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Google Sued for Trademark Infringement: Technology Liberation Front v. Data Liberation Front

by on September 14, 2009 · 11 comments

Googles Data Liberation FrontGoogle today unveiled the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers in Chicago dedicated to ensuring that Google build “liberated products”—ones that have “built in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you’d like to take it elsewhere.” We’ve spent a lot of time here warning about the dangers of Googlephobia, but now that Google has brazenly appropriated the TLF’s unique mock-Communist iconography, we’re starting to think that Jeff Chester and Scott Cleland may be right: Maybe Google really is trying to take over the world!

So we regret to announce our filing of a lawsuit in the Twelfth Circuit Court of Appeals to challenge Google’s infringement of our mark. We demand 50% of the $0.00 Google earns every time they “allow” users to port their application data out of Google to a competitor’s services! We will, of course, dedicate these royalties to the important project of educating and empowering users about how they can determine their own destiny online.

But seriously… We heartily agree with our Data Liberation Front comrades that users should be fully empowered to switch from one service to another online. This kind of competition is clearly the best protection for consumers in the Digital Age. Making switching easy should assuage not just antitrust concerns, but also concerns about how much privacy or security each web service offers to its users, no matter how big its market share: If you don’t like what a service offers, just take your data and leave! Who needs the government micro-managing the Internet when users have that kind of control?

Viva la (Technology) Revolution!

P.S. In case you haven’t seen it the Monty Python video we’re all riffing on:

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Retweet the Revolution: Help Spread the TLF’s Message on Twitter!

by on September 8, 2009 · 4 comments

You might have noticed that we’ve added a Tweetmeme button at the top of each TLF post showing how many times each post has been “retweeted” on Twitter. If you like a TLF post, please take a second to retweet it. Retweeting is an easy way to spread the TLF’s message that politicians should keep their hands off the ‘Net and everything else related to technology! Here are three ways you can help us with viral marketing the message of technology freedom:

  1. If you’re already signed into Twitter, clicking the green “retweet” button will take you to Twitter with a retweet ready to go (“RT @techliberation “). You just have to click “Update.”
  2. You can make retweeting even easier—just one click!—by connecting your Twitter account with Tweetmeme. Just sign in to Tweetmeme with your Twitter log-in and select “Allow” to enable TweetMeme to automatically send your retweets to your Twitter account.
  3. You can tweet your comments on our posts by logging in with your Twitter account or using a Disqus account (assuming you’ve linked Twitter to your Disqus Profile). Each tweeted comment will count as a retweet of the post.

If you click the gray tweetcount button, you’ll be taken to Tweetmeme statistics about that particular post. One of my posts last week really took off, getting over 150 retweets! You can follow the TLF on twitter here and find links to individual TLF authors’ feeds here.

If you’re not already on Twitter, you can use but Tweet counts as an indicator of which TLF posts are hottest. But what are you waiting for, anyway? You’d better claim your name on Twitter before someone else does! It’s easy to set up an account and free, of course, and you can add followers from your webmail contacts. If nothing else, you can easily pipe your Tweets into Facebook as status updates. If you think Twitter is a stupid fad, Kevin Spacey and David Letterman may agree with you. But what do they really know about technology?

http://www.youtube.com/v/2Z1aZ7Gs46A

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Cyber-Libertarianism: The Case for Real Internet Freedom

by on August 12, 2009 · 186 comments

libertyby Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka — (Ver. 1.0 — Summer 2009)

We are attempting to articulate the core principles of cyber-libertarianism to provide the public and policymakers with a better understanding of this alternative vision for ordering the affairs of cyberspace. We invite comments and suggestions regarding how we should refine and build-out this outline. We hope this outline serves as the foundation of a book we eventually want to pen defending what we regard as “Real Internet Freedom.” [Note:  Here’s a printer-friendly version, which we also have embedded down below as a Scribd document.]

I. What is Cyber-Libertarianism?

Cyber-libertarianism refers to the belief that individuals—acting in whatever capacity they choose (as citizens, consumers, companies, or collectives)—should be at liberty to pursue their own tastes and interests online.

Generally speaking, the cyber-libertarian’s motto is “Live & Let Live” and “Hands Off the Internet!”  The cyber-libertarian aims to minimize the scope of state coercion in solving social and economic problems and looks instead to voluntary solutions and mutual consent-based arrangements.

Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest”—an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.

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Many Ways to Follow the TLF!

by on June 2, 2009 · 9 comments

This is just a quick reminder to both faithful and fair-weather readers that there are many ways to keep up with what we’re saying here at the Technology Liberation Front, including:

(1) RSS

Subscribe in a Reader

Add to Google Reader or Homepage

(2) Twitter

(3) Facebook

Find us on Facebook!

(4) Daily email alert

(5) Podcast

Subscribe to Tech Policy Weekly from TLF on Odeo.com Subscribe to Tech Policy Weekly from TLF in iTunes Subscribe in Google Reader … Or just make the TLF your browser’s welcome page!  What better way to start each day? Finally, as always, we appreciate your support, attention, tolerance of our rants.

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TPW 42: The Flare-Up over Facebook’s Revised Terms of Use

by on February 18, 2009 · 6 comments

facebook-logoOn this episode “Tech Policy Weekly,” Technology Liberation Front contributors Ryan Radia and Berin Szoka join me for a discussion of the flare-up over Facebook’s recent changes to the data retention provisions of its Terms of Use agreement and whether there are any serious privacy issues in play here—or if this is all much ado about nothing. [Ryan blogged about it here, and I did here.]

Earlier this month, Facebook announced changes to the way it handled or retained user data on its site after a user quits Facebook, raising questions about who actually owns that data and whether any privacy issues were raised by the company’s new policy. Following some intense scrutiny in the blogosphere, Facebook decided this week to revert to their old terms of service until they figured out a new approach to data management and ownership.

You can begin listening by downloading the MP3 file here or by just clicking the play button below.  Or subscribe to our Podcast ( iTunes, other).

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Other “Liberation Fronts”

by on February 16, 2009 · 30 comments

Savvy TLF Readers probably realize that the TLF was preceded by the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front.  I suspect neither group has much of a sense of humor (although I’m glad to see from their Wikipedia pages that neither organization appears to have actually killed anyone, despite their use of terrorist tactics).

A TLF reader just called my attention to another group that most definitely does have a sense of humor:  the Beard Liberation Front.  I also discovered the The Hamster Liberation Front through Google.  Then there’s the classic People’s Liberation Front of Judea (or is it the Judean People’s Liberation Front?) from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian:

http://www.youtube.com/v/hSELOCMmw4A&hl=en&fs=1

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Technology Liberation: What’s It All About?

by on February 16, 2009 · 14 comments

I often ponder what the TLF is all about.  Of course, our official mission is “keeping politicians’ hands off the ‘net and everything else related to technology.”  You can read more on our “About Us” page.  But this quote from Robert Heinlein‘s 1973 classic Time Enough for Love (among my top five favorite novels) really hits the nail on the head for me:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”

“Man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras of Abdera (c. 480-410 B.C.).  So it is for me:  technology is ultimately a means—indeed, the means—by which the condition of humanity is improved.  By “liberating technology”—i.e., defending the freedom to innovate and to profit from bringing innovation to the marketplace—we’re all doing our small part to prevent “right-thinking people” from squelching the creative minority whose toils will sometday take the species to the stars.  

I can’t wait to see what the coming decades will bring.  In the words of the immortal 1970s rock band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive: You ain’t seen nothing yet!  

http://www.youtube.com/v/lJmBPCYt5LY&hl=en&fs=1

  (The full version of the video—not the embedded player—includes an ad to buy the song, a new YouTube feature.  Heinlein would be proud.)

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Nuts & Bolts: Everything You Wanted To Know About Cookies But Were Afraid To Ask

by on January 27, 2009 · 16 comments

As a means of introducing myself to TLF readers, this is an article that I wrote for the PFF blog in September that has not been previously mentioned on the TLF. Most of my other PFF blog posts have been cross-posted by Adam Thierer or Berin Szoka, but I’ve taken ownership of those posts so they appear on my TLF author page.

This is the first in a series of articles that will focus directly on technology instead of technology policy. With an average age of 57, most members of Congress were at least 30 when the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. So it is not surprising that lawmakers have difficulty with cutting-edge technology. The goal of this series is to provide a solid technical foundation for the policy debates that new technologies often trigger. No prior knowledge of the technologies involved is assumed, but no insult to the reader’s intelligence is intended.

