June 2007

Internet Safety Month, Part 4: Website Labeling and Metadata Tagging

by on June 4, 2007 · 0 comments

This is part 4 or a multi-part series of essays to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month.” Previous installments discussed online safety metasites, filtering and monitoring tools, and operating system and web browser controls. In this installment, I will be discussing the importance of website labeling and metadata tagging.

All the information in this series is condensed from my forthcoming Progress & Freedom Foundation special report, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods” which we will be launching on June 20th with an event at the National Press Club.

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JVD Retrospective

by on June 4, 2007 · 8 comments

Years ago Jim Delong started to write a book on property rights–the physical ones. His publisher insisted on discussions of intellectual property. He resisted. Surely, he thought, these things are very different. But he reports his surprising conclusion that the significance of the differences for policy is less than is often thought. Intellectual property, like physical property, must be protected, for the good of consumers and everyone else, doing as little harm as possible. As for the details, “tech” and “content” each raise valid concerns and the results of experimentation and give-and-take impossible to foresee. But a functioning market is in everyone’s interest.

During his tenure at CEI, he debated these issues often with Fred Smith. At first I was on Fred’s side, my own views on IP strongly influenced by Tom Palmer. Over the years, though, I began to see the issue as more difficult than my philosophy could answer by reference to the standard repertoire, even Hayek and Leoni.

Questions about IP arise in a context of hard problems in philosophy of law, difficult questions of empirical economics, and the hard question of how closely law in an advanced economy must resemble primitive law. And a blinding pace of technological and economic change that makes throws existing legal institutions completely out of wack. Particularly enforcement, the aspect of law taken entirely for granted in most policy discussions. In this environment, what are the odds that we can derive the answers we need to practical problems from first principles and get it right the first time?

Thanks Jim. Come back and see us.

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When Markets Outgrow Copyrights

by on June 4, 2007 · 0 comments

I’m planning a paper on how growth in markets affects the efficacy of copyright, and am shopping around an abstract. I welcome your comments. The abstract goes a little something like this:

Does copyright protection offer the best means of stimulating the production of expressive works? Maybe it does now. If so, however, copyright will probably over-protect expressive works in coming years. We should hope that it will, at any rate, given that human progress will render copyright obsolete.

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Internet Safety Month, Part 3: Operating Systems and Web Browser Controls

by on June 4, 2007 · 0 comments

This is the third in a series of essays about how parents can deal with potentially objectionable online content or contacts to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month.” The first installment in this series outlined the many excellent online safety organizations or websites that should be the first place parents begin their search for assistance. The second installment discussed Internet filtering and monitoring tools and software. This installment will discuss how companies like Microsoft and Apple are integrating parental controls into PC operating systems and web browsers.

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Internet Safety Month, Part 2: Internet Filters & Monitoring Tools

by on June 3, 2007 · 0 comments

In part 1 of this series, I noted that the Senate recently passed a resolution (S. Res. 205) declaring June “National Internet Safety Month.” The Resolution “calls on Internet safety organizations, law enforcement, educators, community leaders, parents, and volunteers to increase their efforts to raise the level of awareness for the need for online safety in the United States.”

In conjunction with Internet Safety Month, I am posting a multi-part series of essays about how parents can deal with potentially objectionable online content or contacts. The first installment outlined the many excellent online safety organizations or efforts that should be the first place parents begin their search for assistance. This second installment will discuss the burgeoning market for filtering and monitoring tools and software.

All the information in this series is condensed from my forthcoming Progress & Freedom Foundation special report, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” The booklet provides a broad survey of everything on the market today that can help parents deal with potentially objectionable media content, whether it be on broadcast TV, cable, music, cellular phones, video games, the Internet, or social networking websites. We will be launching the booklet on June 20th with an event at the National Press Club.

Before discussing filters and monitoring tools, I want to again stress that these tools should not be considered substitutes for talking to our children about what they might see or hear while online. Even though various tools and strategies can help parents control the vast majority of objectionable content that their kids might stumble upon while online, no system is perfect. In the end, education and ongoing communication are vital.

