Today Adobe finally released its statement on the whole debacle with Microsoft regarding its inclusion of PDF support into upcoming versions of Office and the Vista operating system. The statement is not completely unintelligible gibberish (despite the inclusion in my blog entry’s title of “double talk.”) Indeed, the statement is a remarkable product:of…CAPITALISM.
This concern over open standards may come across as an obscure, geek-infested issue, but at its core is good old fashioned competition. Adobe vs. Microsoft has brought out the real incentives behind open standards. It’s not about the good, pure route toward a better society. It’s about money. Make no mistake about it, companies are willingly pushing open standards to governments for corporate leverage.
Here’s a relevant part of the statement:
Adobe is committed to open standards. Adobe publishes the complete PDF specification and makes it available for free, without restrictions, without royalties, to anyone who cares to use it. Because we license the PDF specification so openly, it has become a de facto standard, used by hundreds of independent software vendors worldwide. PDF is incorporated into a number of ISO standards, and Adobe encourages developers, independent software vendors and publishers to support and embrace it.
The above is Adobe’s pitch that it has created a successful product that it wants everybody to use – except Microsoft. Because as the statement continues:
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Next week, the FCC may revisit the issue of whether cable providers will be required to carry every channel of programming transmitted by over the air broadcasters. “Must-carry” itself is not a new idea–for years cable systems have been forced to carry broadcast signals over their networks. When broadcasters switch to digital transmission, however, each will be able to transmit multiple channels over the same bit of spectrum. So, should cable firms be required to carry each and every one of these channels? The FCC said “no” to such multicast must-carry rules a few years ago. But that was under Chairman Michael Powell. Current chairman Kevin Martin feels differently about “multi-cast must-carry,” and may now have the votes to reverse the prior decision. (More on the issue here.)
This week, he got support for this expanded regulation from an unlikely source: AT&T. AT&T, you may remember, has in recent months been exhaustively making the case against another set of rules–neutrality regulation. The federal government should keep its paws off private networks, they (rightly) argued, warning that they would discourage needed investment in private networks. However, this week a spokesman said that, regarding must-carry, it had no objection to federal paws. “We’re more than happy to put this programming on our network,” he said. “We support multicast must-carry.”
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If anyone out there is looking for even more to read (for instance if you are thumbing through old issues of MacWorld), you might want to check out Heritage’s new Linked! page. This page provides constantly-updated links to news and commentary from the web on a full range of public policy issues, including (of course) technology. For all issues check here. For tech only, go here
Enjoy.
I was catching up on some reading last night and I thumbed through the April issue of Macworld. I came across not just one, but two articles plugging Handbrake, a video-conversion utility that allows consumers to transfer a variety of video content–including DVDs–to their iPods for viewing on the road.
The first article makes a passing reference to this article which claims that using Handbrake is fair use, even if creating it was clearly illegal. (I think this is wrong–the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions don’t include a fair use exemption) In either event, the articles’ authors certainly don’t seem especially concerned about the prospect of urging their customers to break the law.
Something’s clearly screwed up here. The rule of law works because of widespread public acceptance. When the law is widely despised and ignored–as it was during prohibition, for example–it inevitably fails to accomplish its stated purpose and undermines respect for the rule of law more generally.
Now, it seems to me that one could reasonably go either way here: one could be outraged at MacWorld for blithely encouraging lawlessness. Or one can be outraged that the DMCA makes innocuous activities like watching DVDs on an iPod illegal. Obviously, my sympathies are with the latter viewpoint. But I worry the most about people who are comfortable with the status quo, where the law is routinely flouted and nobody cares. If the law is stupid, it should be changed.
Vacation? What vacation? There’s WiFi in my Frankfurt rental apartment! I’m here attending the opening round of the World Cup, Adam’s most-loved sport, and tickets to the games have RFID chips embedded in them.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee met in San Francisco. The most interesting thing about the meeting to me was leaving without showing ID at the airport. But one of the items of highest interest at the meeting was a draft report put forward by a subcommittee of the DPIAC suggesting that RFID should be disfavored for human tracking.
It was subject to some exaggerated reporting, and some RFID industry folks went into a bit of a tizzy. Penny-wise-and-pound-foolishly, they seem to believe that they should preserve the multi-million-chip market for RFID in identification cards, even though doing so frustrates and delays the development of a market for RFID on the packaging of consumer goods, which easily could reach tens or hundreds of billions of tags.
In a near analogy to tagging identification documents, the World Cup has issued a couple million tickets with RFID chips embedded in them. Getting RFID readers into German stadiums makes it likely that club teams will use RFID chips in their tickets henceforth. Kudos to the wily Phillips Corporation for using its World Cup sponsorship to create an installed base of RFID-using venues.
So let’s look at how mighty RFID adds value to the soccer ticket – and what part of any value goes to fans, organizers, or RFID manufacturers and integrators (after the jump).
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The past week has truly been a miserable one for supporters of neutrality regulation. Last Thursday, they got shellacked 269-152 in the House vote on the issue. Despite earlier talk of GOP members joining the pro-reg crowd, only 11 actually did so. But a surprising 58 Democrats voted against it. Then, yesterday, the Washington Post–no, not the conservative Washington Times, but the Post–editorialized against regulation. (By the way, no extra points will be awarded for guessing that pro-regulation advocate Jeff Chester responded to this by making an ethics charge, claiming that the Post didn’t disclose its conflicts of interest. Anyone sense a pattern here?)
