There is an absolutely intriguing discussion going on over on the Second Life blog today about a new threat facing this popular virtual reality world. (If you are not familiar with Second Life, see this Wired magazine “travel guide” for this virtual world.)
It seems that Second Life users are growing increasingly concerned about the spread of a program or bot called “CopyBot,” which allows the instantaneous and perfect reproduction of virtual objects / property created inside of Second Life. As Daniel Terdiman points out over on CNet News.com today: “That includes goods such as clothing that people purchase for their in-world avatars, and even the virtual PCs that computer giant Dell announced Tuesday it is going to sell in the digital world.”
The folks at Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, posted a note about all this entitled, “Copyrights and Content Creation in Second Life.” It does a lousy job of trying to explain how copyright law works in the real world but suggests that Second Lifers who feel they have been wronged might want to look into how the DMCA could help them out. The post goes on to note that:
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It occurs to me that the popularity of blanket patent cross-licensing agreements among software firms is pretty strong evidence that software patents don’t do much to incentivize creativity. This isn’t how healthy patent or copyright markets behave. For example, when’s the last time two big Hollywood firms announced blanket cross-licensing deals for their movie libraries, wherein each promises not to sue the other for copyright infringement if they pirate each others’ movies? Or how often do pharmaceutical companies sign blanket cross-licensing agreements permitting each to produce the other’s drugs without paying for them? Or, for that matter, how often do software companies sign blanket cross-licensing agreements for their software copyrights?
The reason these things almost never happen is that movie copyrights and drug patents represent genuine economic assets with clear boundaries. A movie copyright protects the right to distribute a particular movie. A drug patent represents the right to manufacture a particular drug. And a software copyright represents the right to distribute a particular bit of code.
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It’s been over a week now and it’s interesting to meter the reaction to the Microsoft and Novell deal. Popular, mainstream reaction has been generally positive–this could create a win/win for the companies, and consumers will benefit form the partnership. But for those more steeped in the open source community, there have been charged responses that indicate a chasm. Some see the agreement as legitimizing open source, at least in the eyes of the broader (Windows-dominated) marketplace. Others view this as a deal with the devil that will ultimately hurt open source and the GPL. The recent Samba team response is clear: the GPL is a zero-sum game–you exploit open source software for your gain to the detriment of others (ie. the "community"). Under Samba’s view, the Microsoft & Novell deal doesn’t enlarge the pie, but only unfairly redistributes it.
Is this the same sort of broad ideological split that separates money-making capitalists from share and share-alike Marxist communists? Or is the split more indicative of a narrow divide about what is better for software innovation, closed (or patented) or open software? Or even narrower still, are we only talking about whether the Microsoft/Novell arrangement violates the specifics of the GPL? I don’t really know–and perhaps a complete response incorporates answers to all three questions.
Tim points to the threat of a split in his post last week. He states:
Microsoft is laying the groundwork for splitting the open source community in two. On the one hand, you’ll have a handful of "open source" companies that sell products like Linux under the umbrella of cross-licensing agreements with Microsoft and other big patent holders. On the other hand, you’d have the rest of the open source community. This would give Microsoft cover to sue medium-sized open source firms and say "all we’re asking is for company X to go legit like Novell." Once they’ve collected a few scalps, they might be able to scare the business community away from buying open source software from vendors that haven’t joined the protection racket.
As I said in my post on this, I welcome these patent agreements. The Microsoft/Novell covenant not to sue is an example of market participants contracting around or within the patent and copyright legal system to reduce the transaction costs of negotiating, monitoring and enforcing licenses. Far from creating a legal cloud, unilateral or bilateral IP agreements work to create a workable opening for innovative developments in an already existing cloud of assertible (if not all enforceable) IP rights.
But I can’t agree with Tim on the following, when he describes the MS / Novell agreement:
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By far the biggest e-voting disaster this election was in Florida:
Florida law requires a recount in all five counties in the district. But all eyes are on Sarasota County, where touch-screen voting machines recorded that 18,382 people – 13 percent of voters in the Nov. 7 election – did not cast a vote for either Republican Vern Buchanan or Democrat Christine Jennings. That rate was much higher than other counties in the district.
As the votes were being counted late Monday, Jennings took the first steps toward appealing the election with an emergency petition asking a judge to have Sarasota’s voting equipment and data secured as evidence due to “alarming aberrations” in the county’s vote tallies. The campaign wants an independent audit of the county’s voting system.
“Maybe we are going to have to do a do-over. It may be the only solution if we cannot do an adequate recount,” Jennings’ attorney Jeffrey Liggio said.
The stark reality is that they can’t recount the output of e-voting machines. A recount involves individually inspecting each ballot and determining the voter’s intent. With e-voting, there are no ballots to inspect. The contents of the computers’ memory are all you get. You can “recount” that all you want, but it doesn’t provide any kind of independent verification of the result.
State officials Monday acknowledged problems with the lack of a paper trail.
“I do see some interesting things that are happening in regards to votes that seemed to have disappeared or people didn’t vote,” said Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, a member of the state Election Canvassing Commission that ordered the recount. “You don’t know if they chose not to vote or whether they didn’t, and possibly a paper trail would show more clearly.”
Computer security experts like Avi Rubin have been saying this for years. Maybe their arguments will be more persuasive now that it’s no longer a hypothetical problem.
