Book Review: Blown to Bits by Abelson, Ledeen, & Lewis
I’ve just finished reading Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, and it’s another title worth adding to your tech policy reading list. The authors survey a broad swath of tech policy territory — privacy, search, encryption, free speech, copyright, spectrum policy — and provide the reader with a wonderful history and technology primer on each topic.
I like the approach and tone they use throughout the book. It is certainly something more than “Internet Policy for Dummies.” It’s more like “Internet Policy for the Educated Layman”: a nice mix of background, policy, and advice. I think Ray Lodato’s Slashdot review gets it generally right in noting that, “Each chapter will alternatively interest you and leave you appalled (and perhaps a little frightened). You will be given the insight to protect yourself a little better, and it provides background for intelligent discussions about the legalities that impact our use of technology.”
Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis aren’t really seeking to be polemical in this book by advancing a single thesis or worldview. To the extent the book’s chapters are guided by any central theme, it comes in the form of the “two basic morals about technology” they outline in Chapter 1:
The first is that information technology is inherently neither good nor bad — it can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us. Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities. All of us, and all of our public agencies and private institutions, have a say in whether technology will be used for good or ill and whether we will fall prey to its risks or prosper from the opportunities it creates. (p. 14)
Mostly, what they aim to show is that digital technology is reshaping society and, whether we like or it not, we better get used to it — and quick! “The digital explosion is changing the world as much as printing once did — and some of the changes are catching us unaware, blowing to bits our assumptions about the way the world works… The explosion, and the social disruption that it will create, have barely begun.” (p 3)
In that sense, most chapters discuss how technology and technological change can be both a blessing and a curse, but the authors are generally more optimistic than pessimistic about the impact of the Net and digital technology on our society. What follows is a quick summary of some of the major issues covered in Blown to Bits.
Sensible Khakis: An Entrepreneurial Anthem
Entrepreneurs rock! You wouldn’t guess it, though, to listen to rock music. (Marc Knopfler’s, Boom, Like That, says something about the founding and rise of McDonald’s, granted, but it hardly casts the enterprise in a very flattering light.) So in honor of entrepreneurs everywhere—but especially those in the board sports industries, whom I thank for making some very fun toys—I offer Sensible Khakis:
Like Take Up the Flame, which I coughed up on YouTube last week, Sensible Khakis’ license leaves you free to play it just for fun. You can find the chords and lyrics—including the law-geek verse, not included in the video above, about the choices entrepreneurs face between sole proprietorships, corporations, LLPs, and LLCs—here. Like the terms attached to Take Up the Flame, any commercial licensees of Sensible Khakis will have to pay a tithe to one of my favorite causes—this time, Surfrider Foundation. That is not a likely scenario, admittedly, but I figure that the thought counts for something.
[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and Technology Liberation Front.]
“Intellectual Property Colloquium” podcast with Doug Lichtman
We’ve failed to keep our podcast alive here at the TLF — and I apologize about that — but there are still a lot of good tech policy-related podcasts out there for you to listen to. Here’s a new one that sounds very promising. It’s called the “Intellectual Property Colloquium” podcast, and it’s hosted by the brilliant Doug Lichtman, a professor of law at UCLA Law School.
The first show features a discussion that took place in one of Prof. Lichtman’s classes in which the always-interesting Fred Von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) begins by talking about the controversial Cablevision DVR case and then transitions into copyright law and infringement more generally. Doug jumps into the conversation about 12 minutes and needles Fred with a litany of excellent questions that really get the debate going. Whenever Doug and Fred go at it, it is a real intellectual clash of the titans.
The upcoming shows look just as good. Next up is a debate between Stacey Byrnes of NBC-Universal and Tim Wu of Columbia University about the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. The November show will include Dan Solove talking about “Privacy in a Networked World.” [I am just finishing up his important new book, Understanding Privacy, and I will be posting a review of it here soon.] And the December show is called “Everyone Hates DRM,” and is set to include Ed Felton of Princeton University versus Dean Marks of Warner Brothers. That should be a interesting conversation.
