My friend and former colleague Radley Balko makes the case for the repeal of the online gambling ban:
June 2007
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 Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, Braden Cox of the Association for Competitive Technology, and Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Topics include,
- Fred von Lohmann makes the case for collective licensing on campus in the Washington Post,
- Tim Lee makes the case against software patents in the New York Times, and
- Google brings an antitrust complaint against Microsoft’s desktop search software.
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!
The Broward County Commission triggered a political mini-hurricane this week, when it considered cancelling its emergency communications contract with a local radio station because its programming is too conservative. For the past year, WIOD-AM has been the county’s “official” station for emergency news and information. On Tuesday, the county commission delayed its renewal of the station’s contract. The problem: the station airs conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The station is out of step with area politics, explained Commissioner Stacy Ritter. “They have every right to speak, but we don’t have to do business with them,” she said.
How thoughtful. I know when I’m looking for disaster information, I’ll want it to be from someone who is in step with my area’s politics.
The reaction, of course, was swift – with Limbaugh, Hannity and others ridiculing the decision – and county officials were deluged with complaints. And to Broward’s credit, several commissioners on the all-Democrat board who had missed the Tuesday meeting came to WIOD’s defense. Yesterday, the county backed off, with a majority of commissioners pledging to renew the contract.
It’s tempting to dismiss the episode as just another bizarre Broward controversy. But the petty censorship attempt by local officials here may be a dry run for a much broader attempt at content control by Congress. Can you say Fairness Doctrine?
It’s also interesting to observe how the national media covered the story. While the controversy received nationwide coverage from conservative outlets, the mainstream national media largely ignored it. Of course, the Miami Herald – the largest newspaper in Florida – did run a piece on the events in Broward. They missed the censorship angle, though – instead they focused with horror on the fact that Rush Limbaugh had called Ritter a “babe.”
So much for the MSM.
It’s a shame that Frontline Wireless LLC‘s bold plan for a wireless broadband network providing nationwide interoperable public safety services in emergencies — that would be paid for by commercial users who can access the network on a wholesale, open-access basis at other times — includes a requirement that the successful bidder “must adopt open access policies not only on the E Block spectrum, but on any other licensed spectrum it holds.”
The rationale? According to Frontline:
The rationale for extending this requirement is clear: it prevents potential anti-competitive behavior. If the winner of the E Block spectrum holds other spectrum, it will be incentivized to offer consumers a single service device that will work on multiple bands. If the open access rules does not apply to all bands held by the E Block licensee, then the carrier could easily push consumers to other bands and tell them their devices are non-compliant. Consumers would not know (nor should they care) which band they are using, but a licensee acting strategically and in its best interests could readily defeat the purpose of open access requirements imposed on the E Block license.
But Frontline’s proposal already prevents such an outcome through a separate requirement that would prohibit the licensee from using the E Block network capacity for its own retail services or selling it to affiliated third parties. The necessity of an overlapping requirement doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, other than the fact that it has obvious value to Frontline as a restraint on competing bidders.
Nothing like a clever turn of phrase to capture and popularize an idea. At TechCrunch, Duncan Riley has come up with “American Tracking & Takedown.”
Here’s a Cato TechKnowledge on how the Senate immigration bill attempts to revive the flagging REAL ID Act.
Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge sent me the following, which I’m re-posting with his permission:
I was listening to the conversation you were having with Tim Wu on the Tech Policy Weekly podcast. The visual voicemail feature of the iPhone actually doesn’t require anything special on the provider side of things. It’s essentially a VOIP voicemail service, which you can find on their own all over the Internet (Callwave is a good example), formatted with a GUI on a mobile phone.
To me, it speaks to the innovation that can come about when services are built to open standards.
I asked whether this means that messages on the iPhone are stored on Apple’s servers, rather than Verizon’s. He replied:
Over at the Abstract Factory, an excellent proposal for patent reform:
- Software companies that wish to protect their intellectual property register with a new ICANN gTLD, .sft.
- A .sft receives “IP points” every time it produces a “significant” software innovation. For example, every time a .sft publishes a peer-reviewed paper in a major computer science conference, that .sft gets 100 IP points.
- Any .sft may “sue” another .sft at any time, for any reason, for any quantity of money.
- Lawsuits are settled by best-of-7 tournaments of StarCraft. A .sft’s designated StarCraft player (“IP lawyer”) starts each match with a bonus quantity of minerals, Vespene gas, and peons determined by a time-weighted function of a the .sft’s IP points. The victor wins a fraction of their client’s requested damages determined by the ratio of their buildings razed, units constructed, etc. vs. their opponents’.
- IP lawyers may play Protoss, Terran, Zerg, or random race, at their discretion.
The merits of this reform are obvious. Much like patent law, StarCraft is governed by a system of arcane rules that are mostly irrelevant to the actual process of writing innovative software. Much like patent law, StarCraft’s rules can only be mastered by a caste of professionals whose expertise is honed over years of practice. Unlike the legal system, however, StarCraft is swift, decisive, objective, and exquisitely balanced for fairness. Any minor loss in the quality of judgment on the margin would be overwhelmed by the reduced transaction costs of the system as a whole.
I like it. If you’re not convinced, he’s got an excellent FAQ addressing the most common objections.
One other point about the purported “lack of evidence” that software patents harm innovation. I’m probably more sensitive to this type of argument than most because I’m also working on a paper on eminent domain abuse, and you sometimes see precisely the same style of argument in that context. People will argue “sure, eminent domain sometimes screws over individual landowners, but there’s no evidence that it harms the economy as a whole.”
There are two problems with this sort of argument. First, as I said before, it’s not obvious what “empirical evidence” would look like. Eminent domain abuse occurs in almost every state in the union, and it would be extremely hard to set up a good controlled experiment.
But the more fundamental point is that individual examples of injustice are themselves evidence that something is wrong. When city governments steal peoples’ land to make room for a shopping center, that is, in and of itself, evidence that eminent domain abuse is harmful. If we can pile up enough examples of such abuse, that’s evidence that the system is causing harm even if the harm doesn’t show up in national GDP statistics.
Similarly, I don’t think anyone would seriously claim that what happened to RIM, or what’s happening to Vonage, is just. So those are two data points in support of the thesis that the software patent system is screwed up. Here are 26 more. When you’re talking about issues like this that aren’t susceptible to clear-cut quantitative measurements, the plural of anecdote really is data—especially when the anecdotes are so lopsidedly in one direction.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.