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Internet Safety Month, Part 1: Online Safety Metasites

by on June 3, 2007 · 7 comments

The Senate recently passed a resolution (S. Res. 205) declaring June “National Internet Safety Month.” The resolution was sponsored by Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Vice Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). It also had 15 other bipartisan cosponsors. The Resolution “calls on Internet safety organizations, law enforcement, educators, community leaders, parents, and volunteers to increase their efforts to raise the level of awareness for the need for online safety in the United States.” In a press release, Senator Stevens noted that “The Internet is no longer a luxury for American families, but a necessity. It is important to provide a safe online environment for children because use of the Internet is an essential part of our children’s education.”

I think this is a worthwhile goal, and Sen. Stevens and his Senate colleagues are to be commended for their focus on Internet safety education as opposed to the knee-jerk regulatory response we all too often see coming out of Congress on this front.

In a few weeks, I will be releasing my new PFF special report, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” The booklet provides a broad survey of everything on the market today that can help parents deal with potentially objectionable media content, whether it be on broadcast TV, cable, music, cellular phones, video games, the Internet, or social networking websites.

I spend a great deal of time in the report dealing with Internet issues and online safety concerns since it is driving so much legislative and regulatory activity these days. I conclude that, even though it can be quite a challenge at times, parents do have the power to effectively control the Internet and online activities in their children’s lives. But, to do so, parents need to adopt a “layered” approach to online child protection that involves many tools and strategies.

Of course, it goes without saying that these tools and methods should not be considered substitutes for talking to our children about what they might see or hear while online. Even though various tools and strategies can help parents control the vast majority of objectionable content that their kids might stumble upon while online, no system is perfect. In the end, education and ongoing communication are vital.

Anyway, in conjunction with Internet Safety Month, I thought I would put together a multi-part series of essays about how parents can deal with potentially objectionable online content or contacts. This first installment will feature the many excellent online safety organizations or efforts that should be the first place parents begin their search for assistance.

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Patents and Tacit Knowledge

by on June 2, 2007 · 16 comments

I’m currently reading Virginia Postrel’s excellent The Future and Its Enemies. Chapter four gives an excellent exposition of tacit knowledge. It occurs to me that the insights of the chapter bear directly on patent policy:

As Polanyi suggested, much of our most important knowledge is tacit—difficult to articulate, even to ourselves. Contrary to Sale’s imaginings, such knowledge is expensive to share, assuming it can be transferred at all. It is “sticky,” in management scholar Eric von Hippel’s term: “costly to acquire, transfer, and use in a new locus.” Von Hippel notes, for instance, the difficulty of duplicating a scientific apparatus. Subtle information about the lab environment, or procedures that people at the original site take for granted, can make the difference between success and failure. “It’s very difficult to make a carbon copy,” say s a researchers quoted by von Hippel. “You can make a near one, but if it turns out that what’s critical is the way he glued his transducers, and he forgets to tell you that the technician always puts a copy of Physical Review on top of them for weight, well, it could make all the difference.

As a result of this stickiness, tacit knowledge often travels only through apprenticeship, the trial-and-error process of learning from a master. (A form of “apprenticeship” is essentially how as children we learn such complex basic skills as speech. Writing in the 1950s, Polanyi argued that the art of scientific research, as opposed to the scientific information that can be taught in a classroom, had still not passed much beyond the European centers where it had originated centuries earlier: without the opportunity offered to young scientists to serve an apprenticeship in Europe, and without the migration of European scientists to new countries, research centres overseas could hardly have made much headway.”

The application to patent debates should be pretty obvious. Some patent proponents blithely assume that you can copy an invention as easily as you can copy a song or a piece of paper. It’s pretty often, for example, to see an argument that without patent protection, a small software company wouldn’t be able to negotiate on an equal footing with a large one, because the large one will simply listen to the smaller company’s pitch, take careful notes, and then steal the company’s idea without paying a penny.

The problem with this story is that it completely ignores the role of tacit knowledge in duplicating technology. If it’s difficult to duplicate a scientific expermient when the technical details of that experiment are publicly available, how much more difficult is it to duplicate a new technology based on the fragmentary information you get from a technology demo? A company seeking to duplicate a competitor’s technology will typically be forced to go through virtually the same trial-and-error process the original company went through. Which means that in many cases, licensing the smaller company’s technology will be the faster and cheaper than trying to re-invent the wheel.

