I’m pleased to announce that my employer, the Show-Me Institute, has a new blog. If you have any Missouri ties, or just want to read the brilliant thoughts of me and my esteemed colleagues, I encourage you to check it out.
March 2007
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.
James Besson tipped me off to this interesting discussion of the implications of the Microsoft v. AT&Tcase:
The question posed by the Microsoft v. AT&T case, is whether that law should apply to situations where the only exported “component” in question is software written in the U.S. but copied and reinstalled in computers abroad. Interestingly enough, the near unanimous view in the software industry–judging from the briefs submitted by the parties I’ve listed above–is that it shouldn’t. (The specific facts of the case are these: Microsoft concedes that its Windows operating system infringes a U.S. patent belonging to AT&T (T) relating to coding and decoding human speech. It is willing to pay royalties on copies of Windows sold in the U.S., but contends that it shouldn’t have to pay for copies installed on computers abroad and sold there. AT&T, and the court below, say it should.)
In other words, all these parties with mighty software patent portfolios would rather, on balance, not be allowed to enforce those valuable assets abroad, so long as they could be assured that, in exchange, they also wouldn’t have to worry about being sued for infringing anyone else’s U.S. software patents abroad. That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of the U.S. patent system, at least as it relates to software patents; it sounds like the opposite. (Patent law is supposed to benefit industry by spurring innovation; yet it sounds like the software industry regards it as a net drag on in its industry.)
I find this an intriguing argument, although I’m sure if I agree with it. What do y’all think?
My favorite TLF reader points out this bizarre story about wireless “piggybacking,” over-zealous police officers, and (a lack of) child porn. It’s a safe bet that the police officers involved have better things to do than harass people using the WiFi connections of public libraries (!) from their cars. The notion that doing so would be criminal theft of service is absurd: presumably, no one would have thought twice if he’d accessed the network while physically inside the library building. It’s not clear how it suddenly becomes a crime once it’s outside.
It seems even more clear that the police were out of line in seizing the guy’s laptop and searching it for child pornography. No reasonable person would take the fact that someone is using the Internet from his car as evidence that child porn is being downloaded.
On the other hand, the trespassing charge isn’t crazy, especially if it happened more than once. Still, a proportionate remedy would have been to write the kid a ticket, not take his laptop.
WASHINGTON, March 13, 2007 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday released a paper about the entertainment industry’s move to take copyright controls global.
The report is the result of EFF’s participation in a closed-door session of the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), the predominant global standard for digital television. (America uses a different digital standard that supports high-definition.)
EFF’s report documents the extent to which the DVB consortium has signaled its assent to copyright control technology. EFF called these a series of “unparalleled restrictions” on consumers’ rights to enjoy lawful digital content. These include “enforcing severe home recording and copying limitation,” “imposing controls on where you watch a program” and “dictating how you get to share shows with your own family,” according to EFF.
The Commerce Department today issued its long-awaited final rules on the new federal subsidy program for digital converter boxes. As expected, the program was expanded include households that have cable TV subscriptions, but want to keep using those non-cable TV’s in the basement or kitchen. In a nod to fiscal responsibility, however, the expansion came with one caveat: these “basement TVs” would be eligible only until the first batch of program funding ($990 million) runs out. The second batch (up to $500 million more has conveniently already been provided for by Congress) would be reserved for households that don’t have cable service.
In other words, the cash till will be wide open until the first billion or so is spent. Only when the money starts running low will sensible limits be applied.
Why the two-part process? After all, Commerce’s initial call was the right one: if subsidies go to anybody, they should go only to those who actually would lose TV service in 2009, when the analog lights go out. In addition to being good policy, excluding cable households made fiscal sense too: no one knows how many cable households would apply for benefits, and total spending could easily go over the total authorized by Congress.
Yet, however sensible Commerce’s initial decision, Capitol Hill didn’t like it. Fearing a public backlash when analog signals are discontinued, members of Congress pushed the agency to expand eligibility. Thus the compromise: spending will only be constrained once the money starts to run out.
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Advances in biotechnology are moving incredibly fast these days and many scientists agree it will soon be possible for most humans to live past 100 years. What’s not being discussed yet is how society is going to manage that longevity revolution. I’m writing a book on this topic now, and here is a link to my op-ed in the LA Times today discussing the issue.
Sunlight Labs has built a little secret government document generator. Eye bet you can’t figure out which snapshot is mine.
Over at Ars, I expand on my recent post contrasting Brad Smith’s recent article defending software patents and Bill Gates’ 1991 memo warning that software patents threaten the software industry:
Gates’ memo suggests that in 1991, Microsoft still considered itself a relatively small company challenging entrenched incumbents. It was locked in a legal battle with Apple over the legal rights to the graphical user interface. It was in the midst of the OS/2 wars with IBM. And it was fighting to break Novell’s dominance of the networking market. In short, Microsoft feared the incumbents they were trying to displace would use the patent system to fortify their dominant positions in their respective markets. They thought their chances in the marketplace were better than their chances in the courtroom.
This post isn’t meant to prove anything, just to note something of some small significance–a data point, basically.
Digg is major gathering point for the pro-open source, anti-big company, anti-DRM crowd. To be sure, many others use the site, and most Diggers who hold these views are casual about their advocacy and not among the hardcore folks who hang out on more focused sites.
But sometimes I wonder whether among casual holders of this creed, the motivating factor isn’t political, philosophical, or ideological, but just to get something for nothing.
So note the current top stories on Digg:
| Votes | Story |
| 2061 | Windows Vista One Click Activator-BIOS Emulation Crack (Paradox and CLoNY) |
| 1174 | It has Been LEGAL to Unlock Your Cell Phone Since November 2006! |
| 726 | Walmart Sends The Consumerist A DMCA takedown notice. |
| 621 | “To whom it may concern: file-sharing is illegal” |
| 498 | The Pirate Bay’s Torrents Quadruple in a Year |
Just a correlation, proof of nothing in particular.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.