I’m reading the briefs leading up to the Ninth Circuit’s Kahle decision, (which was handed down this week) and I found this passage, from the government’s motion to dismiss at the district court level, striking:
Under the 1909 Act, a copyright holder could secure a 28-year renewal term only after filing a renewal registration with the Register of Copyrights in the last year of the first 28-year term of protection. S. Rep. No. 102-194, at 3 (1992). “In 1976, Congress concluded years of debate and study on all aspects of the Copyright Act by passing a comprehensive revision to the 1909 law.” Id. Congress identified the copyright renewal revision as “[o]ne of the worst features of the present copyright law.” H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, at 134. “A substantial burden and expense, this unclear and highly technical requirement results in incalculable amounts of unproductive work. In a number of cases it is the cause of inadvertent and unjust loss of copyright.”
So Congress found in 1976 that requiring authors to file for the renewal of their own works was an unjustified administrative nightmare. This, the government argues, justified scrapping the registration requirement. This despite the fact that this burden and expense is spread across thousands of different authors, and despite the fact that authors know better than anyone else which works they own and which works are still commercially viable.
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WASHINGTON, January 23, 2007–Those who would “Save the Internet” came to Memphis last week and declared victory in their struggle. They also hosted a party to celebrate and launch the next phase of the battle: going on the offensive.
The SavetheInternet.com Coalition is, of course, David to the Bell companies’ Goliath. Over the last two years AT&T, Verizon Communications and their trade group the United States Telecom Association spent more than $50 million lobbying Congress to change the nation’s telecommunications laws, according to disclosure documents. But it was spent in vain. The Bell-favored bill, which had overwhelmingly passed the House, died last year in the Senate.
In contrast, SavetheInternet.com spent $250,000 on educating the public about its side of the story, said coalition spokesman Craig Aaron. “Save the Internet” opposed the Bell bill, and made “Net Neutrality” its rallying cry. The coalition gathered more than 1.5 million petition signatures supporting the notion that telecom companies must be stopped from controlling the content that flows over their broadband networks
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Cindy Skrzycki, The Washington Post’s outstanding regulatory affairs reporter, notes in her column today that The Center for Auto Safety has asked federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to “restrict the use of systems that carmakers are building into their vehicles so motorists can’t make phone calls or fiddle with other interactive gear while they drive.” The Center for Auto Safety’s complete petition can be found here.
Skrzycki notes that on-board communications, navigation and entertainment systems are gaining in popularity. For example, GM’s “OnStar” system is now being countered by “Sync,” which is Ford’s new offering that is being developed in partnership with Microsoft. (I saw a demo of it out at CES this year and it is very cool. It allows the music from a PC in your house to be zapped directly to your car as soon as you pull in the garage). And many other auto makers currently integrate such systems into their cars, or at least plan to in the near future.
But the Center for Auto Safety claims that this is all just a disaster waiting to happen and want the government to regulate to restrict the use of these technologies within our cars:
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Ken Fisher at Ars has a great article on the flaws in HDCP, the copy protection scheme that “secures” most high-definition devices these days:
This stuff doesn’t work reliably for even the basic stuff like showing video flawlessly, let alone securing outputs. I even have a HDCP/HDMI issue with my TiVo, which decides that my TV is no longer secure about once a month, requiring a reboot.
Stranger reports have arisen from PlayStation 3 owners who are experiencing blinking displays when connected to some HDTV sets. When playing games, occasionally the sound cuts out and the entire display would blink on and off. As it turns out, the HDCP technology in the PS3 would freak out and sputter if a connected TV could not consistently and quickly indicate it was copy-protection ready. No one knew that this was the case until the guys at Popular Mechanics pinned the tail on the donkey.
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Related to our discussion a couple of weeks ago about immigration for high-tech workers, Katherine Mangu-Ward cites a study illustrating one way that a “brain drain” can be good for the country from which the brains drain:
Imagine, if you will, foreign movie makers who come to California. They are much more likely to make excellent movies there–or even to make movies at all, really–and more of their countrymen will get to watch them when they appear, especially if their countrymen have few qualms about bootlegs.
The authors, economists Peter J. Kuhn and Carol McAusland, write that those who remain behind “benefit because ‘their’ brains produce ‘better’ knowledge (such as more effective medicines, more entertaining movies, or more effective software) abroad than if they had remained at home.” This is particularly true in situations where a discrepancy between protections for intellectual property at home and abroad makes it easy for residents of the innovators’ countries of origin to enjoy the fruits of their labors with low transaction costs.
Personally, I find the notion that someone should be forced to live in an impoverished country solely so that his countrymen can benefit from his presence morally repugnant. But even if you buy that premise, it’s not at all clear that liberal immigration of high-skilled workers is, on net, harmful to poor countries. And liberal immigration is undeniably beneficial to the world as a whole.
