Nick Carr has a lengthy article on the pros and cons of peer production. To some extent, it’s hard to quibble with his basic point that peer production is useful but not a panacea. Clearly, peer production doesn’t work for every project, and it will always rely on a core group of dedicated individuals who do a lot of the work.
But what I found striking about the article is that it spends a lot of time asserting that peer-produced products have problems, but Carr provides hardly any examples. Below the fold, I’ll look at one of the few specific criticisms of free software, which I find to be seriously misguided.
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A reader sent me a link to the controversy last week over the blocking of Listpic by Craig’s List. Listpic was a service that allowed users to view Craig’s List ads as image thumbnails rather than as text ads:
In an e-mail to Wired News, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster explains the company’s position: “The 0.1% of our users who were accessing Craigslist images via Listpic were creating a grossly disproportionate drain on our server resources, degrading performance significantly for the 99.9% of our users accessing Craigslist in the normal fashion. Besides frequently hitting our site to harvest Craigslist user content for re-display on their site, each Listpic page load was causing our systems to serve up approx 100 full size images.”
In a forum post on Craigslist, company founder Craig Newmark (look for his yellow name tag) echoed Buckmaster’s comments. And of course there’s the inconvenient little fact that ListPic was serving Craigslist data on an external website while selling advertising — a big no-no.
The reader who emailed it to me suggested that this was an illustration of Craig Newmark’s hypocrisy for advocating network neutrality for telcos while discriminating against websites using Craig’s List content in ways they don’t approve of. I don’t think that’s quite right. I certainly think Craig’s support of Internet regulations is misguided, but I don’t think this really illustrates it. In the first place, network neutrality is a principle for ISPs to follow. No one has ever seriously suggested that it be applied to websites, and indeed, it’s not even clear what a neutrality policy for websites would even mean. Second, Listpic was not a Craig’s List customer, and so there’s no reason Craig’s List has any obligations at all to Listpic. Third, Craig appears to be claiming that Listpic wasn’t even serving up the images itself, but was hot-linking the images from Craig’s List’s servers—hot linking on such a large scale is universally regarded as a no-no.
There are good arguments against government regulation of the Internet, but spurious accusations of hypocrisy against Craig’s List, Google, or anybody else is not among them.
Julian pinpoints exactly what’s wrong with the ludicrous claim that copyright infringement is a bigger problem than ordinary property crime:
There’s a big difference between a the cost of theft to an industry or firm and the cost to the country. If I steal your bike, I’ve cost you one bike, not America. America still has the same number of bikes in it. The cost to the country of the theft of physical resources is not the cost of the resources themselves, typically, but rather the efficiency loss of shifting those resources to less valued uses, the cost of resources expended preventing or prosecuting it, the opportunity cost of the effort expended on a zero-sum transfer, and so on. By contrast, piracy is actually positive sum in static terms: Nobody has any fewer programs, songs, or movies, while the pirate has (at least) one more. Nothing has been redirected to a lower-valued use. So the only actual loss in this case is the value of new IP that doesn’t get created because piracy prevents prospective creators from fully internalizing its value. (There may be further losses if we think piracy induces companies to raise the prices of their products, and there are consumers who are priced out of the legal market by this, but don’t avail themselves of pirate copies.) I don’t know how significant that number is—or even how you’d measure it accurately—but “hundreds of billions” just doesn’t pass the straight face test.
A software industry study released a few years back tried to translate piracy losses into job losses in the tech sector. And again, even if we take that number at face value, just looking at one specific sector is worse than useless. By that mode of reckoning, Bastiat’s satirical “Petition from the Manufacturers of Candles” should be read as a serious guide to policy.
Quite so. As I’ve argued before, attempts to inflate the costs of movie piracy fall equally flat. Even if we equate the lost revenue of the movie industry with the lost wealth to the country (which is almost certainly an overstatement), the losses to the movie industry are measured in the billions (about $6.1 billion, to be precise) not tens or hundreds of billions. And the software industry’s inflated figure is only $34 billion. “Hundreds of billions” isn’t even remotely plausible.
