A very interesting essay from Paul Graham on software patents, including the argument that patents for hardware also constitute patents on algorithms.
April 2007
If you look back at all the writing we have done here on Net Neutrality (NN), it seems to me that the common theme of our collective opposition to regulation is that we just don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into. No doubt, we’re skeptics about most regulatory proposals, but with good reason. Our government does not have a very good track record when it comes to regulating communications or high-technology markets for the purposes of improving consumer welfare. In fact, just the opposite is usually the result. Consumers typically are on the losing end of grandiose regulatory schemes that are suppose to serve “the public interest.” As a century’s worth of communications industry regulation proved, regulation typically results in stagnant markets, lack-luster innovation and limited consumer choice.
That’s why yesterday’s new Notice of Inquiry about Net neutrality from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has me so worried. It tees up all the questions that we’ve been asking here for the past few years. The difference is, of course, that now the whole world is going to flood the agency with answers and many of them will entail regulatory action.
Just the way the FCC frames some of the questions in this Notice concerns me, especially in terms of the breadth of what the agency is investigating. Consider how the discussion kicks off:
Tomorrow, the House Homeland Security Committee is hosting a “Border Security Tech Fair.”
Vendors scheduled to participate include: Sightlogix, Scantech, Wattre, Hirsch, Bioscrypt, Cogent Systems, Cross Match, L1 Identity, Sagem Morpho, Motorola, L3 Communication, Authentec, Privaris, Mobilisa, and Lumidigm.
I don’t know all of these companies, so I made some educated guesses about the links (and I may have gotten the wrong division of Motorola), but it appears that fully 11 of the 15 participants are in the biometrics industry.
If you think for a minute that this is about the boundary line dividing the United States from its neighbors, I have a bridge to sell you. No wait – I have a “biometric solution” to sell you. Mobilisa, for example, is being used to run background checks on the citizens of Clermont County, Ohio.
Participants in the Homeland Security Committee’s lunch briefing are all in the biometrics industry. One of them, James Ziglar, wrote an op-ed in favor of a national ID in Monday’s New York Times. He claims it’s not a national ID, but then, he’s got a biometric solution to sell you.
Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle today announced a citywide wireless service coverage initiative to ensure all major cellular phone companies are able to provide full coverage through Anaheim’s 50 square miles. This is in contrast to other cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia that prefer to stifle competoition by only granting city-wide access to a small number of providers like Earthlink or Google.
“It’s only fitting that the United States’ largest municipal Wi-Fi city would have complete and total coverage for all wireless devices, including cellular telephones,” said Mayor Pringle. “For 150 years in Anaheim, we have championed creativity, innovation and imagination – the same ideals that technology companies embody.”
Good for them. It’s time for leaders in other cities to do the same.
I think we can all agree that Don Imus is an ass and that his comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team were offensive and racist. He has rightly been universally condemned for his actions, and his employers — CBS Radio and MSNBC — have terminated his morning talk show program as a result.
But does his behavior justify something more in the form of a regulatory response? Some people think so, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), the head of the Congressional Black Caucus. As this L.A. Times article notes, Rev. Sharpton and Rep. Kilpatrick argue that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should sanction the CBS Radio stations that aired the Imus remarks. Rep. Kilpatrick has also suggested that the FCC should mandate diversity training for CBS Radio and MSNBC employees who allowed the show to be broadcast.
It goes without saying that any effort by the FCC to regulate hate speech is going to raise a number of sticky constitutional issues. As former FCC Chairman Richard E. Wiley tells the L.A. Times: “Lets say there was a discussion of some minority issue, and somebody said something that somebody took offense to. You can see how very quickly it could get very complex constitutionally.” And as Tom Taylor, editor of Inside Radio, told the Times: “You’d have to build another building just for all the complaints” the FCC would receive, he said.
I’ve spent the last 7 years closely monitoring the ongoing debate over media ownership in this country and what I find most intriguing about it is the inherent schizophrenia of the media criticism emanating from the political Left. That is, although we find ourselves in the midst of unprecedented explosion of media options and diversity, critics on the Left are still spinning gloom-and-doom stories about our modern media environment and the state of deliberative democracy. But they are doing so from two radically different perspectives.
This is the subject of a new article of mine that appears in the latest issue of the City Journal entitled “The Media Cornucopia.” In the essay I note that:
This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society–or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon.
I go on to describe these two competing schools of Leftist media criticism, which I label the “scarcity-obsessed” critics versus the “information-overload” critics. I discuss the views of the various theorists who occupy each camp of thinking and explain how they have quite successfully used these competing theories of media criticism to spin reality out of the political dialogue about these issues. In the end, I conclude that: “What unifies the two schools of leftist media criticism, beneath their apparent opposition, is pure elitism. … Both liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction.”
Anyway, if you are interested in reading the entire essay, the folks at the City Journal have posted it on their site here.
Former IRS Commissioners Doris Meissner and James Zigler editorialize in today’s New York Times about their support for “secure, biometric Social Security cards” as an essential part of immigration law reform.
The give-away line?: “To insist on secure documents with biometric identifiers is not a call for a national ID.” They provide no logical support for this naked assertion. Because it’s false.
Strengthened “internal enforcement” of immigration law means federal surveillance and tracking of all workers. All of them. Including you.
Last week, Mark Blafkin said:
There is a loophole (that Stallman hasn’t found a way to close yet) in the GPL that allows distributors to ship proprietary binaries on the same CD as free software, but they can’t be part of the same program/system. The GPL is designed to make it as difficult possible (and GPLv3 more so) to run both proprietary and free software at the same time.
Now, Merriam-Webster defines a “loophole” as “an ambiguity or omission in the text through which the intent of a statute, contract, or obligation may be evaded.” With that in mind, here is the relevant provision of GPL v2:
Mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
Now, as it states above, the term “loophole” describes an interpretation of a contract that is contrary to the intention of its drafters. If the ability to distribute free and proprietary software side-by-side on a CD is a “loophole,” it’s mighty hard to explain why they would have added a provision that explicitly permits such distribution.
But whether that was a loophole or not, at least Stallman is working hard to close it, right? Well, here’s the latest version of the GPL 3 draft:
A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation’s users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.
This is a bit wordier, but it seems to me that the intent is no less clear: the GPL specifically and deliberately permits distributors to “ship proprietary binaries on the same CD as free software.” Blafkin either doesn’t know what a loophole is, or didn’t bother to read and understand the GPL before criticizing it.
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