The third shoe fell on the regulation crowd yesterday, when Senator Ted Stevens released his revised telecom reform bill in the Senate. Contrary to expectations, Stevens did not add neutrality regulation provisions to his bill. Instead he stood firm, with the bill only calling for a study of the issue. Kudos to Sen. Stevens for holding his ground on this.
Of course, the neutrality debate is far from over–and momentum could change. However, with only a few months left in the congressional schedule, regulation proponents must be looking nervously at the calendar, and hoping it won’t bring any more weeks like this one.
My side of the network neutrality debate may have resorted to paid astro-spam commenters to get their point across, but as far as I know, no regulation opponents have stooped to writing a cheesy song about the issue:
Three singer/songwriters met at a Los Angeles recovery center for those suffering from internet-related anger issues. How could Congress vote to destroy one of the only good things left in America? This made no sense! How could so few people be enraged? What were people doing to keep network neutrality the law of the land?
I get tired of repeating myself, so you can click here to see why this is nonsense. Oh, and you can listen to their cringe-inducing ditty here.
The Washington Post editorialized yesterday in opposition to regulating the Internet:
The advocates of neutrality suggest, absurdly, that a non-neutral Internet would resemble cable TV: a medium through which only corporate content is delivered. This analogy misses the fact that the market for Internet connections, unlike that for cable television, is competitive: More than 60 percent of Zip codes in the United States are served by four or more broadband providers that compete to give consumers what they want–fast access to the full range of Web sites, including those of their kids’ soccer league, their cousins’ photos, MoveOn.org and the Christian Coalition. If one broadband provider slowed access to fringe bloggers, the blogosphere would rise up in protest–and the provider would lose customers…
The serious argument for net neutrality has nothing to do with the cable TV boogeyman. It’s that a non-neutral net will raise barriers to entry just slightly–but enough to be alarming. To use a far better analogy: Competitive supermarkets aim to please customers by offering all kinds of goods, but the inventor of a new snack has to go through the hassle of negotiating for display space and may wind up on the bottom shelf, which dampens his incentives. Equally, if the owners of Internet pipes delivered the services of cyber-upstarts more slowly than those of cyber-incumbents, the incentive to innovate might suffer. Would instant messaging or Internet telephony have taken off if their inventors had had to plead with broadband firms to carry them?
This concern should not be exaggerated. Cyber-upstarts already face barriers: The incumbents have brand recognition and invest in tricks to make their sites load faster. The extra barrier created by a lack of net neutrality would probably be small because the pipe owners know that consumers want access to innovators.
Mike Masnick correctly notes that the Post exaggerates the competitiveness of the broadband market a bit–60 percent of zip codes may have four broadband service providers, but that doesn’t mean that 60 percent of consumers do–the vast majority have two or fewer. But I think the broader point of that paragraph–that there’s no danger of the Internet turning into a non-competitive service like cable TV–is exactly right. The value of the Internet stems from the availability of hundreds of thousands of small sites. The telcos would be shooting themselves in the foot if they cut off their customers’ access to those sites. And most broadband customers do have at least one option, so their ability to jerk their customers around is limited.
The editorial’s conclusion gets it right:
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The Register reports on what is quite possibly the awesomest object in the universe:
Astronomers have identified a massive comet-like structure – spanning a whopping three million light years – that is tearing through a distant galaxy cluster at more than 750 kilometres a second.
Yes, you read that right. A great ball of fiery gas, some five thousand million times the size of the solar system. Fortunately, it isn’t anywhere near Earth. The flaming gas-ball is in the Abell 3266 galaxy cluster, even more millions of light years away from us than it is across.
The fireball, which is the largest object of this kind ever identified, was spotted by stargazers using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-Ray telescope.
The author of the article showed remarkable restraint in avoiding references to “great balls of fire.”
Via IPCentral, I just finished reading “Patents and Business Models for Software Firms.” The authors assemble a large data set of patents, classify them as software and non-software, and do some statistical analysis as to which type of firms are most likely to take advantage of patents. They conclude, not surprisingly, that product-oriented firms are more likely to patent than service-oriented firms.
What they don’t do (and they acknowledge it) is determine any kind of causal connection among software patents, R&D spending, and innovation. And it seems to me it would be difficult to draw any conclusions about the impact of software patents on overall industry innovation using data of this sort. Software patents clearly benefit firms at the margin, or they wouldn’t seek them. But we can’t conclude from that fact that software patents benefit the industry overall–that would be a fallacy of composition.
It seems to me the best way of evaluating software patents empirically would be at the micro level: that is, look at individual patents and try to estimate the likelihood that the covered invention would have been created without the availability of software patents. Obviously, some will be hard cases, but there are also many easy cases.
It occurred to me that this is the sort of task that could be accomplished in a decentralized, peer produced manner: set up a web page where the user can look at a patent and rate it for obviousness, prior art, etc. There are probably enough geeks out there who hate software patents that you could analyze far more patents in far more detail than a traditional research team could hope to accomplish.
I just registered AmIObviousOrNot.com. I could set the site up, but my web development skills are rather rusty, so it would take me a while. Are there any PHP gurus out there who’d like to help out with a project like this?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.