This article focuses on cookies–not the cookies you eat, but the cookies associated with browsing the World Wide Web. There has been public concern over the privacy implications of cookies since they were first developed. But to understand them , you must know a bit of history.

According to Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, “[g]etting people to put data on the Web often was a question of getting them to change perspective, from thinking of the user’s access to it not as interaction with, say, an online library system, but as navigation th[r]ough a set of virtual pages in some abstract space. In this concept, users could bookmark any place and return to it, and could make links into any place from another document. This would give a feeling of persistence, of an ongoing existence, to each page.”[1. Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving The Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. p. 37. Harper Business (2000).] The Web has changed quite a bit since the early 1990s.

Today, websites are much more dynamic and interactive, with every page being customized for each user. Such customization could include automatically selecting the appropriate language for the user based on where they’re located, displaying only content that has been added since the last time the user visited the site, remembering a user who wants to stay logged into a site from a particular computer, or keeping track of items in a virtual shopping cart. These features are simply not possible without the ability for a website to distinguish one user from another and to remember a user as they navigate from one page to another. Today, in the Web 2.0 era, instead of Web pages having persistence (as Berners-Lee described), we have dynamic pages and “user-persistence.”

This paper describes the various methods websites can use to enable user-persistence and how this affects user privacy. But the first thing the reader must realize is that the Web was not initially designed to be interactive; indeed, as the quote above shows, the goal was the exact opposite. Yet interactivity is critical to many of the things we all take for granted about web content and services today.

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Use Competition to Bridge the Gap in Human Spaceflight

by on October 31, 2008 · 4 comments

As TLF readers may know, I took over in July as Chairman of the Board of the Space Frontier Foundation.  As I explained in my recent interview on The Space Show, SFF has been the leading citizens’ advocacy group for space commercialization since 1988.  Dedicated to promoting Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill‘s vision of space settlement, as described in his 1976 masterpiece The High Frontier, the Foundation has always argued that “space is a place, not a program.”

We sent out the following press release on October 28, calling for a major transformation of the U.S. government’s space program by which the U.S. government would buy commercial transportation to the International Space Station.  We’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks.

Space Frontier Foundation Finds Funding Source for COTS-D

The Space Frontier Foundation today called upon Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to invest the $2 billion in new funds they have promised to NASA for reducing the “Gap” in U.S. human spaceflight (after the Space Shuttle is retired in 2010) to spur innovation and competition in America.

Foundation Chairman Berin Szoka said “It’s time that our national leaders give American entrepreneurs a shot at closing this gap. Let’s take the two billion dollars in the candidates’ plans and fund up to five winners of COTS-D.”

The NASA Authorization Act of 2008, recently signed into law by the President, directs NASA to “issue a notice of intent [by mid-April 2009] … to enter into a funded, competitively awarded Space Act Agreement with two or more commercial entities’ for transporting humans to the ISS”-the “Capability D” of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (or COTS-D for short). But that directive is not yet funded.

Szoka continued, “Let’s have an American competition in space – to create good jobs, fuel innovation, and close the gap more quickly. With private funds matching government’s investment, we can dramatically leverage the $2 billion to produce breakthroughs in a new American industry – commercial orbital human spaceflight.” Continue reading →

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Goodbye to Most Business Method & Software Patents?

by on October 30, 2008 · 11 comments

The Federal Circuit significantly limited the patentability of software and business methods today.  Mike Masnick at TechDirt summarizes the holding of the case as follows:

the court has said that there’s a two-pronged test to determine whether a software of business method process patent is valid: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. In other words, pure software or business method patents that are neither tied to a specific machine nor change something into a different state are not patentable.

I’m sure several of my TLF colleagues will have a great deal to say about this.   Tim Lee has already written about this on Ars Technica:

The Bilski decision, then, is a clear signal that the pendulum has begun to swing back toward tighter limits on software and business patents. However, it remains to be seen how far the court will go in this direction. Bilski was a relatively easy case. The applicant made little effort to hide the fact that he was seeking to patent a mental process, something the Supreme Court has clearly said is not allowed. Therefore, the Federal Circuit’s rejection of this patent doesn’t tell us how it will rule when confronted with software or business method patents that are tied more directly to a physical machine or a transformation of matter. And indeed, the Federal Circuit reiterated that some software and business method patents are valid, so we are unlikely to return to the near-prohibition on such patents that prevailed until the early 1980s.

Thoughts?

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