Picker on Interoperability and the Law

Randy Picker has a great post on interoperability and the law:

In one classic case, Borland did this when it sold the spreadsheet Quattro Pro with an alternative interface that emulated that of Lotus 1-2-3, the dominant spreadsheet of the day. Lotus tried to rely on copyright law to defeat Borland and failed though do remember that the vote in the Supreme Court was 4-4 and ties go to the lower court winner, in this case Borland. When I switched my main browsing program from Internet Explorer to Firefox, Firefox looked on my hard disk to find the links that I had stored as IE Favorites, again reducing the transaction costs of switching.

But we see how design matters when we return to my tagged stories. I don’t know for sure—perhaps the computer savvy can tell me—but I don’t think much if any of my Google Reader info is stored locally on my machine. I have been using my wife’s laptop at home at night while my laptop has been dying and, once I have logged in, Reader works on her machine as it would if I were logged on my machine. I don’t think that there is any locally-stored info for FeedDemon to examine were I trying to switch over both my feeds list and my tagged stories. And the question is whether FeedDemon could write something that would burrow through my Google Reader “subscription”—that seems like a fair description—to extract my tagged stories. And these design issues are even more embedded than that suggests, as Nick Carr makes clear in his recent post on this.

As the Lotus/Borland saga makes clear, law matters for switching costs and portability. Sometimes that law will be copyright law as it was there. Other times it will be antitrust, as the European Union is trying now in forcing Microsoft to disclose more so as to increase interoperability between operating systems and servers. (My colleague Richard Epstein criticizes this here.) In other cases, we will legislate portability and interoperability, as we have done with telephone number portability and as parts of Europe may push Apple on iTunes and the iPod.

I think it’s worth drawing a clear distinction between two different ways the law can affect interoperability. On the one hand, you have cases like the Lotus/Borland dispute where the law is the primary obstacle to interoperability. Borland had implemented an interoperability solution, and Lotus tried to use copyright law to block it. On the other hand, you’ve got cases like the Microsoft antitrust dispute, where the barriers to interoperability were non-legal (unless you want to consider copyright itself an interoperability barrier) and government officials were attempting to use antitrust law as a tool to force more interoperability.

The iTunes is a hybrid: a major barrier to interoperability is the DMCA. And rather than change the DMCA to permit reverse engineering by Apple’s competitors, the EU is pondering using antitrust-like legal mechanisms to force Apple to assist its competitors in achieving interoperability.

It seems to me that in the long run, legal barriers will almost always be more important than technological ones. In a legal regime that robustly protects the right of competitors to reverse-engineer one another’s products, it will almost always be possible for a smart hacker to build tools that allow consumers to convert their data between different formats. Samba, GAIM, Handbrake, and Open Office are all examples of open source projects that have transformed a closed standard into a de facto open one by allowing people to access their data without being tied to the proprietary software that created it. All the law needs to do to ensure these options are available, at least in the long run, is to get out of the way.

Client-server applications modify this point, but only slightly. It’s true that many feed readers store your data on a server and therefore it’s not as simple for a new application to convert the data from the old application. However, if you can access your data, it will always be possible (albeit very tedious in some cases) to write a script that will “scrape” the data from the old service and upload it to the new one. (In principle, the service could prevent this by limiting the fraction of your data you can access in any given session, but very few are likely to do that) If a service is popular enough, and has been around long enough, chances are someone will eventually write such a tool.

Picker’s post also beautifully explains one of the reasons that geeks tend to hate proprietary software and proprietary formats. Because they frequently muck around under the hood, geeks are more conscious than others about the problems proprietary formats create. If you want to kill your chances of getting a job as a programmer (especially in an open-source-friendly shop), the best thing you can do is send your resume in Word format. Many geeks won’t even open a resume submitted in Word format, and almost all of them will count it as evidence of cluelessness. In my experience, geeks’ dislike for proprietary software (and by extension, Microsoft, the king of proprietary data formats) is driven far more by these kinds of concerns than they are by a hatred of capitalism or a desire to get stuff for free.

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