December 2006

Government Stalls RFID Progress!

by on December 15, 2006

Any modern society worthy of the title must have progress. But sometimes the government gets in the way. Or rather, sometimes it doesn’t. CNET bemoans a recent example:

The Food and Drug Administration set a deadline of December 1, 2006, for U.S. pharmaceutical companies to comply with regulations regarding paper trails, known as “pedigrees,” for their drugs…. [But] Judge Joanna Seybert agreed [with critics] and on December 11 granted an injunction against the implementation of the requirements. While the decision does not directly weigh on technology standards, the injunction, along with other state cases that challenge it, could subdue the rush for companies to comply and stall their adoption of RFID technology, Liard said.

That’s right; without regulation and a government mandate, RFID adoption will be stymied. Horrors.

This mentality is far from abnormal among scientists and technologists (consider the debates over stem cells and NASA funding). The march of progress is onwards and upwards, by hook or by crook. And if it’s the government’s hook, so be it–full speed ahead!

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Anderson on the Evolving Web

by on December 15, 2006

Chris Anderson has a great two part series on the future of the Wired website. I thought this snapshot of the evolving conventional wisdom with regards to website design was particularly interesting:

THEN: Bookmarks and habit drive traffic to the home page; site architecture and editorial hierarchy determines where readers goes next. Portals rule.

NOW: Search and blog links drive readers to individual stories; they leave as quickly as they come. “De-portalization” rules.

THEN: Media as Lecture: we create content, you read it.

NOW: Media as Conversation: a total blur between traditional journalism, blogging and user comment/contributions.

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Do Small Companies Need Software Patents?

by on December 15, 2006 · 20 comments

In a comment on Wednesday’s post on software patents, Patrick Mullen offers the following argument:

I think patents actually make it harder for companies like Microsoft and Apple. You can be the best programmer in the world and write the best program ever, but if a company with the resources of Microsoft has the ability to copy your program, who do you think will have the market share? Do you think you would stand a chance against their marketing machine?

I would find this argument more persuasive if there weren’t so many counterexamples. Let’s start with Google. They entered what everyone thought was a mature industry in 1998 and created a $150 billion company in under a decade. Yahoo and Microsoft did their best to copy the technology, but they were unable to stop Google’s momentum.

Or take YouTube. Google–by 2005 a large company with deep pockets–actually beat YouTube to market with a flash-based video site. Yet YouTube surged past them, and after 18 months they had beaten the company so soundly that Google was forced to shell out $1.5 billion to buy them.

There are plenty of other examples: MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, Hotmail, Digg, and probably hundreds of smaller firms I’m not thinking of. Most of these had big companies try to replicate their success. And in most cases, those efforts failed miserably; the competing products weren’t as good, or couldn’t generate the buzz of the original. As far as I know, software patents were not an important component of any of these startups’ business models.

Now, of course some small companies have been crushed by larger rivals. Netscape is the obvious example. Kiko is arguably another. But it’s not clear to me why we should consider that a problem. One of Netscape’s big problems was that Netscape version 4 sucked, and then they took 3 years to release an even more sucky version 6.

As Mike Masnick emphasizes over and over again, it’s a good thing that companies have to keep innovating if they want to succeed. Giving a company a patent that guarantees it a lock on a particular market simply reduces their incentive to keep improving the product. That doesn’t seem like good policy to me.

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A Jobless Future?

by on December 15, 2006 · 4 comments

Ezra Klein worries about the perils of robotics to the labor market:

Soon enough, according to Bill Gates, we’ll all have personal robots. The precise implications of a transition to an economy largely run by hyperpowered, anthropomorphic machines is, obviously, unclear. It’s pretty safe to assume you’ll see a lot of occupational displacement, and at a point, you’ll see more than can be effectively made up. Was Marx right, but we had to wait for robots? Maybe. Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your usefulness!

This gets economics completely backwards. The purpose of an economy is to produce wealth, not jobs. Jobs are the unpleasant tasks we have to perform to get the wealth. If we can get wealth without jobs, that’s an unambiguous improvement. Only decades of demagoguery about “creating jobs” makes it possible for people to get that so backwards.

The more wealth there is in the world, the easier it will be for you to get some of it. Robots would only accelerate the accumulation of wealth, thereby increasing the amount of money a worker is likely to be able to get for a given unit of his labor. True, his wages might shrink relative to the overall economy, but he’ll only get more productive as technology improves, so in absolute terms his wages will only go up.