PFF has just released the transcript of an event I hosted on May 18th on “The Complexities of Regulating TV Violence.” [The print transcript can be found here and the audio here.]
The event featured Henry Geller, Former General Counsel, Federal Communications Commission, Robin Bronk, Executive Director, The Creative Coalition, Robert Corn-Revere, a partner at the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, and Jonathan L. Freedman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and the author of Media Violence and its Effect on Aggression. It was an interesting discussion and I encourage you to check it out if you are following this issue. Also, I published a report last month on this issue entitled, “The Right Way to Regulate Violent TV,” which focused on the tools and methods parents can use to deal with this issue on their own.
This month, I have been posting a series of essays about how parents can deal with potentially objectionable online content or contacts to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month.” (Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). In this series, I have been talking about how parents need to adopt a “layered” approach to online child protection that involves many tools and strategies. And such an approach is certainly needed to address social networking activities.
Social networking websites have become wildly popular with teenagers in recent years. Sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged, Imbee, LiveJournal, Yahoo! 360, and Windows Live Spaces attract millions of users and represent just a few of the hundreds of social networking sites online today. These sites offer their users the space and tools to build the equivalent of an online journal and then to network with others more easily. New sites are seemingly surfacing every week, and they are growing more personalized in an attempt to appeal to specific niches.
But concerns about how youngsters use these services quickly prompted lawmakers to introduce legislation to ban access to such sites in schools and libraries. Others, including several state attorneys general, want such sites to age-verify all users to exclude those over or under a certain age. (I have discussed my reservations with proposals to impose age verification schemes on social networking websites in my PFF white paper, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.”)
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I haven’t been able to think of a policy angle to the spat (via Matthew Ingram) between Google and eBay, but this is just too funny to pass up.
Earlier this week the NY Times reported that Google filed a complaint with the Department of Justice about Microsoft’s desktop search. At a time when Google is under scrutiny in the EU for privacy practices, censorship in China, and has potential antitrust issues of its own with the recent DoubleClick acquisition, this complaint is politically precarious.
But the complaint hits on a broader public policy point: will antitrust regulation put the heat on tech companies that innovate by integrating?
That’s the subject of my new paper along with co-author
Steve DelBianco. In Consumer Demand Drives Innovation and Integration in Desktop Computing, we examine the competition policy concerns raised by the
on-demand desktop, and the danger that overzealous regulators could constrain
the future of Web2.0.
Feature integration is an essential way to improve products
and motivate existing consumers to upgrade. Traditional desktop vendors like
Microsoft and Apple usually spend several years integrating new features into
major releases of their operating systems and applications. Even a core Linux distribution like Debian
manages only about one release each year. Consumers often prefer a bundled
product that provides more value for the money, and the software industry
typically responds by combining services in a suite of applications.
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From Derek Slater:
A judge ordered [PDF] the FBI today to finally release agency records about its abuse of National Security Letters (NSLs) to collect Americans’ personal information. The ruling came just a day after the EFF urged [PDF] the judge to immediately respond in its lawsuit over agency delays.
EFF sued the FBI in April for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about the misuse of NSLs as revealed in a Justice Department report. As we noted yesterday, more evidence of abuse was uncovered by the Washington Post, and EFF urged the judge Thursday to force the FBI to stop stalling the release of its records on the deeply flawed program.
I bet we’ll learn all sorts of interesting things from these records!
Broadcasters have long had one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington. But it now seems that the National Association of Broadcasters has met its match — an equally powerful outfit known as the National Association of Broadcasters. Yes, that’s right — NAB, under new president David Rehr, has been shooting quite effective bullets recently at itself.
The battle was triggered by the proposed merger between XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. NAB has gone on the warpath against the merger, arguing that it would create a monopoly. Of course, to argue that, it has to argue that broadcast radio doesn’t compete with satellite radio. That argument, however, was rebutted by NAB’s David Rehr (yes, the same one), who just last year gave a stirring speech about broadcast radio’s satellite competitors, declaring:
In 2006 we have satellite and Internet radio. And barely a day passes without the introduction of a new competing device or service. And we have news for our competitors: “We will beat you — as we have beaten those change agents in the past.”
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.