Last week, my organization, ACT, announced its intention to scour the European
Commission’s FLOSS
report and read and analyze this lengthy (and heavy) 287 page study. The goal: go beyond the executive summary and provide an in-depth analysis of the report, and in the process initiate a real conversation about the paper and its conclusions. As the recent
disputes over the report suggest, informed analysis is still sorely needed.
In a nutshell, the authors of the UNU-Merit report argue that an aggressive commitment to FLOSS – Free/Libre/Open Source Software – will provide an innovative spark for the EU. Using what the authors suggest is Europe’s competitive advantage in open source developers, the European ICT industry will be able to better compete with America’s tech leaders.
It is a provocative and ambitious strategy. But is it sound? If the EU desires to adopt FLOSS as its competitive advantage in ICT, would the data and proposals presented in the UNU-MERIT study help? How do they authors support their strategy in the 274 pages that follow the executive summary?
Those are some of the key questions I hope to answer in the coming weeks. Starting with Section 6 next week, we’ll analyze the report section by section, identifying the value but also the pitfalls of the report.
I’m also looking forward to constructive feedback from TLF readers. The report implicates software licensing models, market analysis, innovation, immigration, antitrust/competition policy, interoperability, and even society/culture. It’s impossible to be an expert on everything! But the long and the short of it is that the paper and its policy implications deserve to be topics of conversation, not just bits of rhetoric.
Full commentary on sections 2 through 5 of the study (essentially the paper’s introduction and reason for being) is here.
This is nothing new, but it’s something that grinds my gears to no end, and that’s how the DMCA makes it illegal for me to use works that are completely in the public domain. Researching my previous post, I had occasion to download and read a PDF of the 9/11 Commission Report. This is a report created by the federal government and therefore has no copyright; it is in the public domain. Nevertheless, when I selected some text and and hit ⌘-C to copy it, I get this lovely message:
If I click to enter a password it tells me that I have permission to read and print the document, but not to copy from it. Because there is no copyright, the government has no right to prevent me from copying. I could circumvent the DRM on the PDF, but then it’s possible that I’d be violating the DMCA (not the way I read it, but I’d have to take the risk). Even if I’m not breaking the law by circumventing the DRM, how am I supposed to do that? I have no hacking skills; I’m just a non-profit lawyer trying to read a government document. Normally I’d buy some software utility that would let me do this, but such a utility is something the DMCA definitely prohibits. I better start writing my petition for a Copyright Office exemption next time they grant them in two years.
Some people seem to think that this was outrageous. Others think it’s funny. Put me in the latter category:
Assistant Attorney General John Grossman called the light boards “bomblike” devices and said that if they had been explosive they could have damaged transportation infrastructure in the city.
Judge Paul K. Leary told Grossman that, according to law, the suspects must intend to create a panic to be charged with placing hoax devices.
It appears the suspects had no such intent, the judge said, but the question should be discussed in a later hearing.
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Implementing the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations was the House Democrat’s top priority during their recent “first 100 hours” legislative spree. One of the recommendations addressed in the resulting H.R. 1 bill had to do with public safety communications interoperability. The 9/11 Commission found that communications between firefighters, police officers, and other emergency personnel failed that day with deadly consequences. Here is a quick analysis of H.R. 1’s interoperability provisions, as well as the Commission’s recommendation itself, in which I argue that they are both overlooking the fundamental causes of the interoperability problem.
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My lefty alter ego Tom Lee comments on my post on video game piracy:
To some extent I think Tim is right: music is a unique case. But that’s mostly because the industry that arose to distribute music was so bloated, stupid and inefficient. Having claimed nearly all of the profit from retail music sales, the record companies are the part of the music industry that’ll withering first in the face of rampant piracy. That’s shielding the actual music creators from piracy’s effects–for now, anyway. Successful but non-superstar artists found different, largely concert- and merch-based means of earning a living a while ago.
But the lack of a large, parasitic & evil distribution mechanism (or at least one as evil) doesn’t mean that the videogame industry can be saved by copyright any more than the record companies can (the question of whether it should be saved strikes me as fairly irrelevant). The game companies’ business is vulnerable, too, and will ultimately have to transform itself. The wealth of DRM options available to game-makers and the console vendors’ closed systems give them a more luxurious position, but with the rise of networked consoles and the maturation of a market for pirate technologies like Alcohol 120% and console modchips, that era is coming to an end.
But that’s okay. The bloated budgets of the high-profile videogame franchises is a bug, not a feature. Look at the success of the videogames Burger King has been selling–they’re short and simple, but they only cost a few bucks and the restaurant has sold 3.2 million of them. I’m sure they were envisioned as a promotional tool more than anything else, but now BK is claiming they helped their bottom line. There’s clearly room for growth in this segment of the market. The idea that every videogame has to be a (shooter|RPG|platformer|sports game|GTA clone) and cost $60 is ridiculous.
I think there are actually two conceptually distinct questions here. One is the empirical question of whether rampant piracy will undermine the traditional business model for music, video games, etc. The other is a policy question about whether that process is something we ought to be cheering on, or if we should be looking for ways to reverse the process.
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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.