But what if the robots are better than the people at absolutely everything? Here, we have to bring in the concept of comparative advantage. Even if robots are better in absolute terms at everything, humans will always have a comparative advantage at something. The classic example here is a lawyer and his secretary. The lawyer might be better than the secretary at absolutely everything. Yet the secretary is still useful, because the lawyer might be 100 times as good as the secretary at practicing law, but only twice as good at making photocopies. Therefore, it still makes sense to hire the secretary to make photocopies so the lawyer can devote his energies to practicing law.

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Software Patent of the Week: Patents as if Abstraction Mattered

by on December 14, 2006 · 2 comments

Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week, we’ll consider this patent, “Computer controlled video system allowing playback during recording,” which a company called Forgent apparently believes entitles it to royalties from the PVR industry. Here is the abstract:

A teleconferencing system with capability to store incoming multiple medium messages for later retrieval and playback is disclosed. The system includes a communications multiplexer which, in normal mode, receives the incoming message and routes the message to various output functions, including video, audio, and computer display. In store mode, the communications multiplexer receives the incoming message and communicates it to disk storage, for example by way of direct memory access. During playback, the communications multiplexer receives data from the disk storage, and controls its communication to the various output functions, in the same manner as during receipt of a normal incoming message during an interactive teleconference. As a result, multiple medium messages may be stored for later retrieval, with the playback appearing in the same manner as a conventional teleconference message.

This patent covers a device that’s capable of recieving, storing, and displaying various types of data. Unless I’m missing something, such a device is generally known as a “computer,” and I’m pretty sure that computers capable of manipulating audio and video content were invented well before 2001.

Moreover, almost all of the features described in this patent are core components of any modern operating system. Modern operating systems are adept at accepting data from a variety of different sources and routing them, as appropriate, to storage or to output devices. Using a technique called “multitasking,” they can store one file to disk while simultaneously streaming another file to an output device.

Once a general-purpose technology (like data storage and retrieval) has been invented, straightforward applications of that technology (like video storage and retrieval) are clearly obvious. I mean, once somebody has invented the hammer, we wouldn’t grant a patent on using that hammer to pound a particular kind of nail, would we?

Update: Incidentally, Forgent appears to be something of a patent troll. They’re the same company that claimed back in 2002 that they owned a patent covering the JPEG format. Forgent settled in one such case back in November.

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Bill Gates Says DRM has “Huge Problems”

by on December 14, 2006 · 10 comments

Bill Gates’s thoughts on DRM, courtesy of a rough summary by Michael Arrington:

Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers” while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are “huge problems” with DRM, he says, and “we need more flexible models, such as the ability to “buy an artist out for life” (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: “People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.”

Keep in mind that Gates heads a company that has an R&D budget in the billions, and they’ve been trying to do DRM right for close to a decade now. Yet he frankly admits that all the money has been for naught. A decade from now, people will look back at the DRM and e-voting fads of the ’00s and ask “what were we thinking?”

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“Dangerous” Toys–Then and Now

by on December 14, 2006

I spend a lot of time arguing with media critics who would like to see various types of content censored in the name of protecting children. Video games are usually at the top of their regulatory wish list. Some of these critics claim that video games are, at a minimum, creating a generation of slothful youth. But others make more grandiose claims that video games are training today’s youth to essentially be cop killers or serial murderers. That’s the conclusion of one book I read recently with the title (I’m not kidding) “Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill.” The authors of this over-the-top book argue that there is “a clear cause-and-effect relationship between screen violence and violent behavior.”

But it just isn’t true. As I documented in this recent study, juvenile murder, rape, robbery and assault are all down significantly over the past decade. Overall, aggregate violent crime by juveniles fell 43 percent from 1995-2004. And there are fewer murders at school today and fewer students report carrying weapons to school or anywhere else than at any point in the past decade. Other juvenile trends are improving, too. Alcohol and drug abuse among high school seniors has generally been falling and is currently at a 20-year low. Teen birth rates have hit a 20-year low in 2002 and fewer teens are having sex today than they were 15 years ago. High school dropout rates continue to fall steadily, as they have for the past 30 years. And although the teenage suicide rate rose steadily until the mid-1990s, it began a dramatic decline after that that continues today. (All these statistics are thoroughly documented in my study).

