Y’all should watch this Sunday’s 60 Minutes CBS News show (May 13, 7pm EDT) about the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and its campaign to crush internet-based business models that discount commissions. My colleague Steve DelBianco appears in the piece, based on his role at eRealty.com, a startup that was thwarted by new rules at NAR.
You’ll be glad to know that Steve doesn’t call for any regulation — just exhorts the Realtors to avoid regulation and litigation by allowing more innovation and price competition in their own ranks.
The show airs at an eventful time for the real estate industry. Earlier this week, the FTC released a report that assessed how the real estate brokerage industry has lobbied for regulation in the name of consumer protection, but has the effect of competition prevention. The report calls for a repeal of real estate laws, rules and regulations that limit choices for consumers, limit competition for new brokerage models and don’t appear to provide any justifiable benefits for consumers. In this report, Steve is quoted multiple times
Finally, the Realtors are holding their mid-year convention next week here in Washington. Add the DoJ antitrust lawsuit against NAR and you have a perfect storm over barriers to e-commerce in the real estate space.
I assume most of TLF’s readers are already reading Ed Felten, but just in case some of you weren’t, I thought today’s post on HBO’s Bob Zitter’s suggestion that we come up with a new euphemism for DRM was particularly good:
The irony here is that “rights management” is itself an industry-sponsored euphemism for what would more straightforwardly be
called “restrictions”. But somehow the public got the idea that DRM is restrictive, hence the need for a name change.
Zitter went on to discuss HBO’s strategy. HBO wants to sell shows in HighDef, but the problem is that many consumers are watching HD content using the analog outputs on their set-top boxes — often because their fancy new HD televisions don’t implement HBO’s favorite form of DRM. So what HBO wants is to disable the analog outputs on the set-top box, so consumers have no choice but to adopt HBO’s favored DRM.
Which makes the nature of the “enablement” clear. By enabling your set-top box to be incompatible with your TV, HBO will enable you to buy an expensive new TV. I understand why HBO might want this. But they ought to be honest and admit what they are doing.
I can think of several names for their strategy. “Consumer Enablement” is not one of them.
Over at Ars, I’ve got a story about the version of the Holt e-voting bill that was passed out of committee on Tuesday. In addition to making more money available to comply with the law’s requirements, the legislation significantly weakens the previous strong source code disclosure rules. The original Holt bill required that the source code be available to anyone who asked. Although the new version does make it available to a lot of people—including parties to election litigation and security researchers—it adds some red tape that’s likely to substantially reduce the number of people who are willing and able to jump through the relevant hoops.
Although I’ve said before that open source voting is no panacea, I find it hard to see an argument against requiring the disclosure of the source code for voting machines. It’s essential that all aspects of an election be transparent and accountable, and the source code of a voting machines is as much a part of the election process as the election judges’ handbook or the rules for recounts. Moreover, voting machines are almost entirely purchased by large institutions, so it’s not like there’s any risk of the disclosed source code showing up in someone else’s voting machine. The only reason I can think of to keep the source closed is to protect voting machine vendors from public scrutiny, which is obviously a reason not to allow them to keep it closed.
You might not know it from my frequent ranting about the DMCA and software patents, but generally speaking I’m actually pro-copyright and pro-patent. There are, in fact, some good arguments for both copyright and patent law. (Although I wish people would stop lumping two very different legal regimes under the misleading heading of intellectual property)
But this article from CNet’s Michael Kanellos is full of cringe-worthy (and in some cases unintentionally hilarious) arguments for “intellectual property.” In fact, in a number of places, the arguments wind up coming across as unintentionally hilarious.
Continue reading →
Bloomberg is reporting that Vonage is working on a “workaround” for its patent infringement. I put “workaround” in scare quotes because, as I wrote last year about the NTP-RIM battle, the problem in these kinds of cases is that no one has the foggiest idea what the patents cover. So when a judge rules that your current product infringes some patent, you respond by re-configuring aspects of your product at random in the hopes that you can convince the judge that the new configuration does not infringe your adversary’s “technology.”
Now, I should acknowledge that I haven’t been able to get my hands on either Verizon’s complaint or the judge’s ruling. But according to this ZDNet post from a few weeks back, the key claim is this one:
26. A method comprising:
receiving a name translation request at a server coupled to a public packet data network;
translating a name included in the request into a destination telephone number associated with a name included in the request; and
transmitting a reply containing both the destination telephone number and a packet data network address of a telephone gateway coupled between the public packet data network and a telephone network through the public packet data network to a calling device.
27. A method as in claim 26, wherein the address is an Internet Protocol address.
Continue reading →
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Jim Harper, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Peter Suderman of the National Review Online. Topics include,
- new legislative proposals to regulate violence in video games
- the David and Goliath struggle between the Library of Congress and WashingtonWatch.com
- Rupert Murdoch’s surprise bid for ownership of the Wall Street Journal
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
There’s nothing to say about this that hasn’t already been said, but boy is this funny:
You can get your own here.
Via PJ, here’s a great joke about programmers by Nathaniel Borenstein:
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
While this is a whimsical example, I think it actually explains why geeks have such strong views on certain issues. For example, on software patents: one of the most common tricks in a programmer’s toolkit is to solve a specific problem by finding a way to solve a more general problem and then treat the particular problem as a special case. For example, VoIP just applies the general data-transmission capabilities of the Internet to one type of data, namely sound. It therefore strikes many programmers as perverse to grant a patent to the first person who happens to file for a patent on applying a widely-understood technology (such as TCP/IP) to a particular application (like voice).
Similarly, geeks tend to be strong support of network neutrality (the concept, if not the regulatory policy) because fundamentally, network neutrality is the principle of abstraction applied to network architecture.
What is the position of the United States government on a proposed treaty, currently before the World Intellectual Property Organization, that would create a copyright-style protection for television broadcasts?
That is the key question that observers want answers for at the public roundtable discussion that will be held today, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., at the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress. The proposed treaty has been rife with controversy from the beginning. One reason is that it is being promoted as an update to the 1961 Treaty of Rome, which the U.S. never ratified.
During negotiations last year at WIPO in Geneva, the U.S. was the most significant government to promote extending the broadcaster treaty to cover webcasters. But the rest of the world balked at that. Failing that modification, the U.S. expressed dissatisfaction with the end-result.
In a column on the subject last September, I quoted PTO officials as follows:
“The U.S. does not believe that [the current treaty] provides a proper basis for going to a diplomatic conference, and intervened to say as much,” PTO spokeswoman Brigid Quinn said September 15. “The U.S. has always envisioned this treaty as one to provide the necessary protections for broadcast signals in the digital age.” As a result, she said, “there is no consensus and alternatives on at least half of the issues.”
A debate is raging over at the Second Life blog about Linden Labs’ (LL) annoucement that the company plans on imposing age verification requirements on its users starting in mid-May. LL says they are making this move “to insure that minors do not inadvertently access Second Life or have access to adult content in-world. In addition, age verification provides an additional layer of trust for in-world businesses and Residents.”
Those are certainly worthy goals. But LL face two very challenging issues in attempting to implement this plan:
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.