Last week, the EPA reversed course and said it will begin to regulate nanotechnology, specifically nanoparticles of silver used in washing machines. Now comes word that “Berkeley is proposing what a city official says would be the world’s first local regulation of nanomaterials,” according to the SF Chronicle. I love the rationale offered by the city official: “There have been a great number of attempts to regulate them, and they’ve all amounted to nothing because of the fear of upsetting industry, which leaves workers and the community at some unknown risk,” he said. “It’s the unknown that’s a concern to us.” Someone recently explained to me that when pasteurization first became prevalent, many opposed it because of possible unknown health risks. Nanotech is something I plan to keep an eye on and maybe shed some light on the consumer benefits as well as the risks.
This week I appeared on C-SPAN’s weekly program “The Communicators” and discussed a wide variety of communications and media policy issues including: the outlook for telecom & media legislation in the new Democratic Congress, the First Amendment treatment of new media technologies, Net neutrality regulation and the need for universal service and spectrum policy reform.
The video can be viewed here and I apologize in advance if I put you to sleep!
When are state and local lawmakers going to stop wasting taxpayer dollars with unnecessary regulatory enactments and fruitless lawsuits aimed at censoring video games? I ask because this week the video game industry added yet another slam dunk victory to its growing string of impressive First Amendment wins. For those of you keeping track at home, this brings the tally to 10 major court wins for the video game industry versus zero wins for would-be government regulators. With a track record like that you would think that government officials would get the point. But the censorial tendencies of public officials have once again trumped common sense.
This week’s win came in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Entertainment Software Association v. Blagojevich. (Full decision here.) The case dealt with an Illinois statute that would have required that video game retailers to affix a 4-square-inch sticker with the numerals “18” on any “sexually explicit” game. It also would have imposed criminal penalties on any retailer who sold or rented a game with that designation to a minor. The statute also included signage and brochure requirements that would have forced retailers to place certain displays in their stores and provide all customers with brochures about game ratings.
The court’s decision overturning the law was written by Judge Ann Claire Williams and it echoed what every previous decision on this front has held, namely:
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According to Congress Daily, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff “said today his department will ensure that the highest-risk urban areas have interoperable [public safety] communications equipment by the end of next year, and that all states have it by the end of 2008.” DHS has been under pressure from the incoming Democratic majority to do something about the lack of communications among first responders. According to the article,
Without explicitly acknowledging the looming pressure for faster action, Chertoff told a conference of emergency response officials that metropolitan regions under his department’s Urban Areas Security Initiative grant program will have interoperable communications by the end of the 2007 calendar year, followed by all states by the end of 2008.
Chertoff said the department will give urban locations “interoperability scorecards” next month to help them decide how much money to seek in their upcoming grant applications. He did not provide additional details during his speech.
A Homeland Security Department aide would only add: “We will have further info at later date, as well as further info on the grant guidance.”
The whole speech is here, but it doesn’t really add much. I’m not sure what to make of this, but if the interoperability problem could be solved so simply, by just giving more money in federal grants to states and localities, then we would have fixed it a long time ago. As the Katrina Commission pointed out in its report, “Although some New Orleans and Louisiana state officials attribute the lack of true interoperability for first responders in the region to financial limitations, this explanation flies in the face of the massive amounts of federal grants to Louisiana.” Among other things, the interoperability problem is caused by a collective action problem, which in turn is cause by a spectrum policy that gives each of 50,000 public safety agencies their own (untradable) spectrum license and thus the impetus to build their own custom radio system. Coordination among these 50,000 actors is not easy, and I don’t see how more money will help.
Luckily, the Mercatus Center and Tom Hazlett’s Tech Center at GMU are putting on a symposium along with the FCLJ that will try to offer some solutions for the interoperability issue on Friday, Dec. 8. You’re intvited. Presenting papers on the topic will be Gerald Faulhaber, Jon Peha, Phil Weiser, and yours truly.
Brazil, India and Italy recently joined the Open Document Format parade, according to today’s press release from the ODF Alliance. Brazil will recommend ODF as the government’s preferred
format, India decided to use ODF at its tax office, and
Italy will recognize ODF as national standard. Is this good or bad news for technology liberators (or neither – is it neutral)?
Hard to tell without reading the full details (Brazil’s document is in Portuguese). But if these governments are in effect choosing technology winners and losers, then this is a bad thing.
Now, I understand that the stated mission of the ODF Alliance is, essentially, to ensure that documents are accessible across platforms and applications, even as technologies change. However, I get squirmy when governments approve and select technologies in a way that that appears to be more than government asserting its power as a customer, and is instead catering to an ideology backed by IBM, Sun, and other large companies with interests in non-proprietary software).
How can we ensure that documents are readable and interoperable without governments engaging in file format beauty contests? There has to be a better way…and there is! I’d rather have governments express their goals – long-term access, interoperability, disability access, etc – and let the market determine the best format. After all, ODF will one day be usurped by a better format, but vested interests in the status quo could delay its adoption by governments.
A transcript of the KSR v. Teleflex oral argument is available here. It sure sounds like the justices are not happy with the status quo:
MR. GOLDSTEIN: Justice Scalia, I this it would be surprising for this experienced Court and all of the patent bar–remember, every single major patent bar association in the country has filed on our side –
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, which way does that cut? That just indicates that this is profitable for the patent bar.
(Laughter.)
MR. GOLDSTEIN: Mr. Chief Justice, it turns out that actually is not accurate.
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Doug Lay points out this summary of today’s oral arguments in the KSR v. Teleflex case. ZDNet’s Anne Broache has another good summary. It sounds like the argument went well for the forces of sanity:
During hour-long oral arguments in a case that’s closely watched by the business community, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that an existing federal court test for determining patent obviousness relied too little on common sense. Justice Antonin Scalia went so far as to call the test “gobbledygook” and “meaningless.”
“It’s worse than meaningless because it complicates the question rather than focusing on the statute,” Roberts went on to say of the test, which requires evidence of a past “teaching, suggestion or motivation” that would lead to a particular invention in order for it to be declared “obvious.”
My co-blogger Solveig Singleton (along with Jim Delong) filed an excellent amicus brief in the case for PFF.
Why didn’t the Baby Bells compete with one another when Congress ended their exclusive franchises in 1996? Each possessed the necessary expertise and vast resources. The FCC was most eager to help. Did the Baby Bells conspire to carve up their territories in order to maintain their respective monopolies? In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, counsel for Twombly allege that they did, though they can’t cite any direct evidence. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday.
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Ed Felten has a clever post on the strange intersection of Second Life and copyright law:
Alice designs a spiffy new hot air balloon that everyone covets. Bob uses CopyBot to make his own replica of the balloon, which he starts riding around the skies. Alice discovers this and sends a takedown notice to Second Life. Bob’s balloon is then “taken down”–it disappears from the world, as in the classic cartoon Duck Amuck, where the animator’s eraser plays havoc with Daffy Duck’s world.
But surely Bob isn’t the only one riding in a copied balloon. Others may have CopyBotted their own balloons or bought a balloon copy from Bob. It’s tedious for Alice to write and send a takedown notice every time she sees a copied balloon.
What Alice needs is a takedown gun. When she sees an infringing balloon, she just points the takedown gun at it and pulls the trigger. The takedown gun does the rest, gathering the necessary information and sending a takedown notice, dooming the targeted balloon to eventual destruction. It’s perfectly feasible to create a takedown gun, thanks to Second Life’s rich tools for object creation. It’s a gun that shoots law rather than bullets.
Felten goes on to explore the ramifications of the development of such a gun. He concludes that “when copying is easy, laws against copying are very hard to enforce.”
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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.