I have come across some very silly applications of antitrust principles in my time, but this one has just moved up to the top of my list. Over on Business Week.com, Jason Brightman argues that video game retailers such as Game Stop are “forcing” consumers to commit to expensive product bundles in order to get their hands on a new PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii gaming console.
Mr. Brightman apparently thinks there is some sort of grave cosmic injustice at work when retailers bundle together gaming consoles with games or other products and require that users agree to purchase that bundle in order to be one of the first people to get their hands on a hot new console. He argues:
“Unfortunately it’s become all too common in recent years for retailers, particularly specialty stores like GameStop/EB, to pull a fast one on consumers who are all too eager to get the newest consoles at launch–remember last year’s $1,000+ Xbox 360 bundles? While it’s true that pre-order campaigns for brick-and-mortar locations allowed customers to pre-order nothing but the console, why should online consumers get the shaft? And is this even legal?… [U]nfortunately, it looks like this ‘predatory packaging’ is legal, but why the heck are consumers getting these console bundles shoved down their throats?”
Oh, come on! You have got to be kidding me. This is called capitalism, buddy. You know… supply-and-demand… rationale pricing of scarce goods… efficient market allocation, etc, etc. In fact, I want to make the exact opposite point that Brightman makes: I think the folks that are selling these consoles on a conditional basis or for a large mark-up are doing society a great service because they are ensuring that those of us who really want these scarce consoles the most can get are hands on them right away.
Unless he wants to make the argument that video game consoles have suddenly become life essential goods on par with food and water, his argument is just plain silly. After all, would anyone die if they had to wait a few weeks before they bought a stand-alone video game console at regular retail prices? How spoiled are we as a culture when we’re even having a debate about fair video game console allocation!?!
Incidentally, what about all those people on eBay selling the extra consoles they bought for major mark-ups? Should they all be in jail? Or perhaps the DOJ or FCC should regulate the video game console marketplace to determine fair prices and efficient distribution of video game consoles to the masses. Perhaps the rallying cry for this new regulatory movement can be “From each according to his [gaming] abilities, to each according to his [gaming] needs.”
Ridiculous.
In the latest issue of Heartland’s IT&T News, S.T. Karnick has an excellent article about the decline of media consolidation fears:
Leftist critics complained about the corporatization and consolidation of the media as an unwelcome phenomenon in the ’60s and thereafter, and they were correct to point out there would be deleterious effects. There may indeed have been an initial increase in sameness of movie and TV productions and a loss of creativity and vitality in the book publishing industry, especially in the fiction section.
Market-oriented analysts simply replied by saying the consolidation was good because it was what people wanted and they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t make sense. That was not the correct response, however. People do stupid things, and corporations do stupid things too.
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Gary Shapiro has commented on my recent post about the Cary Sherman article. He posted the full text of the 2002 speech from which Cary Sherman plucked a few words to quote. It’s worth checking out.
Jim Harper and I have a new project in the works that you might be interested in. There’s been a lot written in recent months about peer production, the term Yochai Benkler coined to describe decentralized, non-commercial projects like Linux and Wikipedia. We think that someone needs to write a paper explaining the the phenomenon and relating it to the ideals of economic freedom that we focus on here on TLF.
And just for fun, we’d like to try a little experiment: can a paper about peer production be produced using peer production? We’ve set up a wiki, and we’d like to invite the libertarian open source geeks of the world to stop by and help us explain what peer production is, why it works so well, and how it’s related to economic freedom.
If the project takes off, we plan to pitch it for publication by a major think tank. Please join us! Contribute a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole section. Peer producing a paper about peer production… it’s so meta!
This is an impressive exercise in issue-dodging on the part of the RIAA’s Cary Sherman:
The “Digital Freedom” campaign claims that the entertainment industry’s goal is to “outlaw new digital technology and devices.” This kind of knowingly false and incendiary rhetoric is designed to distort the issue and thwart solutions by demonizing us. The fact is, we are not only music fans, but technology fans, too. We celebrate advances in technology and recognize the importance of finding new ways to deliver content.
Instead of redefining fair use to promote a short-term free-for-all, let’s embrace the existing concept to allow for long-term growth of technology, while valuing and protecting the content it carries. That benefits us all.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that this is an example of “outlawing new digital technology and devices”–in this case, satellite radios with record functionality. Yet, Sherman manages to write more than 800 words without even mentioning satellite radios. In fact, I don’t think he mentions any of the policy debates that have occurred since the Grokster decision. It’s as if the RIAA just laid off all of its lawyers and lobbyists in the summer of 2005, and for some reason, that darned CEA just keeps picking on them for no apparent reason.
For the past few days, TLF’s Tim Lee and Brooke Oberwetter of the Competitive Enterprise Institute have been engaging in a, well, spirited discussion over net neutrality. The whole thing seems to have started when Oberwetter linked approvingly to one of Tim’s TLF posts. Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Tim responded with a detailed criticism of Oberwetter. Such is the blogosphere.
You can see the whole gory mess here, here, here, and here. Oberwetter argues that tiered pricing for content delivery could potentially benefit consumers, by opening up another dimension of competition. Tim comes down hard on this idea–arguing that such a fee system is unlikely to develop, and in any case would be a bad thing.
At the risk of shattering the image of universal pan-TLF consensus, I have some problems with Tim’s easy dismissal of this potential market development.
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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.