Google Book Search deal = ASCAP / online collective licensing model for the future?
At first glance, it seems to me that this big settlement announced today between Google and the book publishers regarding Google Book Search sounds a lot like an ASCAP model for online book transactions. Specifically, of the key provisions of the agreement, it’s this last one about the Book Rights Registry that makes me think of ASCAP:
Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works – Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.
That’s basically what ASCAP does today, and I think this sounds like a pretty good plan for books going forward. But I also find myself wondering: Could this be the beginning of a move toward a more comprehensive online collective licensing system for other types of content as everything moves online. For example, could this model work for music? EFF has argued it could. And some in the music industry appear to be moving in that direction. (Talk about your strange bedfellows… EFF and the RIAA potentially on the same side of an issue!)
Of course, you’d need to get a lot more companies than just Google to play ball to make it work for music — specifically, you’d need all the ISPs on board. For books, by contrast, the reason today’s deal will likely work is because Google has been the only online operator with the scale and interest in putting the entire contents of so many books online. But all music is already online and much video is heading online, too. So, I think it would be much, much more challenging to make collective licensing work for music and video the way it appears it might work for books. (We’d probably need compulsory licensing instead, which I am no fan of). The key to these voluntary collective licensing systems is large, trusted intermediaries that can clear a massive volume of transactions. Google can do that for books as today’s deal makes clear. It will be interesting to see if others suggest that music and video can and should work the same way. I’m skeptical, and I’m also a bit hung up on some fairness issues about how it would work, which I might touch upon in a future essay.
But I’m no copyright expert so I’d be interested in hearing what my colleagues and others think.
Update: Looks like someone beat me to the punch with the ASCAP comparison. I just starting reading through my RSS feed and finding reaction from others and came across Mathew Ingram’s post arguing that, “In effect, Google is setting up a body that does what ASCAP and similar groups do for musicians.”
What Is This Drawing About?
Arts+Labs, a new coalition “committed to a better, safer internet that works for both artists and consumers,” has written up Friday’s Cato Institute book forum on The Crime of Reason on their ArtLab blog. Author Robert B. Laughlin of Stanford University will present his book, then we’ll have comments from Tom Sydnor of the Progress and Freedom Foundation.
I’ve gotten a glimpse at the slides Dr. Laughlin will be using, and this Nobel laureate in physics also turns out to be something of an artist.
Join us Friday to learn what this drawing is all about.
Intellectual Property Laws and Government Security Threaten Science and Knowledge
If you find the title of this post provocative, you’ll be interested in a Cato Institute book forum on Friday, October 10th.
In The Crime of Reason, Nobel laureate in physics Robert Laughlin argues that intellectual property laws and government security demands threaten the development of new knowledge. Without change, we risk bequeathing our heirs a world where knowledge is criminalized and our intellectual tradition of unfettered inquiry is lost.
The event should be a fascinating inquiry into the role of information and information rules in our society. Thomas Syndor of the Progress & Freedom Foundation will comment. I’ll be your humble moderator. It’s noon on Friday, October 10th, at the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. Luncheon to follow.
You can register for the event here.
Cory Doctorow on the Bureacrash Podcrash
None other than Sci-Fi author, civil libertarian, blogger, activist, and TLF commenter Cory Doctorow drops in at the Bureaucrash Podcrash (that’s a podcast for “crashers”) to discuss his new book Little Brother.
Austin Grossman’s review of the book for the New York Times remarks:
An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother” is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned — hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore).
We at TLF may disagree with Mr. Doctorow on a number of policy issues, but I must admit that he’s a talented writer. I bought Cory’s Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, a collection of short stories, at Capital Books here in DC and read it cover to cover by the end of that weekend. A great read available free in digital form at Cory’s Craphound.
Is Piracy Killing PC Gaming?
