their money without the benefit of protective legislation. If they can’t do bad, it’s a free market. I look forward to reading an article that would provide insight concerning the implications of McCain’s and Obama’s technology policies.
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    Great comment, Steve. You make an excellent point that should not be overlooked--"fighting piracy" often entails harmful laws with unintended, undesirable consequences.

    Obama has called for the reform of intellectual property laws, but what does that mean? I see no reason to assume that Obama is implying he would gut existing copyright laws. The current IP regime is in need of serious reforms, including the reduction of copyright terms, and the elimination of the DMCA anti-circumvention clause. Fellow TLFers have noted on numerous occasions that existing laws are deeply flawed because they make it illegal to conduct research or reverse engineer copy protection mechanisms for the purpose of inter-operability.

    I think most of us would welcome an effort by an Obama administration to re-examine intellectual property laws. Fighting piracy is important, but it's not the only concern that should matter to policy makers.
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    Obama's IP reform statements say very little about copyright, and a lot about reforming the patent system. Of course, for a candidate, that's very easy, because its a system that everyone knows is broken.
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    Perhaps you think this because there is a John McCain banner on your site? The "tech vote" is a non issue as it is not up to the president or his cabinet to determine the future of technology. It is market driven and whoever controls the market, controls the direction.
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    Garrett, as I explain here, we do not choose the political ads on our site. They are selected automatically by Google's Adsense technology.
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    I see. Perhaps I was hasty in my accusations, my apologies.
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    lessig has a much different take on mccain's tech policy.
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    Sonia, if you have not seen it already ITIF put out an updated comparison side-by-side comparison of each candidate's tech plan.

    http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=176
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    I think the thing that most dissapoints me is the predominance - in the media, academia, and among liberal politicians - of the "innovation at the edges" model/point of view. True, lots of innovation flourishes there. However, you need to have a system that nurtures core innovation for the stuff at the edges to occur in the first place. A system that says - "Heck, you have to build it anyway, so we're going to tax it, or impose free riders on it" - will not boost innovation for long. It will not only stifle developments at the core, it will slow developments at the edges, too.
 

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