Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Via Patri Friedman, here’s a video of a very interesting talk Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth gave at Google:
It gives a nice overview of the current state of the Ubuntu community. He makes it clear that emphasis in free software discussions on “community” is not just a rhetorical flourish. His team spends an enormous amount of time and effort communicating and coordinating with the hundreds of different projects that make up the Ubuntu distribution.
Ed Felten reports that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a draft of a report to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee recommending that the next iteration of its voting machine standards not permit the certification of paperless DREs. Given the speed at which the wheels of bureaucracy turn, it appears that would mean that no new paperless voting machines would be certified after the 2008 election. Existing DREs might be grandfathered in for the 2008 election and beyond.
This is great news. As Felten notes, the report recommends against certification of paperless DREs in clear and unambiguous language. It’s particularly important because if a recommendation like this is adopted by an official standards-setting agency of the federal government, it will be awfully hard for the Diebolds of world to demonize the source, as they’ve done with previous critics.
Regular readers might recall my software patent of the week for September 2, which covers the concept of controlling music playback on a computer screen. Now, via TechDirt, comes news that the lawyers responsible for that shakedown has put out a press release bragging about his accomplishment. And it really illustrates what’s wrong with our patent system:
Starkweather wrote the patent in 1996 for David Contois of Contois Music Technology. The concept consisted of a desktop computer holding multiple songs with an interface allowing a user to select three songs and play them on an electric grand piano. Starkweather saw the broader value and broke the patent into three elements: remote music storage, selection of music to download, and playing music on a music device.
Starkweather realised that downloading movies was an obvious variation to downloading music. It was data manipulated in the same way. “Sometimes it’s easy to break an invention down to its key components,” Starkweather says. “That’s why patent writing is an art, not a science, and requires creativity.”
There are a couple of interesting lessons from this. First, it’s obvious that this patent did nothing to advance the progress of science and the useful arts. The inventor had already created his invention when Starkweather came along, and had no expectation of getting a patent for it.
Second, this should make it clear that patents do create incentives for creativity. It’s just not the kind of creativity that the patent system is supposed to encourage. The real innovator here was Starkweather, who managed to get a patent that’s much broader than was merited by the actual invention, not Contois. Economists call this kind of creativity “rent seeking”–gaming the political system to extract wealth from others. Starkweather is in the same category as lobbyists and ambulence-chasing trial lawyers.
Neat! The Wall Street Journal appears to have cited my DMCA paper in today’s editorial. (It’s behind a paywall, unfortunately) Unfortunately, although I always appreciate seeing my work cited, it doesn’t look like they read read it very carefully:
A recent Cato Institute paper argues that “transformative” technologies like search engines should be exempt from many of these copyright lawsuits because they create entirely new products out of the old. They argue that the role of “copyright law is to promote, not impede technological progress.” That’s true. But without rigorous enforcement of intellectual-property rights, there may not be much technological progress to promote.
This wasn’t really the point of my paper, nor is it just my opinion. Rather, I was quoting the decisions of the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1994 that “transformative” uses of copyrighted works tend to be fair, and the Ninth Circuit, which ruled that thumbnails used in image search engines are such a transformative use. And I wasn’t talking about the YouTube or Google Book Search controversies, which involve different issues than the reverse-engineering cases I was focusing on in my paper.
As I’ll explain below the fold, the rest of the editorial makes the same kinds of mistakes.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
