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.
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, I consider Patent #6,988,138, “Internet-based education support system and methods,” issued in January to Blackboard Inc. According to CNet, the Software Freedom Law Center is challenging the patent’s validity. And it’s a good thing somebody is. Here’s what the patent purports to cover:
A course-based system for providing to an educational community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a) a plurality of user computers, with each user computer being associated with a user of the system and with each user being capable of having predefined characteristics indicative of multiple predetermined roles in the system, each role providing a level of access to a plurality of data files associated with a particular course and a level of control over the data files associated with the course with the multiple predetermined user roles comprising at least two user’s predetermined roles selected from the group consisting of a student role in one or more course associated with a student user, an instructor role in one or more courses associated with an instructor user and an administrator role associated with an administrator user…
And it goes on in that vein. In a nutshell, they’re trying to patent the concept of distributing course information (assignments, announcements, class discussions, grades, etc) via the web with different access permissions for different users.
With most of the patents I’ve analyzed in this series, I’ve had to make my best guess about whether someone of ordinary programming skill could have developed the type of software described in the patent. But I don’t have to make any guesses in this case, because I’ve personally worked on software that does most of the things this patent describes.
Joe at Techdirt makes an excellent point about government and monopolies:
Here’s a story that hits on some of today’s themes of monopolistic behavior and keeping stuff off the internet. The Department of Justice has been given the go ahead to proceed with a lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors, alleging that the group colluded to prevent listings from appearing online, in a bid to give established brokers an advantage. Now, we’d be tempted to say that however backwards the organization’s thinking is, they have the right to distribute their data to whomever they want. But we should take a step back and ask why the NAR is in the position to monopolize this information in the first place. That fault rests with the government, which has put the NAR in charge of regulating its industry, and deciding who can and can’t be a broker. In other words, its monopoly has official legal blessing. Without this, anyone could go out and get listings, and abide by whatever rules they wanted to, offerings to broker home sales as efficiently as possible. So instead of suing the NAR, for doing what it’s intended to do (maximize profits for its members) why not get at the root of the problem and take away its monopoly status?
Quite so. We just published an article by my colleague Sarah Brodsky describing how the realtors’ lobby recently got a euphemistically named “Homeowners’ Bill of Rights” passed in Missouri that limits competition by outlawing discount real estate brokers. If you want to pay someone to list your house but do the rest of the legwork of selling the house yourself, that’s too bad. You have to go with a full-service real estate agent.
The state has a split personality when it comes to monopolies and cartels. Most of the time, our elected officials vigorously denounce them and take action to (supposedly) increase competition. However, if they’re created by the government, that’s a whole other ball game. In that case, only crazy right-wingers would suggest that more competition would be beneficial. And sometimes, the state does both at the same time: creating a cartel with its right hand, while its left hand simultaneously investigates the cartel for being anti-competitive. It’s very strange.
Yesterday, the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Progress & Freedom Foundation filed joint comments in both the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and Third Circuit Court of Appeals calling upon the courts to halt the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) recent over-zealous indecency enforcement activities. The cases are Fox Television Stations v. FCC (the Second Circuit case) and CBS Corp. v. FCC (the Third Circuit case). (The filings we submitted to the courts were virtually identical so I’m just posting the link for the Second Circuit brief which you can find here).
In our joint amicus briefs we argued that the status quo cannot stand for three primary reasons:
This is odd. Apparently, the CIA has recently decided that access to its entire website will henceforth be encrypted using SSL–the encryption standard used by websites accepting your credit card number.
They say this ensures that no one is able to impersonate the CIA website, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to impersonate the CIA’s public website. And if they did, SSL is only an effective deterrent if the user manually examines the site certificate, which doesn’t seem very likely.
The other claimed benefit is to prevent eavesdropping on (or tampering with) peoples’ browsing. But that doesn’t make sense either. An eavesdropper could still see the URLs being visited by a user. And since most of the site is publicly available, static content, encrypting it is kind of pointless. It’s certainly good to encrypt personal information submitted by users, but the site was already doing that before this announcement.
Technologically-challenged institutions have an unfortunate habit of judging security using bulleted lists. Throwing more encryption at something doesn’t make it more secure. You have to think about who your attacker is and what he’s likely to be after before you start looking for solutions. In this case, it’s not clear there’s any attacker at all. As far as I can see, no one is trying to spoof the CIA’s public website or eavesdrop on people visiting it. So adding SSL is a solution in search of a problem.
CNET reports that Google has been contacted by cell phone carriers who don’t want their customers accessing Google Maps from their cell phones. One Google executive claims: “we’ve been getting notes from some of the telco carriers who are saying ‘look, you need to stop our customers from downloading this thing’.” If the report is true, it says a lot about whether or not we need heavy-handed government regulation to protect basic Internet freedoms.
Google Maps one of the best cell phone features I have ever used and I would be angry if my cell phone carrier tried to take it away. They could, of course. They’re under no network neutrality-type obligations. Any cell phone carrier could block access to Google Maps tomorrow. But if the media report is true, some have decided to appeal to Google instead. Maybe they fear a customer backlash if they take action on their own. Dissatisfied customers could jump ship. There are four major cell phone carriers to choose from. But existing customers are locked into service agreements, so one would assume the carriers are in a strong position. What they fear, I suspect, is bad press and resulting damage to the brand. They also may be afraid of provoking Washington. Either way, they already seem to feel there are limitations on what they can do even in the absence of net neutrality regulation.
Mike Masnick notes that Venezuela is ahead of the United States when it comes to adopting voter-verified paper trails for their electronic voting machines. Several commenters objected that given the level of corruption in Venezuela’s government, this doesn’t really mean anything: corrupt government officials can mis-count paper voting records as easily as electronic ones.
I don’t know enough about Venezuelan politics to have a definite opinion on whether the election is likely to be rigged, but the general point is quite true. Voting security ultimately turns on human factors, not technological ones. If the people running your election system are systematically corrupt, your election results are going to be suspect no matter what technological safeguards you put in place. E-voting (with or without a voter-verified paper trail) can’t make dishonest officials follow the rules. It simply obfuscates the voting process, making it less likely that someone will spot foul play should it occur.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
