On today’s Cato podcast, I discuss patent reform and last week’s Supreme Court decisions.
May 2007
The EU continues to issue what one hopes are wild threats against Microsoft. Now EU antitrust authorities have revived the possibility of “structural remedies,” that is, breaking Microsoft up. This apparently because Microsoft is seen to be resisting compliance with earlier orders.
Interesting. What is the theory behind this? The focus of antitrust law is supposed to be consumer welfare (not, say, competitor welfare). So the earlier commission orders were supposed
Crosbie Fitch, Scott Carpenter & Enigma_Foundry.. I don’t know exactly what it is you have against open debate about IP issues, but as someone who both works at PFF and who gave birth to this blog many years ago while at the Cato Institute, let me at least try to briefly dissuade you (and others) of any nonsensical notion that there is some sort of grand conspiracy going on here by PFF / IP Central people to control the Tech Liberation Front.
First, if you’d bother reading the “About Us” note at the top of the TLF, you’d notice that this blog is not a one-man or one-issue show. It’s intended to be a clearinghouse of ideas to give the world a flavor for what various libertarians in a wide assortment of think tanks are thinking and saying about technology policy.
Second, libertarians have deep differences over copyright policy. Obviously, Tim Lee and Solveig Singleton stand on opposite ends of the spectrum. I’m somewhere in between. And everyone else who contributes to this blog has his or her own opinion. As I wrote in a 2002 Cato Institute book I edited on this subject (“CopyFights”), there is no clear “libertarian position” on copyright and IP matters. The movement is all over the board on the issue and this blog features contributions that reflect that intellectual schizophrenia.
Third, I would greatly appreciate it if you would refrain from engaging in vicious personal attacks against those who contribute their views on these matters. Despite the alleged, neo-conspiratorial “strange web” you guys speak of between the TLF and PFF, the reality is that PFF has no control over the TLF. Zero. Zip. Nothing. Nadda. Every scholar and commenter is free to post whatever they want here. Tim’s view’s on copyright, DRM, and DMCA certainly dominate here because he writes the most on the issue and he is the most aggressive of all our bloggers. Nothing that Tim says on the matter is ever edited or censored in any fashion. Nor are the comments you guys and many others make edited or excluded. Then again, neither are the opposing views of Solveig or anyone else. Do you think we’d be better off stifling all debate on this issue and telling Solveig or others with conflicting views to go buzz off? Why can’t we debate these things here on the TLF in a mature, adult fashion?
I hope you guys (and others) will take what I have said seriously because we certainly welcome your contributions to the TLF, but I would hope those contributions would not be done in such poor taste in the future.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee is filing comments on the REAL ID regulations. Comments close today (Tuesday). Instructions for commenting can be found here, and apparently, due to difficulties with the automatic comment system and with receiving faxes, DHS has opened an email address for receiving comments: oscomments@dhs.gov. Emails must have “DHS-2006-0030” in the subject: line.
The Committee took care to offer constructive ideas, but the most important takeaway is summarized by Ryan Singel at Threat Level:
The Department of Homeland Security’s outside privacy advisors explicitly refused to bless proposed federal rules to standardize states’ driver’s licenses Monday, saying the Department’s proposed rules for standardized driver’s licenses — known as Real IDs — do not adequately address concerns about privacy, price, information security, redress, “mission creep”, and national security protections.
“Given that these issues have not received adequate consideration, the Committee feels it is important that the following comments do not constitute an endorsement of REAL ID or the regulations as workable or appropriate,” the committee wrote in the introduction to their comments for the rulemaking record.
I’ll be testifying on REAL ID today in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
My paper critiquing arguments contra copyright from the cumulative nature of knowledge is out.
You should check out the ongoing discussion with Cord Blomquist about the ethics of digging AACS keys. Cord’s core point seems to be this:
Copyright and patents aren’t contracts, they’re codified law, and it’s understandable why we’d prefer a common standard for such things. Imagine we had to sign a contract waving acknowledging that the seller retains the rights to reproduction every time we bought a book or magazine. This would be cumbersome and tedious. Yet even without a contract or another such explicit statement we all know that we can’t just post an article from a magazine on a site and put AdSense ads against it and call ourselves a legitimate web business. This would be copyright infringement and stealing. Take this idea a step further and we see that he 2nd or 3rd person to copy the material is equally liable for the copying if they know that the material is copyrighted.
How is this different from Digg hosting something that is copyrighted? Are we saying DRM and music copyrights don’t deserve the same respect because they are copyrights we don’t like?
The first thing to point out here is that Cord is lumping together two very different rights. I wholeheartedly agree with him that copyright law is a beneficial institution, and it’s entirely appropriate for the state to take action to protect peoples copyrights. If Digg’s users were posting copyrighted songs or films, I would certainly be a lot more critical.
