Mike Masnick draws a distinction I hadn’t given much thought to before:
Over at Computerworld, Mike Elgan has written up a great piece highlighting how the iPhone is a fantastic piece of innovation that really has very little new in it. As we pointed out when we questioned Apple’s claim to 200 patents around the iPhone, the multi-touch interface isn’t new and has been publicly demonstrated numerous times. Elgan points to that video as well as other examples of how almost all of the “new” things in the iPhone have actually been around for quite some time–but that what’s special about the iPhone is that it will really be the first time that such features and tools are available to the general public, and how it’s then likely to move those same features from research labs into all sorts of common computing applications. That’s great for everyone–but it’s about innovation, not invention, and it seems like the market can do a great job rewarding such innovation without resorting to patent-based monopolies.
If you think about it, Apple’s strength really doesn’t come from inventing things. I’ve been a Mac guy for pretty much my whole life, and so during college I was one of those people who’d watch the Steve Jobs keynote every year. Almost every time, my techie officemates would see a new Apple product and say “hey, there’s nothing new there. Linux has been able to do that for 6 months.”
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Sunday’s Washington Post featured a story entitled, “Cable War Fails to Offer Rate Relief in Montgomery.” The gist of the story is that Comcast, the incumbent cable provider in Montgomery County, Maryland, is raising rates by 4 percent and residents are distraught that the much vaunted competition from Verizon has done nothing to curb prices.
So much for the idea that “competition will bring down rates,” said Montgomery County Council President Marilyn Praisner (D-Eastern County), who has long clashed with the industry over regulation. “That clearly hasn’t happened.”
David Isenberg links to the story under the headline “Benefits of Competition my Ass” and asks, “Are you listening Kevin Martin?”
You would think Verizon has been providing service in the country for years and has settled into a cozy duopoly with Comcast. So when did Verizon get permission from the county to start competing with Comcast? November 28, 2006. That’s right folks, less than three months ago.
As the Post story notes, Comcast serves 200,000 households to Verizon’s 1,000. However, it will build out to most homes in four years. The story also notes–albeit in paragraph 14–competition on margins other than price: “Comcast, for instance, has improved its Internet speeds four times over the past three years without increasing its prices.”
Scott Kieff, a law professor who works just down the street from me at Wash U, makes a novel (to me anyway) argument about the purpose of patents:
When patents are enforced with clear and robust rules, and backed up by a strong right to exclude, they serve an essential coordinating role in facilitating the complex process of getting inventions commercialised. Patents help get inventions put to use broadly and rapidly.
Bringing an invention to market requires coordination among many complementary users of that technology, including capitalists, developers, managers, labourers, other technologists, manufacturers, marketers and distributors. Patents help this diverse group act in a coordinated fashion in at least two distinct ways.
First, the right to exclude associated with a published patent acts like a torch in a dark room in drawing to itself all those interested in the patented subject matter. This beacon effect gets all the diverse individuals to interact with each other and with the patentee.
Second, everyone’s expectation that the patent can be enforced against anyone is exactly what provides these individuals with the required incentive to strike deals with each other. This bargain effect falls apart if everyone knows the patent can’t be enforced.
The profit potential associated with an enforceable patent incentivises everyone in the commercialisation process. Not least of all, for example, the promise of financial payoffs is what brings the essential capital investments to start and sustain businesses.
This argument has a certain superficial plausibility, but as I’ll explain below the fold, it runs afoul of Ed Felten’s Pizzaright Principle.
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Satellite radio competitors XM and Sirius have announced their intention to merge their companies in a $13 billion deal. The deal will face some obstacles at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but I think there are strong reasons for the agency to approve the deal immediately and unconditionally.
What are the consumer benefits that might arise from a satellite radio marriage? First and foremost, the survival of a vibrant and healthy satellite radio competitor is important to consumers.
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Joe at Techdirt reports on some great news from India:
We’ve written in the past about various problems brewing at Indian outsourcing firms that are increasingly facing talent shortages and competition from lower-cost competition. Om Malik has an interesting roundup of a fresh set of articles all pointing to continued troubles at these firms. The big problem continues to be the shortage of labor, which is the result of a few different factors. Many employees who got their start at one of these outsourcers are now going to business school, hoping to move up to higher value work. Furthermore, these jobs aren’t viewed as highly by college graduates as they used to be. Increasingly, talented coders have the opportunity to work directly for the likes of Google and other international tech firms. And there remains a shortage of top-quality education opportunities, preventing many from getting trained and choking off the overall pool of labor. None of this necessarily spells doom for these companies. One way they can cope is by moving up the food chain, offering services of higher value than simple outsourcing or call-center work. And, of course, they don’t have to limit themselves to Indian employees, they can hire talent from the US as well.
When the Lou Dobbses of the world complain about globalization, they like to paint a picture of an inexaustible supply of cheap labor overseas. This is bad for two reasons, we’re repeatedly told: it’s unfair to the overseas workers who are “forced” to work for low wages, and it’s unfair to American workers who can’t compete against foreign competition.
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Steve Jobs wants to sell you back copies of your own home movies for a $1.99 apiece! Or so declares this humorous Onion parody, (which almost sounds like it might have been secretly penned by our own Tim Lee!)
And while you’re over at The Onion site, you might also want to check out this funny take-off on the government’s ongoing lost laptop problems, which I’ve been writing quite a bit about here.
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Here’s another installment of my analysis of the voluminous Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) report issued by the European Commission. In my last blog post, I discussed how the EC’s
report is a call to action for Europe’s policymakers. The ambitious proposals in the report aim to do for Europe’s ICT industry what the Airbus project did for Europe’s aeronautics industry.
This realization makes the report less about open source software, and more about industrial policy (not necessarily in a bad way).
If you’re going to have industrial policy, however, you need the industry. In Section 6–FLOSS Role in the Economy: Market Share and Geography–the authors argue that Europe has both parts of a successful FLOSS industry equation: developers and users. This section is not a “build it and they will come” proposition; rather, the
authors proclaim to policymakers “build FLOSS apps because FLOSS developers are
already here.”
In the first of two posts about Section 6, I analyze the report’s discussion of the kinds of FLOSS use in Europe and the rest of the world.
How Popular is FLOSS?
It is an undeniable fact that the use of free and open source software is growing rapidly throughout the world and in Europe. In some cases, FLOSS software applications are even outpacing all of their proprietary competitors. Section 6 provides statistics and data from dozens of sources to back this up.
Read my full analysis over at the ACT blog.
Well, here we go again. Politicians in Washington are talking about regulating “excessive violence” on television, and this time around they plan to sanitize cable and satellite TV while they’re at it. I’ll have more to say about this issue in coming days and weeks as the debate unfolds. For now, I thought I’d just pass along some recommended reading for policy makers who haven’t given enough consideration to the sensibility or constitutionality of this quixotic endevour:
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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.