Michael Perelman of Against Monopoly points out this Business Week story about probably the world’s largest patent troll invention company, Intellectual Ventures:
Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s first chief technology officer, has a plan for Intellectual Property. First he gathers leading scientists and patent attorneys to brainstorm and come up with ideas that his company, Intellectual Ventures, can license to others. They plan to produce nothing but patents. You know what comes next.
The company also offers to “immunize” corporations from patent suits for a $50 million fee. The company will go around and buy patents before other patent trolls do, thereby “protecting” the clients. Others, of course, will have to face the consequences of not having ponied up the $50 million.
Does the word “blackmail” have any relevance here?
An excellent question! I found the phrase “culture of infringement” particularly chilling. Companies in the software industry don’t infringe because they’re uninterested in doing the right thing. They infringe because they realize that finding and paying off everyone who holds a patent that describes something they could do is logistically impossible. “Ending the culture of infringement” in the software industry means ending the freedom to develop software without spending tens of thousands of dollars on legal advice first.
Which, in practice, means limiting the software industry to a handful of large companies staffed mostly with lawyers. Hey, come to think of it, that sounds a lot like Intellectual Ventures!
Nick Gillespie has a great article at Reason on the Clean Flicks decision. His conclusion is right on:
I have no problem with gratuitous nudity (is there any other kind in a movie?), foul language, and graphic violence; but I’m squarely on the side of the easily offended CleanFlicks’ customers. They are doing precisely what technology is there for: to create the sort of art, music, video, and text that an individual or group of individuals wants to consume.
By all accounts, the CleanFlicks-type outfits weren’t ripping off Hollywood in any way, shape, or form–they were paying full fees for content–and they weren’t fooling anyone into thinking their versions were the originals; the whole selling point of CleanFlicks’ Titanic is that it spared audiences the original movie’s brief moment of full-frontal Winslet. CleanFlicks was simply part of a great and liberatory trend in which audiences are empowered to consume culture on their own terms–not the producers’. Big content providers may have prevailed in this specific case, but the sooner they understand and adapt to a much larger and more powerful cultural dynamic, the better they’ll be at serving the audiences who are increasingly in control of what they watch, listen to, and read.
Hollywood sure seems to be shooting itself in the foot with this decision. Instead of litigating Clean Flicks out of existence, they ought to have negotiated a licensing agreement with them. Not only would that mean more revenue for Hollywood and fewer boobs on the TV screens of conservative viewers, but it would also give conservatives one less reason to lobby for censorship.
Here’s my blog on ipcentral regarding Nick’s comments on the cleanflicks case, with which I respectfully disagree.
Art Brodsky complains about the broadband duopoly:
We’ve argued that broadband is a duopoly, with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) statistics showing that just about everyone who has broadband gets it from either the telephone company or the cable company. The FCC has affirmatively pursued the policy of creating this situation, and it’s one of the main reasons we need a Net Neutrality policy. There is no real choice.
The new Kagan study shows just how un-competitive the broadband market is. Here’s the title of the study: “Cable Modem Vs. DSL: Rivals Side-Step Big Price Wars So Far.”
Not only are there only two “choices,” in supplier, there’s little evidence of competition on one factor that really counts–price. In their July 6 Insights email newsletter, Kagan puts it fairly simply: “Though the battle for broadband access subscribers is intense, there’s no screaming price war between cable TV and telcos, and Kagan Research doesn’t expect one in the foreseeable future.” You can read the report here.
There are several things to say about this. First, this doesn’t match my experience. I signed up for a cable modem a year ago at an introductory rate of $26.99/month for six months. After that rate expired, I called my cable provider and threatened to switch to AT&T (who was offering a $14.99/month introductory rate), and they offered me a rate of $29.99/month with a 1-year contract. So not only am I paying significantly less than the Kagan article shows, but I’ve also experienced direct price competition for my business.
Maybe St. Louis is just a more competitive market than most. But it’s also possible that the competitors have kept their official prices steady while offering more discounts, rebates, and special deals. The Kagan article doesn’t have a lot of detail about its methodoloy, so it’s hard to be sure.
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Slashdot is reporting that Mozilla Firefox is now used by 13 percent of web users, up from 9 percent in April 2005, and 2 percent in May 2004. That’s impressive, if overdue, progress. Microsoft’s market share has dropped from 94 percent in 2004 to 83 percent today. Opera and Safari have been below 2 percent since 2004.
It’s interesting to note that FireFox has succeeded where commercial browser efforts like Opera largely failed to make a dent in Microsoft’s market share. This, it seems to me, is one of the many reasons to prefer a legal environment hospitable to open source development efforts. Microsoft may have killed Netscape using “monopolistic” tactics (personally, I think incompetence on Netscape’s part was mostly to blame) but such tactics can’t hurt a volunteer-driven effort like Mozilla, which isn’t focused on the bottom line. Having open source projects in the mix ensures there will always be some competition for the market-leading firm no matter what happens in the marketplace.
Score one for David Levine’s argument that complimentary goods would allow producers of expressive works to profit without copyright, part of his broader response to the infamous “King Kong question.”
Yesterday, I got Tool’s new CD 10,000 Days.
