A great Hayek quote from Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
The understanding that “good fences make good neighbours”, that is, that men can use their own knowledge in the pursuit of their own ends without colliding with each other only if clear boundaries can be drawn between their respective domains of free action, is the basis on which all known civilisation has grown. Property, in the wide sense in which it is used to include not only material things, but (as John Locke defined it) the “life, liberty and estates” of every individual, is the only solution men have yet discovered to the problem of reconciling individual freedom with the absence of conflict. Law, liberty, and property are an inseparable trinity. There can be no law in the sense of universal rules of conduct which does not determine boundaries of the domains of freedom by laying down rules that enable each to ascertain where he is free to act. (Hayek 1973, 1:107)
Property rights are essential to a free society. But “property rights” without clear boundaries aren’t property rights at all, they’re an affront to the rule of law.
One of the things I love about the geek community is that they’re absolutely fanatical about civil liberties. Take my new story at Ars about Mike McConnell’s ham-fisted demagoguery:
McConnell charged that as a result of press reports and Congressional debates regarding surveillance activities, “some Americans are going to die.” That’s because disclosures about surveillance activities will tip off terrorists to the existence of American surveillance programs and prompt them to use alternate communication methods, making it more difficult for the authorities to stop terrorist attacks before they occur.
This annoyed me enough that I took the liberty of editorializing in the very next paragraph:
McConnell didn’t elaborate on which specific revelations undermined anti-terrorism efforts. It can hardly have been a surprise to Al Qaeda that the U.S. government was spying on them or that they were using American voice and data networks to do it. Still, fear of terrorism is a potent force in American politics, and so McConnell’s charges, however dubious, may persuade some members of Congress to support the administration’s position.
But Ars readers, who were almost unanimous in their reactions, had a had some much better retorts. This one is my favorite:
Thousands of Americans already did die to secure us in our persons, houses, papers and effects. McConnell is pissing on their graves.
If only the general public had that kind of moral clarity! I think I’ve linked to this before, but Paul Graham’s essay on hackers offers a theory about why geeks get so excited about civil liberties issues.
We took the podcast on the road this week and recorded at our Alcohol Liberation Front event on the last day of the PFF Aspen Summit conference. Giving us their reaction to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote address are Cord Blomquist of CEI, James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, and Jeff Eisenach of Criterion Economics, as well as yours truly. Also, Adam Thierer of PFF and Hance Haney of the Discovery Institute discuss Lawrence Tribe’s address on tech policy and the First Amendment. In two weeks we’ll have another “Live from Aspen” podcast featuring Solveig Singleton, Jim Harper, and Bill Rosenblatt on copyright fair use.
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!
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Tim Wu announces AltLaw, a search engine for legal decisions. This is a fantastic idea. I wonder why Google hasn’t jumped on it yet. The case coverage is still somewhat limited—Supreme Court decisions only go back to 1991—but it’s an excellent start, and I imagine they’ll be adding additional cases over time.
In the Q&A after his speech Tuesday night at PFF’s Aspen Summit, one of the questions with which Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was clearly most voluble and at ease dealt with the market for advertising. He rightly touted how Google has paid out billions of dollars to small and medium-size businesses, users of Google’s AdSense program. (Full disclosure: A project of mine, WashingtonWatch.com, is one.) And, without giving away the Google playbook, he discussed some of the directions Google’s advertising efforts will be going.
Along with newspaper advertising, he spent a good deal of time discussing location-based advertising. He enthused about the possibility of all those mobile computers people carry (still often called “phones”) helping people find the things they need as they move from place to place.
For example, Schmidt talked about how he could be driving down the street and get directions for all the places to eat in a given area. Because he had eaten pizza the night before, his phone might direct him to a burger joint. And then, Schmidt hastily added, he would turn off his phone.
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How does market growth affect the efficiency of copyright? I earlier argued that, holding all else equal, the low marginal cost of reproducing expressive works ensures that a larger audience will tend to reward copyright owners with larger profits. Population increases thus threaten to throw copyright policy out of balance, making the costs of its restrictions outweigh the benefits of its incentives. I’d here like to air a related but distinctly different argument: Holding all else equal, an increase in population, because it brings an increase in the number of authors motivated by non-pecuniary incentives, tends to render copyright less necessary.
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Progress & Freedom Foundation hosted its 13th annual “Aspen Summit” this week and, as always, it featured some of the leading thinkers in the field of technology and media policy. This year, we were also lucky enough to be joined by one of America’s leading constitutional scholars, Prof. Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard University Law School.
I invited Prof. Tribe to Aspen to deliver a keynote address on the future of the First Amendment in an age of rapid technological change and media convergence. It was an amazing speech and I thought I would share a few highlights from his address with you here. I hope to transcribe the complete address and publish it sometime soon. [Update 8/27: The video is now online.]
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Seth Schiesel of the New York Times seems to be channeling me in his piece yesterday entitled, “Courts Block Laws on Video Game Violence.”
As video games have surged in popularity in recent years, politicians around the country have tried to outlaw the sale of some violent games to children. So far all such efforts have failed. Citing the Constitution’s protection of free speech, federal judges have rejected attempts to regulate video games in eight cities and states since 2001. The judge in a ninth place, Oklahoma, has temporarily blocked a law pending a final decision. No such laws have been upheld.
I’ve been doing a lot of writing on this subject in recent years and have pointed out that every single court that has reviewed the constitutionality of video game regulation has concluded that:
(1) Video games are a form of expression protected by the First Amendment.
(2) Not a single court in America has supported the theory that a causal link exists between exposure to video games and real-world acts of actual violence.
(3) Parents have many less-restrictive means of dealing with underage access to potentially objectionable games—such as the industry’s private rating and labeling system, third-party ratings and info, console-based controls, and the fact that they don’t have to buy the games in the first place! [See my paper and book for more details on all these things.]
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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.