Obviously, the force of this argument will vary with the degree to which products embody tacit knowledge. For example, it seems like pharmaceutical products would be easier to copy than others because they can be characterized by their chemical formulas. Software seems to be at the opposite extreme—especially if copyright law prevents the verbatim copying of source code. There’s a tremendous amount of tacit knowledge embedded in any software product of non-trivial complexity, so the idea that software companies can duplicate their competitor’s products quickly and easily is unrealistic.

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DeLong leaves PFF

by on June 1, 2007 · 0 comments

I’ve been thinking about the best way to respond to the news of Jim DeLong’s apparent semi-retirement from the public policy world. For the last decade, DeLong has been the most prolific, and perhaps the most influential, libertarian thinker on patent and copyright issues. He has probably done more than any other person in the libertarian think tank world to promote the view that patents and copyrights are no different than any other kind of property right, and that libertarians should therefore almost always come down in favor of broadening the scope and duration of copyright and patent rights, for stiffening the penalties for violating these laws, and for enacting new regulations of third parties to make it easier for copyright holders to enforce their rights.

I’ve criticized DeLong’swritings repeatedly on this blog, so I won’t re-hash those arguments. But I am disappointed that (with one exception I can recall) DeLong never engaged any of my criticisms. Perhaps he was offended by the derisive tone some of my posts took. Maybe my work just never made it onto his radar screen. In any event, I think it’s sad that a significant opportunity for substantive engagement on these issues was missed. DeLong often seemed to be arguing with caricatures of his ideological opponents, ignoring the more nuanced substantive work he could have found if he’d looked for it. I was particularly disappointed that he never took the time to offer a substantive critique of my DMCA paper, one work of mine that I know he did read. I doubt he would have been able to change my mind (or vice versa), but I bet I would have learned a few things from his criticisms.

One place I do have to give DeLong credit is his amicus brief (with TLF contributor Solveig Singleton) in the Teleflex case. This was probably the most important patent case in the last quarter-century, and in my view he came down on the right side of it, recognizing that the patent system becomes an obstacle to progress if patents are granted too liberally.

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Critiquing Wireless Carterfone

by on June 1, 2007 · 4 comments

In the latest installment of TechKnowledge, I critique Tim Wu’s recent article on “wireless Carterfone”:

True, a government-designed standard is not impossible, but “not impossible” is a long way from a good idea. Indeed, Wu seems to be implicitly conceding that it is far from the “simple requirement” he touts in his Forbes article. He seems to be proposing that the FCC dictate to wireless carriers what network services they must offer, who may access them, on what terms, and at what price.

History suggests that such efforts often end badly. Even when a government-created monopoly situation makes public utility regulation unavoidable, as in the Carterfone case, it can take a decade or longer for the dust to settle. The Clinton-era FCC attempted to create competition in the telephone and DSL markets by requiring Baby Bells to “unbundled” their local phone lines and lease them at FCC-determined prices to competitors. The Bells ultimately killed the plan using a combination of lobbying, litigation, and foot-dragging. But for the nine years between the passage of the Telecom Act in 1996 and the Supreme Court’s Brand X decision in 2005, telecommunications firms spent tens of millions of dollars on lawyers and lobbyists to seek advantage in the regulatory arena.

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Microsoft Wants to Have Its Cake and Eat It Too

by on June 1, 2007 · 12 comments

Horacio Gutierrez, vice president of intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft, says that interoperability requires licensing agreements like the Novell-Microsoft deal:

“In fact, one makes the other possible, especially at a time like this, when interoperability is so important. Microsoft recognizes the importance of interoperability, which is why we are doing the things we are in our products, why we created the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, and why we are listening to customers,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s vice president of intellectual property and licensing.

Customers did not want to have to solve this problem themselves, they wanted industry leaders, their vendors, to solve the interoperability problem for them, he said.

“The only way that’s possible is for companies to really be open to licensing arrangements and building these bridges that people thought were impossible before, among different providers and among different software development models,” he said…

He felt it “unfortunate that while Microsoft is trying to build bridges wherever possible between the commercial and open-source software industries, some seem intent on tearing down those bridges. We are in the bridge building business, not in the bridge burning business.”

This is, as Luis points out, complete and utter nonsense:

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