Instead of a jewel case, it comes in a sort of book with stereoscopic lenses built into it. As you ROCK to the first new album from them in years, you look through the lenses at these interesting and bizarre pictures that so typify the Tool aesthetic.
Meaning: You downloading wussies, sitting in your dorm rooms listening to the Tool song that you downloaded, you have no idea what the total Tool experience is like. You can’t download the Tool experience. Smoke all you want of the skank-weed you bought from that hustler and listen to your downloaded Tool. You don’t rock out to Tool the way I rock out to Tool. If you want to do that, you have to buy the CD. Downloader.
Ahem. Sorry. A little over-excited about the new Tool CD.
But you get the point. Consciously or not, Tool has linked its digital good to a tangible one and helped to lock in sales.
The album is good. I mean, . . . it’s Tool!
The LA Times has an editorial attacking the entertainment lobby’s pet causes this year: tech mandates for copy protection in digital TV and radio:
The bills would pressure device makers and service providers to limit or eliminate features from some products, such as the ability to record individual songs off satellite radio. In essence, tech companies would have to alter what they are selling to safeguard the entertainment industry’s wares.
Protecting intellectual property is a legitimate goal for Congress–after all, the Constitution called on Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” The task has grown more urgent with the emergence of an Internet-fueled global information economy. But what the entertainment industry is seeking in this year’s proposals isn’t merely protection from piracy; it’s after increased leverage to protect its business models.
That’s why lawmakers must bear in mind the balance needed between copyright holders’ interests and the public’s, something Congress has not done well lately. In 1998, it gave copyright holders broad power to block legitimate uses of works, even those in the public domain, through the use of electronic locks that impede copying of digital products. And that same year, it prolonged the public domain’s starvation diet by extending copyrights an additional 20 years, to 70 years beyond the death of the creator.
Whatever your views on the DMCA and copy protection in general, mandating particular copy-protection standards is clearly bad policy.
Today brings a strange WaPo article on the supposed weakness of Wikipedia because several of the original contributions on Ken Lay after his death were inaccurate, even intentionally so. The article was corrected within a few days of his death, and that, WaPo would have us believe, is a bad thing – better to not have the article at all, than to have it within a matter of days, I suppose.
Everything new is old again, it seems, and the breathtaking power of Wikipedia is already leading some to clamour for whatever is next. (How about a book, updated by experts every year or so, and sold door to door out of the trunks of chevys?)
That’s Rob Hyndman. I have to say I don’t really understand why Wikipedia gets taken in for so much criticism. Wikipedia is accurate 95 percent of the time, and it probably covers a wider range of subjects than any other publication on Earth. And it’s made available to the world for free.
Now, if you’re a journalist or an academic writing a peer-reviewed paper, you probably shouldn’t cite Wikipedia as your source. But so what? People older than 12 don’t generally cite traditional encyclopedias in their research either. Most of the time, 95 percent accuracy is more than sufficient. And if you need 100 percent efficiency, Wikipedia gives you a good starting point by giving you an idea of what to look for.
More to the point, when will the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Ken Lay be updated to reflect his death? 18 months from now? For that matter, does EB even have an entry on Ken Lay? It’s downright bizarre to fault Wikipedia for being slightly inaccurate for a few hours, when EB provides the reader with no useful information at all until months after an important event occurs.
Ars reports on the first of many security holes in next-generation DVD standards:
The folks at c’t magazine have discovered a simple tool for beating the content protection on Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats: the print screen button. By pressing the print screen button once per frame, you can capture an entire movie at full resolution. Of course, you’d want to automate this task, but c’t has shown that it can be done. They’re promising more details in the forthcoming print version of their magazine.
The few machines on which they’ve confirmed the hack have been running Intervideo’s WinDVD, though it’s likely that this hack isn’t specific to WinDVD. C’t also reports that Toshiba now has updates planned to disable the screen capture function while the software is running, and they may also update the AACS key in order to force users to either patch their software or be unable to decode the content.
The industry will stick its thumb in this hole, but if the record of past DRM efforts is any guide, that’s not likely to save the dike.
Ed Felten has a great new paper out on network neutrality regulations. Here’s his policy conclusion:
The network neutrality issue is more complex and subtle than most of the advocates on either side would have you believe. Net neutrality advocates are right to worry that ISPs can discriminate–and have the means and motive to do so–in ways that might be difficult to stop. Opponents are right to say that enforcing neutrality rules may be difficult and error-prone. Both sides are right to say that making the wrong decision can lead to unintended side-effects and hamper the Internet’s development.
There is a good policy argument in favor of doing nothing and letting the situation develop further. The present situation, with the network neutrality issue on the table in Washington but no rules yet adopted, is in many ways ideal. ISPs, knowing that discriminating now would make regulation seem more necessary, are on their best behavior; and with no rules yet adopted we don’t have to face the difficult issues of linedrawing and enforcement. Enacting strong regulation now would risk side-effects, and passing toothless regulation now would remove the threat of regulation. If it is possible to maintain the threat of regulation while leaving the issue unresolved, time will teach us more about what regulation, if any, is needed.
And here’s one other thought that struck me while reading the paper:
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.