Ezra Klein shrugs at the decline of the traditional American daily:
Newspapers currently expend a fair number of resources doing certain things very poorly, or replicating the efforts of other organizations. That was fine when the information junkie had few alternatives. It’s less so when the world offers limitless avenues for data accumulation.
But all this really means is that newspapers will begin following magazines and specialty newspapers (like The Wall Street Journal) and seeking to make themselves indispensable to certain audiences. Some of those audiences may be ideological, and you’ll see campaigning newspapers akin to the British Guardian or Fox News. Some will be professional, and you’ll see dedicated foreign bureaus that do nothing save in-depth reporting on global issues, in much the way National Journal does for Congress. All will be, in their way, more relevant. The bloodless, fearful paradigm of “objective” reporting has alienated all while informing none, and it will likely come to a close.
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IT&T News is a great publication that features many excellent articles by a variety of free-market policy experts. But I found this article on e-voting, by PRI’s Vince Vasquez, rather disappointing:
The e-voting experience has been a resounding success that has generated relatively few complaints from the electorate. To be sure, there were some legitimate problems with DRE machines on November 7, but many have been found to be man-made, such as innocent user error, inept poll workers, or ineffective planning by local election authorities. Unfortunately, these human-based fumbles have opened the doors for open-source zealots, wide-eyed activists, and crafty politicians who want to scrap DREs for the 2008 elections.
I’m not a politician, and I actually don’t think that open source would solve what’s wrong with e-voting, so by process of elimination, I must be a “wide-eyed activist.” I bet Ed Felten and Avi Rubin–both widely respected computer scientists–would be surprised to learn that they, too, are “wide-eyed activists.”
After busting out that sort of inflammatory rhetoric, you would think that Mr. Vasquez would have some pretty compelling refutations of us wide-eyed activists. But he doesn’t even mention–much less address–any of the actual arguments that e-voting critics make against computerize voting. No mention of the fact that DREs are less transparent, harder to audit, or more susceptible to wide-scale (rather than local) fraud than paper ballots. No mention of the current debacle in Florida, the various reports of problems with e-voting machines, or the fact that computer security researchers have actually demonstrated that some e-voting machines are vulnerable to vote-stealing viruses.
Nope, all we get is vague arguments about how “digital red tape and risky industry requirements jeopardizes the value of these innovative machines.” (Why are they innovative? Because there are computers in them!) And overheated rhetoric about “feeding the country’s voting system to ideological lions.” There might be some good arguments for using DREs, but Mr. Vasquez doesn’t seem to have any.
I’m excited to announce that Brooke Oberwetter is joining the TLF team. Brooke has been a friend of mine since we worked together at Cato. She’s one of the sharpest and funniest people I know. Brooke earned my admiration for her tireless (and sadly, futile) fight to stop the smoking ban in DC. Also, with the possible exception of Julian, she throws the best parties in DC.
And (despite my occasional nitpicking) she has many interesting and worthwhile things to say about tech policy. She’s a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and she tells me her work at CEI will be more focused on tech policy in the coming months. She’s currently seeking a masters degree in public policy at American University, and she also blogs at the CEI blog and her personal blog.
Lawrence Ebert says that my American article didn’t quite get the Federal Circuit’s obviousness test right:
Of the “specific documentation” point, Lee wrote: “[The CAFC] held that when a patent covers the combination of two elements, it can be declared obvious only if someone can produce another patent, an academic paper, or other formal documentation that pre-dated the patent application and had a specific ‘teaching, suggestion, or motivation’ to combine the elements in the manner described.”
Lee is wrong in stating that specific documentation must be found. In the CAFC case of In re Kotzab, decided in the year 2000 long before KSR v. Teleflex, the CAFC wrote:
“the teaching, motivation, or suggestion may be implicit from the prior art as a whole. rather than expressly stated in the references… In re Kotzab, 217 F.3d 1365, 1370 (CAFC 2000)”
I stand corrected. Mr. Ebert has a JD and I do not, and he doubtless knows this area of the law much better than I do. In my defense, however, I think I’m in good company: in oral arguments, the Supreme Court justices seemed pretty confused by the Federal Circuit’s precedents themselves. If Justice Breyer finds the TSM test confusing, I don’t feel too bad about getting it wrong myself.
In any event, I appreciate Mr. Ebert’s taking he time to point this out.
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has posted two videos relating to the iPhone. The first is an interview with Steve Ballmer that gives good insight into the state of competition in the device market. Ballmer scoffs at the iPhone’s high price point (and lack of current availability), while conceding that MSFT is behind in MP3 players. The second video, though, shows just why the iPhone is likely to do well. It may be high-priced, but it has incredible capabilities. Do check it out.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.