Sean Sands makes the argument that it is in a very powerfully worded editorial today over at The Escapist entitled “Sink the Pirates“:
PC developers are being forced to make more dramatic decisions in the face of overwhelming piracy, an issue that Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crysis developer Crytek, recently enumerated at one legitimate copy to every twenty pirated. [...] Yes, I think Cevat is inflating his 20 to 1 statistic, but he’s probably not nearly as far off as you or I might think. Looking at arguably one of the largest P2P torrent sharing sites on the web (no, I’m not going to link to it), and the number of Games torrents currently available, the evidence is absolutely damning. Despite PCs’ relative weakness in the marketplace, clearly in the backseat by orders of magnitude in relation to the next gen and handheld systems, it represents 50% of all torrents. Let me stress that - the number of illegal PC downloads are, at any given moment, equal to or greater than the illegal downloads for every other system combined. [...] Here’s the bottom line: Yes, piracy is destroying PC gaming. That is an immutable truth, evidenced by the exodus of PC developers defecting en masse to make games for consoles. End of story.
I’m not prepared to offer an opinion one way or the other, but I have noticed the slowdown in the PC gaming market recently and wondered about why many developers were moving over the more secure gaming consoles. That doesn’t necessarily prove that piracy was the primary factor, but it certainly could be part of the explanation.
What do you think?
New orphan works bills introduced
Yesterday bills were introduced in the House (PDF) and the Senate (PDF) addressing the orphan works copyright issue about which I’ve written many times before. Alex Curtis has a great write-up of the bills over at the Public Knowledge blog.
An orphan work is a work under copyright the owner of which cannot be located so that a potential re-user cannot ask for permission to use or license the work. If you can’t find the owner, even after an exhaustive search, and use a work anyway, you risk the possibility that the owner will later come forward, sue you, and claim statutory damages up to $150,000 per infringing use.
Both bills are largely based on the Copyright Office’s recommendations and not the unworkable Lessig proposal that had been previously introduced as the Public Domain Enhancement Act by Rep. Zoe Lofgren. The bills limit the remedies available to a copyright owner if an infringing party can show that they diligently searched for the owner before they used the work. (What constitutes a diligent search is specifically defined, which should address the concerns about the Smith bill expressed by visual and stock artists.)
Rather than statutory damages, the owner would simply be owed the reasonable compensation for the infringing use—that is, what the infringer would have paid for the use if they had been able to negotiate. I think this is a fine solution because it gives all copyright holders an incentive to keep their registrations current and their works marked to the best of their abilities (i.e. what old-time formalities used to accomplish). I’m also happy to see that injunction is also limited.
Like the Smith bill, both of these new bills direct the Copyright Office to complete a study and produce a report on copyright small claims. There are many instances of copyright infringement that are too small to be litigated in federal district court—like a website that uses my copyrighted photo they got off flickr. Professional photographers and other visual artists face this all the time and there should be a way to address their concerns. One idea is to create a copyright small claims court and it’s something I’d love to research and contribute to a Copyright Office proceeding. So if Congress has been thinking about this for a few years, what’s stopping the Copyright Office from taking on the project sua sponte?
Anyhow, stay tuned as these bills wind their way through committee and the IP maximalists are engaged.
Framework Set for ‘Broadcast Flag’ Copyright Control to Go Global
WASHINGTON, March 13, 2007 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday released a paper about the entertainment industry’s move to take copyright controls global.
The report is the result of EFF’s participation in a closed-door session of the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), the predominant global standard for digital television. (America uses a different digital standard that supports high-definition.)
EFF’s report documents the extent to which the DVB consortium has signaled its assent to copyright control technology. EFF called these a series of “unparalleled restrictions” on consumers’ rights to enjoy lawful digital content. These include “enforcing severe home recording and copying limitation,” “imposing controls on where you watch a program” and “dictating how you get to share shows with your own family,” according to EFF.
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