But DRM is not the same thing as traditional copyright. Anti-circumvention rights are a brand new legal right that was invented from whole cloth by Congress in 1998. The question of whether those rights are legitimate are wholly separate from the question of whether the underlying copyright.
Cord continues:
Jennifer Medina of the New York Times penned an article yesterday on the debate over social networking fears leading to calls for age verification mandates. She noted that measures are moving in several states that would require social networking sites to age-verify users before they are allowed to visit the sites or create profiles there. But Medina also noted that there are many difficult questions about how age verification would work and how “social networking” would even be defined. (I summarize these questions in my recent PFF report, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.”)
Ms. Medina was also kind enough to interview me for the story and she summarizes some of what I had to say in her piece. In a nutshell, I stressed that the most effective way to deal with this problem is to get serious about dealing with sex offenders instead of trying to regulate law-abiding citizens. We need to be locking up convicted sex offenders for a lot longer in this country to make sure they behind bars instead of behind keyboards seeking to prey on our children.
I also stressed the importance of online safety education as part of the strategy here. But my comments on that didn’t make the cut in the story. But you can read my big recent paper on this issue for additional details.
Some lawmakers at the federal, state and local level have advocated video game industry regulation in the name of protecting children from potentially objectionable content, usually of a violent nature. In my opinion, the better approach–and one that doesn’t involve government censorship or regulation of games–is to empower parents to better make these decisions for their own families. And the key to that effort is an effective rating / labeling system for game content that parents understand and use.
Luckily, there are good signs that the video game industry’s voluntary ratings system–the ESRB (the Entertainment Software Rating Board)–is doing exactly that. The game industry established the ESRB in 1994 and it has rated thousands of games since then. (The ESRB estimates it rates over 1,000 games per year). Virtually every title produced by major game developers for retail sale today carries an ESRB rating and content descriptors. Generally speaking, the only games that do not carry ESRB ratings today are those developed by web amateurs that are freely traded or downloaded via the Internet.
The ESRB applies seven different rating symbols and over 30 different content “descriptors” that it uses to give consumers highly detailed information about games. Thus, by simply glancing at the back of each game container, parents can quickly gauge the appropriateness of the title for their children.
So, how effective is this system, as measured by parental awareness and usage of the ESRB ratings and labels? Since 1999, the ESRB has asked Peter D. Hart Research Associates to study that question and conduct polls asking parents if they are aware of the ESRB ratings and if they use them. As this chart illustrates, the results are impressive with both awareness and use growing rapidly since 1999:
Better yet, all gaming platforms and most PCs can read these ratings and labels and allow parents to block games rated above a certain level they find unacceptable. But the real strength of the ESRB’s ratings system lies in the content descriptors, which give parents plenty of warning about what they will see or hear in each title. That way, parents can talk to their kids about those games or just not buy them for their kids until they think they are ready.
The game industry deserves credit not only for creating such an excellent content rating / labeling system, but also putting significant resources into public education / awareness efforts to ensure parents know how to take advantage of it. So then, why are lawmakers continuing to waste millions of taxpayer dollars litigating unneeded regulatory efforts?
Previous installments (1, 2, 3 & 4) in this series have documented how our government seems to have a difficult time keeping tabs on laptops and personal information. The latest on this front comes from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Last week, the TSA informed us that a computer hard drive containing the personal, payroll and bank information of 100,000 current and former TSA workers has apparently gone missing and is assumed stolen. The FBI and the Secret Service have apparently opened a criminal investigation into the matter.
I was about to launch into another rant on this front, but then I picked up this morning’s Washington Post and their editorial on this issue really nails it:
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Cord Blomquist also doesn’t approve of the Digg protesters:
Websters are calling the ‘revolt’ at Digg an online Boston Tea Party. This is offensive to anyone who knows the history of the Boston Tea Party. The Sons of Liberty destroyed someone else’s property, a very non-libertarian thing to do, but they did so to protest the unjust taxation of their own hard earned dollars and the tyrannical British rule. Besides, the British East India Company was nothing like what we would call a private enterprise. Before it was dissolved in the middle of the 19th century the East India Company had many governmental and military functions and virtually ruled India. The revolutionaries were against this kind of government granted monopoly and unjust use of power.
Digg users posting HD-DVD encryption keys is no Boston Tea party. These rogue digg users are referencing a proprietary code, which is not their property, and they’re using a private website, which is also not their property. This attack on private property is more like an online October Revolution. The people at Digg can exercise control over their own property, while the users claim that controlling a private site is equivalent to theft. (They should read What’s Yours is Mine). It all smacks of Marxism to me.
So in other words, it’s OK to destroy private property if you’re protesting a law Blomquist disagrees with, but it’s not cool to even “reference” private property if you’re protesting a law Blomquist likes.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.