But let’s set aside these meddlesome things called facts for a moment and ask a different question: Are the “games” that kids play today really more dangerous than the games older generations played when they were children? Are the electronically-rendered games that kids play today really more dangerous than the games children played back in the “good ol’ days”?

What got me thinking about this website that one of my PFF colleagues brought to my attention entitled “The 10 Most Dangerous Play Things of All Time.” It’s a humorous look at some of the most dangerous toys and games of the past few decades. And when I say dangerous, I mean seriously dangerous toys–as in death, dismemberment or poisoning. That kind of dangerous. And I’m proud to say that even though I owned and played with 3 of the toys on the “most dangerous” list, I made it out of childhood alive and unharmed! Nonetheless, the list is frightening.

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What Should McDowell Do?

by on December 14, 2006 · 2 comments

An interesting ethical dilemma confronts FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell, who could decide the fate of the AT&T/BellSouth merger.

It may not entirely be McDowell’s fault that the merger is languishing at the FCC despite the fact the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice has already concluded it poses no significant threat to competition. After all, as McDowell pointed out in a recent statement, his four colleagues managed to approve the recent SBC/AT&T merger without him. But the analogy isn’t useful. Back then, many in Washington thought telecommunications legislation appeared to be moving through Congress and all sides had high hopes for their agendas. Everyone realizes the legislation is now dead, and this merger is the only opportunity on the horizon to enact a net neutrality nondiscrimination principle and prop up the unsustainable CLEC business model. Indications are McDowell doesn’t want to participate; the question is, should he anway?

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Leahy’s Agenda

by on December 14, 2006 · 2 comments

A friend sent me Sen. Leahy’s speech on his agenda for the upcoming Congress. I don’t agree with all of it, but it looks like it’s mostly positive. He wants to strengthen oversight of law enforcement agencies, strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, and defend the judicial independence. Here’s what he had to say on NSA spying:

For years, this Administration had hidden the “President’s program” of warrantless wiretapping of Americans. We are now beginning to learn that it was not just one program but many that have been hidden from Congress. We all support monitoring the communications of suspected terrorists. Doing that is basic to thwarting terrorism. It is essential, and it is permitted under existing law. It is also essential that when that monitoring impinges upon the rights of Americans, it needs to be done lawfully and with adequate checks and balances to prevent abuses. Initially the Administration stonewalled our inquiries and claimed unilateral power and a monopoly on deciding what needs to be done and how to do it. As we pressed for answers, their responses turned into a demand for sweeping legal authority without any independent judgment by Congress, or any meaningful answers about what they have been doing.

We came together in the days after 9/11. We worked together to provide new authority the Administration said it needed. But after White House unilateralism set in, they have claimed for themselves broad authority to violate the law and secretly eavesdrop on American phone and computer communications, without proper congressional or judicial review. That is a recipe for abuse. The reason we have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act–or FISA–in the first place is because of a period of earlier abuses of Americans’ rights and privacy.

With meaningful oversight and cooperation from this Administration we can achieve the right balance. We all have the same goal–protecting our country and its citizens. We have made more than a dozen changes to FISA since 9/11. If FISA needs more changes, then we should work together to achieve that in a responsible way, once Congress has a basis in knowledge that justifies further changes.

This sounds good, although I wouldn’t be shocked if Leahy caves to the administration the way Specter did. And Leahy mentioned patent reform:

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Declaration of Independence for Virtual Worlds?

by on December 14, 2006 · 2 comments

My former Cato Institute colleague and frequent co-author Wayne Crews suggests in an editorial today the time may be right for a “Declaration of Independence for virtual games.” Crews, who is currently vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues that:

“Can political regulation be avoided? ‘Second Life’ is a grand experiment: Those appreciative of today’s numerous revolutions in communications, of which ‘Second Life’ is one striking example, have a stake in keeping voluntary, private networks like ‘Second Life’ as unregulated as possible, or at the very least, relying on existing law that obviates the need for harmful regulatory adventurism.”

This is something I’ve wondered about myself in various essays here. It’s been ten years since John Perry Barlow penned his famous “Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace.” Maybe it’s time for someone take a shot at one for the virtual reality world. So, who wants be the Thomas Jefferson of virtual reality?!

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